William Aarnes teaches as Furman University and lives with his wife in Clemson, South Carolina. He has published two collections of poems—Learning to Dance (1991) and Predicaments (2001)—both published by Ninety-Six Press. Over the years he has had poetry published in The Southern Review, The American Scholar, and Poetry. Recent poems have has appeared in Main Street Rag, Shark Reef, and Red Savina Review.

Books by William Aarnes:

Other poems on the web by William Aarnes:
Five poems
"Answer the Call"
Five poems
"Life"
"No"
"Leave"

About Do In Dour:

"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

"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.'"
—Ron Rash

"Like Emily Dickinson, William Aarnes not only prefers the truth told 'slant' but sees it so to begin with. My response to a first reading of this collection was to start again at the beginning to make sure I had seen it all 'right.' I suspect many readers will react to Aarnes' work with the same rapt, baffled eagerness."
—Rhina P. Espaillat