Interview with David Duchovny on onlypoems.net
On being asked about writing poems instead of songs:
(...) songs are kind of propelling you forward all the time, rhythmically, whereas with a poem, you can kind of sit down in it, reread it. I don't know, except to say that something feels like a poem when there's a mystery there. A spiritual mystery. Something feels like a story when there's a plot mystery. Something feels like a song when there's a melodic mystery. I think that's the best I can do.
He's later asked about investigating masculinity is his poems, and his answer is somewhat boring but he says something that stuck with me:
just because it wasn't foremost in my mind doesn't mean it's not in the poems
I like this interpretation of poetry coming from an author, because some readers tend to think that poetry is like a hidden message and that everything there is intentional (which is true in some cases), and dismiss their own interpretations of the piece or assign them to the author, when sometimes there's things in a poem that not even the writer knows are there. That's the beauty of it, I think. He doubles down on this later, saying:
I don't think that I walk around preoccupied by death. But if you were to look at these poems closely, maybe there's a lot of death in them.
Overall, I wasn't expecting Duchovny to be a poet, and some of his answers to this interview are really interesting. As always, Karan poses the best of questions and reflections. The poems in another post!
Finally, his writing prompt, which I really liked:
Write the shadow of what you believe.
