Now, and maybe always, the poet’s role as truth-teller, as conveyer of aletheia – meaning truth but literally ‘not forgetting’ (against Lethe) in Ancient Greek – has been downplayed to that of village idiot. The poet, one who does not forget, is an outsider, a misanthrope and a little digging into any poet’s biography will only reinforce this stigma. But in the Ancient Greek, an idiotis was not necessarily a simpleton but someone who didn’t take part in the affairs of the community – like a young man outside of a house who keeps tripping over his own feet trying to decide whether to go in and join the party (the literati) or just leave (go home) and who then does leave to write a poem about falling in love with a woman (literature, history, music, art) in a house while a woman (contemporary literature) who would fall in love with him waits in the kitchen (bathroom) of the house he just left, enjoying her drink (gin and tonic) but not the company (mostly novelists). Part of me is that young man, even now, searching for a way in without actually having to be there.