The ideology of the poem cannot be reduced, suggests Smith. Instead there are multiple ideologies just as there are multiple conversations. Smith avoids the conventional ways of constructing perception, even if the conventions are ones formed in the last five or ten years. Smith's vision is one of whimsy irony, and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, responsibility. Responsibility manifests itself in the attitude that each reader is responsible for his or her own take on the poem and the world.
Interpretation is a choice, never an absolute, since meaning is always in flux.
Of course, this is what gives contemporary conceptual poetry its great intellectual freedom and energy. In Memory of My Theories . Everything is false, and yet incessantly weighted. Or weighted by the inability to distinguish. And we are back to the real, to detail, to staring at the impenetrable details of accumulated history with which we obscure the distorted image of ourselves we chose to show posterity.