Actor, writer, musician, and now poet, David de Coveney, known to audiences for his roles in Californication and The X-Files, turns his attention to something more intimate.

Poems that wrestle with love, loss, memory, and the passing of time.

It's a meditation on what it means to grow older, to look back, and to wonder what still lies ahead.

I spoke with him recently about his book, About Time. David Decoveny, welcome to the News Hour. Thank you for having me. You know, I couldn't help but laugh at the way you open your book. You write, I know what you're thinking, just what the world needs now, a bunch of poems from an actor. What drew you to poetry at this point in your career?

Well, I've been writing poems my whole life, really, and just stuff in them in drawers.

And so this collection really represents probably at least 20, 25 years of just writing poems when they come to me. The preponderance of the poems are more recent,

but there's some old ones in there.

So it's just something that I've always done and been interested in.

And you also say that poetry is not useful,

and that's exactly why we need it. Why?

Well, you know, this idea of use or utility is, it's interesting to me.

And especially educationally.

We want to get educated to be able to work, to have a job of some kind.

But, you know, which is great and it's necessary, but we've lost sight of educating

a mind, how to think or a soul, how to feel.

And the disciplines like English literature, I feel, and philosophy are the disciplines that

educate the soul. So that's not useful. That's not considered

useful anymore to learn how to think. Yeah, and poetry often asks so much more of a reader,

slowness, attention. You find utility in that. I find mystery in words. I find mystery in expression.

And the more mysterious you can make your words, not intentionally, but just because it's

so difficult to put your finger on the deepest truths and the deepest emotions that we

have, then the truer that it is. You know, so the mystery that you're talking about, I think, is inherent in the poetic enterprise,

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