Furman University Professor of English Emeritus William Aarnes read from his newly-published book Do in Dour (Kelsay Books) on Monday, September 12th, at 5:30 in the Pitts Memorial Room of James B. Duke Library on the Furman campus.
“William Aarnes keeps finding the little seed words inside larger words—“the get in vegetables,” “the real in cereal”—just as his poems find the meaningful kernels inside the daily goings on of our lives. His poems are school-yard savvy and know the difference between “brains and smarts.”” —Michael Chitwood, author of Spill and Poor-Mouth Jubilee
As the title suggests, there is plenty of wit and wordplay in this excellent collection, but there is plenty of heart as well. Bill Aarnes bears witness to the marvelous within everyday experiences—driving home with a daughter and wife from a restaurant, standing on an airport conveyor belt, observing frost on a windshield. Yet such insights are often tempered by a sense of life’s fleetingness. Other poems, some of childhood or of a less overtly biographical nature, show his range and achieve for this book what Aarnes himself imagines as an earthly paradise: “the wish / that a steadying of focus / could stop the present from hurrying / the coming moment into the past.”
Born in Columbia, Missouri, Aarnes grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. After receiving his Ph.D. From Johns Hopkins, he taught at Clemson University for two years before coming to Furman in 1981. He has published articles on Walt Whitman (the subject of his dissertation), Herman Melville, and Arthur Miller. Aarnes is the author of three books of poems, Learning to Dance and Predicaments (Ninety-Six Press) and Do in Dour (2016). His poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Poetry, and NewVerseViews, among many other venues. Aarnes’s manuscripts and books are housed in the South Carolina Poetry Archives in the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Furman.