"It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel"
About this Quote
Language is usually sold as a home; Antin flips it into captivity. "A hostage in somebody else's mouth" lands with physical claustrophobia: your selfhood reduced to a movable piece between teeth and tongue, spoken for, chewed up, swallowed. It’s a brutal image for what it feels like to be represented by someone else - especially someone with more authority, volume, or cultural permission to narrate. The line turns ventriloquism into a power relation.
Then Antin sharpens the threat by shifting from speech to story: "a character in somebody else's novel". A mouth can misquote you in a moment; a novel can misframe you for an era. Fiction here isn’t imagination so much as ownership. Someone else decides your motives, your arc, your ending. You don’t get interiority; you get characterization. The discomfort is that it’s often flattering on the surface - being included, being described - while still erasing agency underneath.
As a poet associated with talk pieces and improvisatory, essay-like performance, Antin is alert to how meaning is negotiated live, in real time, through voices that can overpower each other. The quote reads like a manifesto against the smooth authority of finished narratives: the kind that make other people legible by making them smaller. Its subtext is ethical as much as aesthetic: when you speak about others, you’re not just describing them. You’re placing them somewhere they may not be able to escape.
Then Antin sharpens the threat by shifting from speech to story: "a character in somebody else's novel". A mouth can misquote you in a moment; a novel can misframe you for an era. Fiction here isn’t imagination so much as ownership. Someone else decides your motives, your arc, your ending. You don’t get interiority; you get characterization. The discomfort is that it’s often flattering on the surface - being included, being described - while still erasing agency underneath.
As a poet associated with talk pieces and improvisatory, essay-like performance, Antin is alert to how meaning is negotiated live, in real time, through voices that can overpower each other. The quote reads like a manifesto against the smooth authority of finished narratives: the kind that make other people legible by making them smaller. Its subtext is ethical as much as aesthetic: when you speak about others, you’re not just describing them. You’re placing them somewhere they may not be able to escape.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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