12 or 20 (second series) questions with Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, andcorporate consultant. Previous collections of poetry include Salient(New Directions, 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season (New Directions, 2022), hertranslations of Iran’s major modern woman poet, Forough Farrokhzad (1937-1962),were a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. The GreenSea of Heaven, a 30th Anniversary Edition of her translations of Iran’smajor medieval mystic poet, Hafiz (d. 1389), appeared from Monkfish Publishingin 2024. She currently serves on theBoards of Kimbilio Fiction, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, Friends ofWriters, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. She wasa Founder and Managing Partner/CEO of Conflict Management, Inc. and AllianceManagement Partners, LLC, boutique corporate consulting firms. She holds a BAand JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives in NewYork City.
1 - How did yourfirst book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to yourprevious? How does it feel different?
My firstpublished book was The Green Sea of Heaven, translations of 50 ghazalsfrom classical Persian, from the Díwán of Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1389),Iran’s most famous lyric poet. Some had appeared in small literary magazines,and the collection was originally going to be published by the Imperial Academyin Tehran in the mid-70s. The Iranian Revolution happened and I went to lawschool and into business. Twenty long years later White Cloud Press reached outlooking for the manuscript and published it in 1995.
I had noidea, at the time, the effect it would have on my life. I thought I was donewith Hafiz, Persian, and Iran. But Hafiz introduced me to scholars andtranslators of Rumi and other classical Persian poets, and New Directions askedme to translate a selection of poems by Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), whichwere published as Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season in2022. And I’ve served on the boards of two NGOs documenting human rightsviolations in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. The Green Sea of Heaven, nowwith 80 ghazals, was issued in a 30th Anniversary Edition inDecember 2024.
My firstbook of my own poems, Series | India, a lyric sequence centered onhippie pilgrims to India in the 1970s, came out from Four Way Books in 2015,and formally owes a debt to John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run. Salient,geographically centered in Belgian Flanders in 1917, came out from NewDirections in 2020.
These areboth very different from my most recent book, After the Operation(2025), which grew out of my experience of brain surgery in 2021 to remove abenign tumor. Assembling ATO was an excruciating process: not only did Ihave to revisit drafts I’d written during the months of dread and recovery, butit was a “first person” book. I generally dislike writing in the voice of anidentifiable “I,” but this book demanded to be written, such evasions were “offthe table,” and here we are.
2 - How did youcome to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’vealways been a poet, for as long as I can remember. My mother read me nurseryrhymes and poems, and they were magical. I figured a poet was the only thing tobe. When I was six, she made a “Collected Poems” edition out of everything I’dwritten so far. Clearly I was an aspiring formalist.
3 - How long doesit take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initiallycome quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close totheir final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I try towrite daily, I try to resist instant revision and polishing. My unit ofcomposition seems to be the book-length series or sequence, so I go in searchof something, in some direction, not quite sure what will appear. I writelonghand, type up that draft, and put it into a box. When I have 50-60 draftpoems in the box I open it up and see what, in fact, I’ve been writing.
Salient, built from WWI British military field manuals and medieval Tibetantexts on protective magic, required somewhere between 5 and 40 years ofobsession and research, depending on how you count. After the Operationrequired none—just me and my brain tumor and a pen.
4 - Where does apoem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end upcombining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" fromthe very beginning?
Poemsusually begin with a piece of language that seems incandescent, plus somelong-standing interest (or obsession). I often begin writing by mimicking theformal moves of another poet using my own material. For example, Series |India began because I was trying to reverse-engineer Ashbery’s moves in hislate book Girls on the Run. The collaged texts in Salient owesomething to Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple and Rachel BlauDuPlessis’s Drafts.
SometimesI have a sense for a “book,” but what I thought I was going to write is usuallynot what heads to the publisher. I thought Series | India was going tobe about The Boyfriend, it turned out to be about Mothers, and the Hindupantheon, particularly Durga and Shiva.
5 - Are publicreadings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort ofwriter who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoydoing readings. I learn (and take energy from) the reactions and questions andenthusiasms from fellow-poets and readers. Readings require that one select andconnect poems that will work for listeners. That ordering, and theinter-poem commentary that’s permitted, offers opportunities to open the workto an audience. It forces me to frame or look at the work in a different, andoften new, way. It’s also a constraint, especially for those of us who work inlarger units of composition: a poem that picks up resonance as part of asequence may be less engaging out of context.
6 - Do you have anytheoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are youtrying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questionsare?
I amalways interested in what can be done with and to language. How at the level oflexicon, syntax, sequence, constellation, can maximum pressure be placed onlanguage in the service of whatever the poem seeks?
I neverthink of my poems as trying to answer anything. They are engaged with seekingand asking. And the question I am always focused on is: How to use languageto express or conjure—directly or in some space created by language—somethingthat cannot be said? A lot of poets are working in that rich vein, bringingto light much which has been (or remains) silenced or unspeakable.
7 – What do you seethe current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one?What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Song,poetry, and tale-telling have been “brain stem” activities for humans for tensof thousands of years. The (hopeful) idea was that “if we get the words justright, then the gods must do as we ask.” The role of the singer andstory-teller has changed in different contexts and eras, but perhaps thesubject matter hasn’t.
Writerscelebrate, lament, console, spin stories and histories, relay the news, soundalarms—these remain important. In our current moment of algorithms andconcentrated communication channels, the creation and exchange of songs andstories in communities is of vital importance.
8 – Do you find theprocess of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I havebeen blessed with great editors for both translation and my own poetic work, andthey used a very light touch. Their questions and insights have been a gift tome and to the work.
9 - What is thebest piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Health. Food.Friend(s). A safe place to live. Everything else is gravy.
10 - How easy hasit been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you seeas the appeal?
Curiosityabout poems by Hafiz drew me to learn classical Persian. Translating Persianwas an intense education about English, about poetry, and about writing my ownpoems in English. To bring something into your own language forces you to pushyour assumptions about what your language can and might do. It forces you toconsider innovative syntactical or lexical moves you might never haveconsidered.
Intranslation you push your own language, and it pushes back. For example, inPersian, there are no gendered pronouns and no capital letters. This forces youto make, or evade, difficult choices in your English translation—and these discoveriesenrich your own repertoire.
Translationis also a way to train and exercise your “writing muscles” in a fallow time. It’sthe ultimate close read of an author’s work. It opens a world.
Whilethere is the danger that the voice of the work/author you’re translating canenter and overwhelm your own, I’ve only found that intrusion to be valuable,expanding the range of possibilities in my own work.
I lovemoving back and forth between them.
11 - What kind ofwriting routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does atypical day (for you) begin?
Themorning, early morning: coffee plus an hour or two of quiet time is when I ammost creative, most able to absorb difficult poetry or critical work by others.Revision, corporate work, the administration of daily life, that can all bedone later in the day.
12 - When yourwriting gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a betterword) inspiration?
I readliterary criticism, preferring brilliant readers/critics on complicated ordifficult writers. I find constraints or procedures that may provoke interestingwork—in a fallow time I used pairs of random Tarot cards as a prompt, or linesfrom other poets. I translate, or pore over someone else’s translations fromlanguages I know slightly or well.
13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?
Since mybrain surgery I have no sense of smell. What I miss most is the scent of asouthwest wind coming over the Atlantic in late August, laden with honeysuckleand the promise of fog on the New England coast.
14 – David W.McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Archaeologicalartifacts and the excavated ground from which they came, the drawings fromthose expeditions. Megaliths, as on Orkney or in central Turkey. Visual art,largely sacred in nature, preferably Tibetan. The music that interests me mostis improvisational music from India or Iran.
15 - What otherwriters or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside ofyour work?
Oh gosh.What a list that would be after 50+ years of reading and writing. I truly don’tknow where to begin. It’s possible that the writer who most recently (ten yearsago) blew apart my assumptions about what writing can do is W. G. Sebald,especially Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. Poets RosmarieWaldrop, Rachael Blau DuPlessis, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nathaniel Mackey, ReneeGladman, have also been important recently. Heimrad Bäcker, Eugene Ostashevsky,Donna Stonecipher, Uljana Wolf. Critics DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, PeterO’Leary, Joseph Donahue.
16 - What would youlike to do that you haven't yet done?
There’snothing left on my bucket list. Somehow my ferocious self got all those boxesgot checked… I feel pretty blessed.
17 - If you couldpick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, whatdo you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I lovethe law, I love negotiation and complex decision-making. I loved being anentrepreneur and corporate consultant. I still work with individuals and theirorganizations to develop and implement strategy, to help them reorganizethemselves or their operations, or to manage a collaboration with anotherorganization.
18 – What made youwrite, as opposed to doing something else?
Writingpoetry was the most important thing, I had to do it, regardless of talent orproduct. It was a spiritual practice. Of course, I needed a day job…
19 - What was thelast great book you read? What was the last great film?
I justfinished the first two books of Danish author Solvej Balle’s On theCalculation of Volume, in which the speaker finds herself trapped in an daythat endlessly repeats—but that doesn’t begin to explain the book, or why I’mcompletely drawn into it. If I could explain, I would.
20 - What are youcurrently working on?
I am picking up the various threads (sequences/series)of poems I was working on in 2020, before the decision to have brain surgery.Once that decision was made, the poems in After the Operation appearedand shoved all of this late 2010s work aside. Neolithic archaeology,divination, and the loss of an imaginary beloved who in fact never existed. Ihave no idea what will come of it all.
