David Duchovny:
I mean, they’re all very personal, but that — to me, that’s not — the allure is not what is personal to me.
What — the allure of writing a good poem is, how can I make what’s personal to me personal to you? How can I write something so personal objectively enough so that you feel like it’s about you? There are poems that are more — in this collection, more tied to times in my life maybe that are — that are — feel more emotional to me, like the birth of my children or when they were young and trying to figure out, how do I teach them, how do I reach them, how do I raise them?
There’s “Carbon Canyon,” that poem which I like very much, which is where I’m walking with my daughter, who’s about 3 or 4 years old, and we come across a carcass of a field mouse, and start talking about life and death. Being a young father, I think, oh, this is a great opportunity for me to teach her about death and impermanence and all those things.
And I start to, but she doesn’t see it that way. And then, as I lean down further, I see all these ants going in and out of the carcass. And it’s terrifying to me. It’s gross that now that I’m in this conversation and now I have got to tell her about the way we’re all eaten and worm food.
And it’s just — it’s too much, I know. And so I go to take her away from the spectacle of it. And the end of the poem goes, she says: “Daddy, look, the ants, there’s so many of them.”
