Category: Poets & Events

When New Hampshire poet William Doreski sat down with Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld of Prolific Pulse Press to talk about his new collection, Orpheus My Orpheus, the conversation ranged from a stubborn high school argument about E.E. Cummings to an early morning writing routine, and from Robert Lowell to a poem about RadioShack laptops that write their own deranged love poetry. It’s a wide-ranging, generous conversation — and it offers a rare window into how a poet’s voice gets built over a lifetime.

A poet almost by accident

Doreski’s origin story starts with resistance, not inspiration. As a high schooler in Connecticut, he was assigned some E.E. Cummings poems by a teacher barely older than his students — and he wasn’t impressed. “This doesn’t seem like poetry to me,” he told his teacher. “Anybody could write this stuff.” His teacher’s response became a turning point: go home and try it yourself.

“I spent several frustrating hours,” Doreski recalls, “learning what Mr. Cummings was doing was held a lot better than I could do.” Cummings never became a favorite, but the exercise cracked something open. From there, Doreski found his way to Wallace Stevens — drawn in partly because Stevens was, like him, a Connecticut poet — and then to Hart Crane, whose Collected Poems was handed to him by a working poet he met in a Springfield, Massachusetts bookstore. Reading about Crane’s death by suicide at 32 was, in Doreski’s words, horrifying — but Crane became an essential influence all the same. Rounding out his early education was Allen Tate, whose Pulitzer- and National Book Award–winning debut left Doreski impressed by a voice he found “very hard to imitate” — a lesson that would shape his own search for a distinctive style.

A career, and a well-timed exit

Doreski went on to teach for 34 years at Keene State College in New Hampshire, with a decade before that as an adjunct at several Boston-area universities, including Boston University, where he studied under the influential critic Helen Vendler. He’s candid about why he chose to retire when he did, at 70: “There comes a point where you may know a lot more than the students, but… their culture has become so different, so far from mine, that I’m really not the right person to be teaching them anymore.” He’d seen colleagues stay too long and become, in his words, “objects of ridicule among the students” — and he wanted to leave on his own terms.

It turned out to be well-timed. Just a few years after Doreski retired, Keene State laid off several tenured English faculty amid enrollment declines tied to New Hampshire’s shifting demographics. “I probably, with my seniority and higher salary, probably would have been a ripe candidate,” he notes.

The discipline of retirement

Retirement didn’t slow Doreski’s writing down — if anything, it gave it more shape. He describes waking early in the morning simply to have quiet, uninterrupted time to read and, some mornings, to write. “It gets sets the right kind of pace for your day,” he says. The flexibility of retirement means he can step away from gardening or painting the house to return to a poem started that morning — “a luxury,” as he puts it, “to be able to pick and choose your time.”

Inside the poems

During the conversation, Doreski reads two poems from the new collection. The title poem, “Orpheus My Orpheus,” restages the Greek myth as a piece of avant-garde 1960s-style theater — complete with a fiberglass fish tank stage, a disembodied singing head placed in a cooler by EMTs, maenads in “fright wigs,” and a narrator accepting a Pulitzer for drama before retreating, Eurydice in hand, toward the underworld. Doreski traces some of its spirit back to a book he’d been reading about the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s — happenings, underground film, and the kind of theatrical strangeness he was, in his words, “too young to really fully appreciate” at the time.

The second poem he reads, “Computers Go Crazy,” imagines RadioShack display computers spontaneously generating and publishing deranged lyric fragments — and refusing to stop even after being unplugged and smashed on the floor. It’s a playful premise, but it illustrates something Doreski returns to throughout the interview: his belief in verse as a shaped thing, distinct from “broken prose.” Years ago, he says, he stopped writing free verse entirely, worried he was just writing sentences with line breaks. Returning to Wallace Stevens’s example — deceptively simple, but unmistakably verse — helped him find his way back to line, rhythm, and form as meaning-making tools in their own right.

On reading poems aloud — and the people who shaped him

Doreski credits Helen Vendler with instilling in him the practice of reading poems aloud, even alone — a habit he says has taught him more about a poem than silent reading ever could. “A lot of poetry… does not read aloud very well at all,” he observes, even work published in respected magazines.

The conversation also touches on the poets and friends who shaped him — including Robert Lowell, whom Doreski knew personally but has deliberately never written about, wary of adding to the “gush of memoir” that followed Lowell’s death. Of Helen Vendler, he jokes that her ghost would “tell me off” if he tried. It’s a glimpse of how seriously Doreski takes the boundary between friendship and material — a poem, he says, quoting T.S. Eliot’s idea of the “objective correlative,” has to become its own thing, not a sermon or a memoir.

A candid note on where poetry stands today

Later in the conversation, Doreski reflects frankly on the state of the literary world — the shrinking audience for poetry, bookstores where used poetry collections outsell new ones simply because they’re cheaper, and a broader cultural shift away from reading. It’s a wistful, clear-eyed assessment from someone who has spent a lifetime inside that world, delivered without bitterness — just honest observation, and an unmistakable commitment to keep writing anyway.

About the book

Orpheus My Orpheus is a slim, restless collection of seventeen poems in which art is never mere decoration — it’s a disruptive force that exposes the hidden dimensions of experience, and poetry itself becomes a form of survival even when the body fails. Written in fast-swerving accentual verse, the collection moves from the domestic to the mythic to the grotesque with startling emotional agility, echoing poets like Mark Strand and Stephen Dobyns.

Order Orpheus My Orpheus and learn more about William Doreski here 🎥 Watch the full interview on YouTube.