In this interview with World Authors, poet William May discusses the deeply personal and carefully constructed architecture behind his chapbook, Blaze without Burning, published by Finishing Line Press. Built around an inventive “twin poem” structure, the collection pairs poems across two mirrored sections, creating echoes of memory, transformation, longing, and emotional connection that unfold gradually throughout the book.
During the conversation, May reflects on the organic way the collection took shape, explaining how recurring themes and emotional threads naturally emerged through the writing process before revealing a larger structural pattern during revision. What began as individual poems written during a particular period of his life eventually evolved into a work centered on duality, reflection, and interconnectedness. The mirrored format became more than a stylistic choice. It became an extension of the book’s emotional core, reinforcing ideas of transformation, relationship, and the shifting nature of identity and experience.
May also speaks candidly about vulnerability in poetry and the challenge of allowing difficult truths to remain unpolished on the page. Rather than smoothing over discomfort, he embraces emotional honesty as a pathway toward universality, arguing that the most intimate experiences are often the ones readers connect with most deeply. Thoughtful and introspective, this interview offers insight into May’s creative process, the role revision plays in shaping a poetry collection, and the delicate balance between formal craft and emotional authenticity that defines Blaze without Burning.
HELLO WILLIAM MAY, WELCOME TO WORLDAUTHORS.ORG! YOUR CHAPBOOK BLAZE WITHOUT BURNING USES AN INNOVATIVE “TWIN POEM” STRUCTURE WHERE EACH POEM IN THE FIRST SECTION HAS A COUNTERPART IN THE SECOND. WHAT INSPIRED THIS MIRRORED FORM, AND HOW DID THIS IDEA EVOLVE AS YOU WERE COMPOSING AND REVISING THE WORK?
My process, as a poet, is mostly just to write poems. I don’t think a great deal about a larger project, such as a book, but I write a great deal, and often the work can circle around what is most relevant in my life at a certain time period. That is, while I don’t set out with the intention of focusing on certain themes or subjects, these elements naturally emerge as a result of my being a person living in the world, with certain events and preoccupations fresh in my mind. If I read through the poems I have written in any given period of time, I am certain I will discover a core around which much of that work is circling. In crafting Blaze without Burning, I was working with a group of poems that reflected a certain period of my life, and thus shared a great deal in terms of subject matter. It was in the process of curation and revision that the central architecture of the book emerged. As I recall, I looked at two of the poems and realized that they, easily, could ( and ultimately, would) share the same title. From there, I just looked at the rest of the book and realized that the poems fit together in a certain way. It was a very organic thing, if I am honest. There was, of course, a fair amount of work to revise and reshape the poems that came along with the choice to organize the book into pairs, but revision is, I think, a major part of the process of crafting a book.
HOW DOES THE TWINNED STRUCTURE OF YOUR POEMS REFLECT THE THEMES OF TRANSFORMATION AND CONNECTION YOU EXPLORE IN THE BOOK? CAN YOU SHARE A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE OF A PAIRING THAT SURPRISED EVEN YOU AS YOU WORKED ON THE BOOK?
The poems that are contained within Blaze without Burning were always closely connected in terms of the themes and images they embrace, including those of connection and transformation which you bring up. For me, those are themes that have a certain duality to them. Transformation is always going to involve two different states, at the least, and connection requires relationship, always implies that something similar must exist between two or more interconnected things. That is, I tend to think that the twinning of the poems arose as a response to themes, that it was only because it was relevant to the poems that the idea ever emerged.
MANY REVIEWERS DESCRIBE YOUR POETRY AS BOTH VULNERABLE AND ILLUMINATING. HOW DO YOU BALANCE EMOTIONAL HONESTY WITH FORMAL CRAFT, ESPECIALLY IN MOMENTS WHEN A POEM FEELS DEEPLY PERSONAL?
The poems that became Blaze without Burning are all particularly personal poems. Not everything I write fits into that category, but, for the most part, the poems in this book do. For me, my task in creating that kind of poetry is in allowing what is genuine and true to be expressed. Very often, it can be uncomfortable for me to reveal true thoughts and feelings about what is most personal, and to do so without trying to clean it up or smooth off the edges, to allow the raw truth of the thing to exist, even knowing that it may reveal too much of what we would normally wish to keep hidden. What is amazing, though, is that what we discover is that those very intimate aspects are also the things that are most universal, they are what allows another person to enter our experience in the deepest ways. The work is the result of focusing on that effort.