An interview by Sarah Kanning

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Kanning, Sarah

LR: Yes, and perhaps somewhere between truth and voice there's this strange thing called "sincerity." (In art, as in true comedy, one has to learn to fake sincerity, as the master comedian George Burns once had it.) Sincerity unmediated by artfulness is, to me, embarrassing. The last thing I mean to be in a poem is only sincere (to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, all bad poetry is dreadfully sincere), yet sincerity somehow has to appear to be there (perhaps in the tone) on some level, for a poem to be, at least to me, credible. So it's a double-back flip: but it's a created, imaginative thing, rather than a confessed, documentary thing.

As Emily Dickinson had it, we tell it slant, which to me means we tell it necessarily slanted to fiction, not to nonfktion. "Sincerity" in its nonfiction guise is often too direct and too blunt an instrument. Telling it slant doesn't require or necessarily enact explanation, apology, seeking approval, or just straight-up whining. "Telling it straight" is usually activating, deploying most or all these things.

Pure voice also has about it a pure bullshit detector, and one gets the sense that there's an actual communion concocted not only for the writer but for the reader, as well. It sounds like it really could have been said to someone, or that one is overhearing a real someone talk to his or her real selves?

SK: It seems that you've also been influenced by T. S. Eliot's drive for impersonality and drive towards character.

LR: Exactly. Eliot's notion of impersonality has been very important to me, but I've discovered there is also something of a ruse in it. We need (or I need) masks by which to speak (personae), but Eliot's notion of impersonality, taken to a kind of clinical extreme, does not really hold up. Things always come from a personal base. The trouble is, if poems do not go beyond a personal base, if they do not burnish themselves into the work of art, they fall into "mere" personality.

As I've said in other places before, I think personality is something that comes to an almost psychotic fruition in high school. In high school, the ultimate social-conditioning-factory, we're hormonally awash in personality. This is difficult to escape, and perhaps the social world really never escapes it (or wants to escape it?), but those who've been exposed to it and detest it sometimes want to mature, to individuate, to get beyond personality to character?

What we call "independent film" (say, the work of John Cassavetes) is often deeply, even painfully personal, and is loaded with personality. But through technique and artfulness (which in the work of Cassevetes often poses as artlessness), Cassavetes manages to give the work of art enough impersonality to make it bearable, so that one can take it in and own it, own up to it.

SK: So impersonality is an alternative to that high school nightmare of insincerity-maybe a more mature alternative? In one of his poems, James Wright wrote, "The kind of poetry I want to write is," The poetry of a grown man. " Is that one of your goals as well?