Thursday, September 6, 2012

Telling lies

Over on her blog, poet and fabulist Theodora Goss writes a thoughtful post about telling lies.
Poets and fiction writers are all liars, of course. Lying is what we do.  Perhaps-- or so some say-- what we are really doing is telling the truths that nobody else sees.  Perhaps.  
Dora, on the other hand, writes about the ordinary lies, the day-by-day lies that people tell to themselves and others, often without even saying a single word, in the way they hide their selves behind a facade.  Well, we all do, of course.  But a poet, or a fiction writer, above all has to be able to strip away those lies, to expose the truths, which is to say, to find the humanity (and humanity is not always pretty!) hidden behind the facade.
So maybe we're truth tellers after all.

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The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau