David Duchovny Releases New Poetry Book ‘About Time’ (Exclusive)

David Duchovny has been writing poetry since high school — and now he’s collected a volume of his poetic musings into About Time, out now from Akashic Books. Acclaimed The Liars Club author Mary Karr called it “a helluva book of poems,” but Duchovny is more modest.

“I’m just trying to ponder [things] from my particular point of view at that moment, and get to the heart of something,” he tells PEOPLE. That’s what a poem is to me: I’ve got this feeling, it’s around this thing, or this event, or this person, and now I want to put that in a form that makes sense in some way, you know, deal with this mystery of this feeling.”

The actor, writer and singer-songwriter, 65, has published seven books, but this is his first poetic work, although he says he’s always thought of himself as a poet. It took the perspective that comes with time to reach a place where he could collect his works into a cohesive volume.

“It was interesting to go back through all the drawers and notebooks and files and find poems that I’d forgotten I’d written, some of them made it in [to the book] and some of them should never have been written,” he says, with a chuckle.

“When you raise kids, you realize that they take stuff very seriously, you know? And sometimes it can be hard not to laugh when they say for the fifth day in a row, this is the worst day ever,” he adds. “Reading your old poems can be a little like that.”

For Duchovny, that’s what making art is: “You do the best that you can in the moment that you’re doing it,” he explains. “And that’s both great and horrible, because you don’t have the long perspective, so you just have what you’re immersed in, and there’s a certain kind of joy in that, in that blindness. A certain kind of honesty.”

That honesty is a sort of through line in the book, with poems ranging from single lines to sweeping ruminations, spanning as many subjects as life does. Duchovny recommends reading them in whatever way strikes the readers best, much like visiting an art museum.

“It’s like when I go to any great museum. I can’t see all the paintings, you know? Even though I might want to, because I don’t know when I’ll be back, it’s like diminishing returns after a while,” he says. “You just get kind of overwhelmed and overstimulated, so I think poems are like that, because they’re dense like painting.”

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Novels, he points out, are a more straightforward journey: There’s a beginning, a middle and an end. But poems are more about “interrogating a feeling,” that can take any number of forms. For that matter, he sees a lot of similarities between writing poems and scripts, a new one of which has been the focus of his attention over the last few months.

“Scripts are more like poems than you would think, because they’re less like novels, because there’s not a lot of descriptive writing,” he points out. “There’s some descriptive writing, but not pretty descriptive writing. It can be more like writing poetry than not.”

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About Time by David Duchovny is available now, wherever books are sold.