Artistic expression, for many, is based on experience and understanding, with originality arising, for the most part, from the writer’s particular vision and imagination. What is imagination for you? How much of it transcends and how far does it govern the working process?

I don’t know how to think about imagination apart from consciousness. What do we mean when we say someone is “imaginative?” My daughter is – she makes things up, she pretends in great detail and creates a world that never actually “happens” in time and space as we know it. That seems to be the realm of what we call “ fiction” writers and it’s a world I can’t imagine for myself. In my daughter’s un-pretend world she delights in wondering how or why and what if — that’s imagination too, of course. And that’s more the kind of imagination that might come into my poems. Consciousness seems to be the word I’d favor — which is made up of so many aspects: memory, desire, stored knowledge, wonderings, image-making — and all the connections that occur in the act of writing. But all of this that we are trying to talk about is fluid, ephemeral — ever passing and changing — clouds crossing an October sky. The miracle of writing is that in doing it something can occur that hasn’t happened yet. But I don’t know how to talk about what that is in words.

You have said that you are interested in the metaphysical. How do you define the metaphysical?

I am interested in the experienced world — the world of clinking cutlery and the barking dog, and what people say when walking along the sidewalk – the physical world we’d call it but I don’t see that world as separate from the metaphysical.

Metaphysical refers to what might be beyond that which we can discern with our senses.

But even the world beyond isn’t quite right, is it?

What did Blake say? “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of the Soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlet of Soul in this age.” Sometimes it seems that the physical world is — the partial expression — of whatever else that is that we can’t discern. A ruffle, a spine breaking the surface, a wave. Because we have only five senses we can only see some of it — but we are it as well. And so there’s no division.

Your introduction for In the Company of My Solitude, an anthology of American writing about AIDS which you co-edited with Michael Klein, is beautifully touching and tenderly honest. You quoted your brother John as saying: “I know I’m going to die soon… What surprises me is that you don’t.” “But I do know,” I said. He said, “Know what?” and I said, “Know that you’re going to die,” and he said, “No, I’m surprised that you don’t know that you are.” A monk I knew once said that truly realizing one’s own mortality can be very frightening but also tremendously liberating. In that passage, your brother seems deeply clear-minded, open and aware. What did you think when John said that?

John! Well, what can you say after that? I think we both laughed. I’m reminded of the five remembrances in Buddhism — but they could be from anywhere and apply to each of us — two of them are. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to die; there is no way to escape death. Only the consequences of our actions remain…

I was thinking about this when cleaning out the car at the end of the summer — all this junk — folding chairs, and deflated blow-up swimming toys, moldy towels and CDs and among all the other detritus, Stanley Kunitz’s Collected Poems — a little warped, some of the pages water-stained — but there was (is) his life of action. Or some of it.

You did an interview for AGNI with David Elliot in which you commented, “Don’t you feel as if our lives are these compositions that we don’t really know how to make end?” Could you comment further on this thought?

Sometimes, it’s lucky to grow older. My friend the novelist Jim Magnuson suggested that as one grows older, one’s life like a novel begins to take shape. That person on page 123 returns on 340 and some things might clarify or resolve. Or… Or… Time is malleable — my brother died at 28 and his life was complete. (“This is not a tragedy,” my brother said, “I am a happy man.”) Stanley died at 101 and his life, too, seemed complete (The last words he said were “Thank you.”) Those five remembrances come back. What remains of us is the consequences of our actions — so much of it we can’t see and will never know. For a writer, one consequence is one’s work.

In the poem, “Limbo,” from your book The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, the last line points to the way in which many people spend their time, usually caught up in so many things. What in your opinion is the most meaningful and productive use of a person’s time?

Oh, I can’t help but laugh out loud when I read your good question. Isn’t that the question on everyone’s mind now? How can I stop being so busy! John Berger has written beautifully and profoundly on this in his book The Shape of a Pocket. He suggests that the current economic world order is stirring up all this activity so that we stay in a state of agitation and hunger for what we might not even know — and so, in order to calm ourselves, we buy something. We become ever more avid consumers. It does seem that to stop, to slow down and to read, to walk with each other, to turn off the machines and be still is more and more an act of resistance to a culture that would have us ever in a frenzy. To read and to write poetry is a help in this endeavor.