What’s It Like To Be Old? is a candid poetry collection that addresses what happens when the self still feels vividly alive, but the body has other ideas. Were there any poets or other writers who influenced your work on this collection?

I guess life was the main source of ideas and insights for this book. I have always admired Thomas Hardy’s excellent poetry, much of it written in the context of his old age. And of course Dylan Thomas and W. B. Yeats made famous statements about old age. But those tended to the heroic, and I wanted to explore the day-to-day consciousness of being old, a rather different thing than a defiant whoop. I did not find many writers who looked steadily at the life of the old, happy, painful, resigned, or entered into a psychological state that I defined as ripeness from Shakespeare’s touching lines.

How do you know when a poem is truly finished?

My poems often come out from a deeper place in my mind where they seem to be always already finished. I might struggle to find words for the middle, but the beginning and end seemed already written, and when the final lines came out, though I might mess with them a bit, I knew the poem was written: a rather mysterious process, I grant.

What was the biggest challenge you faced in putting together this poetry collection?

I had a great number of poems on the subject of what it is like to be old. I had recently entered into the life of older people, my 70s, when I would hit upon a statement, or a dramatic voice of someone, or a point of view, and so on, and I would create a poem. I edited all the poems very carefully, but then came the hard part: picking the ones worth putting in a book of poems on the subject. If they had made it through my editing process, they had some value, and it was hard to know which to select. I settled on distributing them into a kind of plot of poem sections that would eventually constitute the major sections of the book. It was then easier to see in a comparison of those in each section which would provide a new perspective and a superior poetic statement. Still, I was sorry to see certain ones have to go.

Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?

I have finished four more books that are already slated for publication: these are a book on life in the unavoidable element of time, entitled Being in Time and Change, a work that follows many of the themes of time in What’s It Like To Be Old? Another is called Political Poems and asks the reader to think about our national and social hopes and despairs– so potent just now; it focuses on dominations and their harm. Next is a book of vivid impressions of life as we experience it daily; it is called Seasons: Moments and explores directly our brilliant or terrible life on the planet. Then there is another book of poems focused on my wonderful dog, Maisie, and her remarkable experiences in a life outside in Central Park.

I am now pulling together and editing a collection of reflections on dying and death, and our response to these realities. As with my other poems, they offer a panoply of points of view, personal, social, or eternal. I am liking these poems as I go through them, even though the subject itself is so unlikeable.

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