Fiction Pretending To Be Fact Poem by gershon hepner

Fiction pretending to be fact
and fact that tries to banish fiction
contend in narratives we act,
while truth claims it has jurisdiction.


Tim Parks reviews 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet, ' by Salman Rushdie (Henry Holt) ('Gods & Monsters, ' The New York Review, May 6,1999) . According to Rushdie, being 'poetic' has to do with entertaining various cultures and remaining, as it were, suspended between them and their various implications. He says that in the confrontation between 'the pure and the impure', the sacred and the profane, ' Rushdie is on the side of the profane, the melting poet and asks:

Do stories flow together in tolerant harmony distinct from our 'factual' world? Aren't they rather, with their rival visions, in urgent conflict with each other to establish what the nature of that world is, what the 'facts'

4/24/99