I wanted to ask you about the role of sincerity,
that is the role of having your speaker
or having the speaker say what you need as a poet
or having your speaker say something
that you're perhaps critical of, and the role like what you all
see the role of sincerity in poetry being.
Does the speaker necessarily have to agree with you?
Or is it necessary to use a speaker to parody something?
What's the necessity for that contemporary poetry?
I guess it's probably--
Well, I think irony is also not new either.
I mean it forms an integral part of Greek tragedy.
There's no there's no Greek tragedy without irony.
In terms of making it new,
I think that's really important too because at all points
every I in every poem is some sort of performance,
and that's where that opposition breaks down as well.
It's a made thing.
It's artificial.
It's not natural.
At every moment you're foregrounding
it's artificiality and it's madeness, and that in itself
can be a form of sincerity as well because you're
sort of emphasizing the powers of the imagination
to make and make again and again,
over and over in different perspectives
and from different perspectives.
I could see how sincerity all the time or irony
all the time are the sort of extreme poles,
and in that sense you have to play in between definitely
for work to really be surprising.