the absurdity that reads as funny

I think none of the speakers in this book are anything I would call real, even those closest to myself. I’m interested in the ideas and feelings that pull against each other, and this interest tends to militate against cohesion or consistency in the poems. At the same time, I hate the idea of randomness and meaninglessness! So I think the tragicomic note you’re hearing is me struggling to reconcile a seemingly cruelly random world with my own need for order and structure. If there is an omniscient maker of these poems, that speaker is still not omnipotent—-you can know a lot without being able to control much of anything. So the extent to which the maker can set up the world of a poem is limited by the inherent contrariness of reality and of language. I wouldn’t say that my poems stage a weirdness, exactly—I think the materials of life just *are* quite weird. The absurdity that reads as funny isn’t something that I’d say I go in search of—-it’s something I’d say I’m perpetually trying to wrestle into some kind of sense. I don’t see being funny as an end in itself.

- Linda Besner, discussing her collection The Id Kid with Susan Gillis, over on Susan's Concrete & River blog. You can read the whole thing here.