William Doreski’s Comments

My poetry explores the seams and gaps between the world our bodies live in and the cloud our minds occupy. Reality and imagination, in Stevens’s terms: but I reject the notion that what lies outside the body is more real than what lives in the mind. The ideal poem would in every line, sentence, and phrase juxtapose those two worlds and force them to fight to a draw. The actual poems I write—lacking the power to fulfill my own ideal—struggle fitfully from one competing notion of the real to another. Images flex, break, collapse into other images. Little dramas lead somewhere or nowhere. Two people, often, offer competing notions of the space they jointly occupy, and terminate dangling in a vacuum. Sometimes the poem learns something, a temporary stay against the muddle of the quotidian. Often it doesn’t go far enough to properly conclude. The tension between the line and the sentence—a stock property of English-language poetry for centuries—takes the form not of free verse but of rough accentual verse, descended from the venerable ballad meter of the late middle ages. Or I surrender to the flux and write a prose poem, which like an amoeba struggles to draw a boundary between its own form and the formless world.

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