just wondering about desire, sincerity, and language

I'm wondering what poets these days see their poems as sincere expressions of their own desires (as authors, as people) and what poets believe that, in a poem, the voice of the poem has its own identity, separate from the author in some ways (in however many ways it may be connected).

I think that a lot of the discussions and debates going on in contemporary poetics turn out to hinge on this particular issue, a fact that often surprises me. So I'd really like to know what people think.

Do the poems you write express your desires? Or does the use of language become a mediating condition that creates a distance between your desires and the desires expressed in the poems that you write?