Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate 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), her translations of Iran’s major modern woman poet, Forough Farrokhzad (1937-1962), were a finalist for the 2023 PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation. The Green Sea of Heaven, a 30th Anniversary Edition of her translations of Iran’s major medieval mystic poet, Hafiz (d. 1389), appeared from Monkfish Publishing in 2024. She currently serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, Friends of Writers, and the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. She was a Founder and Managing Partner/CEO of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC, boutique corporate consulting firms. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives in New York City.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first
published book was The Green Sea of Heaven, translations of 50 ghazals
from 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 Academy
in Tehran in the mid-70s. The Iranian Revolution happened and I went to law
school and into business. Twenty long years later White Cloud Press reached out
looking for the manuscript and published it in 1995.
I had no idea, at the time, the effect it would have on my life. I thought I was done with Hafiz, Persian, and Iran. But Hafiz introduced me to scholars and translators of Rumi and other classical Persian poets, and New Directions asked me to translate a selection of poems by Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967), which were published as Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season in 2022. And I’ve served on the boards of two NGOs documenting human rights violations in Iran since the 1979 Revolution. The Green Sea of Heaven, now with 80 ghazals, was issued in a 30th Anniversary Edition in December 2024.
My first
book of my own poems, Series | India, a lyric sequence centered on
hippie 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 New
Directions in 2020.
These are
both very different from my most recent book, After the Operation
(2025), which grew out of my experience of brain surgery in 2021 to remove a
benign tumor. Assembling ATO was an excruciating process: not only did I
have to revisit drafts I’d written during the months of dread and recovery, but
it was a “first person” book. I generally dislike writing in the voice of an
identifiable “I,” but this book demanded to be written, such evasions were “off
the table,” and here we are.
2 - How did you
come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always been a poet, for as long as I can remember. My mother read me nursery rhymes and poems, and they were magical. I figured a poet was the only thing to be. When I was six, she made a “Collected Poems” edition out of everything I’d written so far. Clearly I was an aspiring formalist.
3 - How long does
it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially
come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to
their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I try to write daily, I try to resist instant revision and polishing. My unit of composition seems to be the book-length series or sequence, so I go in search of something, in some direction, not quite sure what will appear. I write longhand, type up that draft, and put it into a box. When I have 50-60 draft poems 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 Tibetan
texts on protective magic, required somewhere between 5 and 40 years of
obsession and research, depending on how you count. After the Operation
required none—just me and my brain tumor and a pen.
4 - Where does a
poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up
combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from
the very beginning?
Poems
usually begin with a piece of language that seems incandescent, plus some
long-standing interest (or obsession). I often begin writing by mimicking the
formal moves of another poet using my own material. For example, Series |
India began because I was trying to reverse-engineer Ashbery’s moves in his
late book Girls on the Run. The collaged texts in Salient owe
something to Rosmarie Waldrop’s Curves to the Apple and Rachel Blau
DuPlessis’s Drafts.
Sometimes I have a sense for a “book,” but what I thought I was going to write is usually not what heads to the publisher. I thought Series | India was going to be about The Boyfriend, it turned out to be about Mothers, and the Hindu pantheon, particularly Durga and Shiva.
5 - Are public
readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of
writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings. I learn (and take energy from) the reactions and questions and enthusiasms from fellow-poets and readers. Readings require that one select and connect poems that will work for listeners. That ordering, and the inter-poem commentary that’s permitted, offers opportunities to open the work to an audience. It forces me to frame or look at the work in a different, and often new, way. It’s also a constraint, especially for those of us who work in larger units of composition: a poem that picks up resonance as part of a sequence may be less engaging out of context.
6 - Do you have any
theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I am always interested in what can be done with and to language. How at the level of lexicon, syntax, sequence, constellation, can maximum pressure be placed on language in the service of whatever the poem seeks?
I never
think of my poems as trying to answer anything. They are engaged with seeking
and asking. And the question I am always focused on is: How to use language
to express or conjure—directly or in some space created by language—something
that cannot be said? A lot of poets are working in that rich vein, bringing
to light much which has been (or remains) silenced or unspeakable.
7 – What do you see
the 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 tens of thousands of years. The (hopeful) idea was that “if we get the words just right, then the gods must do as we ask.” The role of the singer and story-teller has changed in different contexts and eras, but perhaps the subject matter hasn’t.
Writers
celebrate, lament, console, spin stories and histories, relay the news, sound
alarms—these remain important. In our current moment of algorithms and
concentrated communication channels, the creation and exchange of songs and
stories in communities is of vital importance.
8 – Do you find the
process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have been blessed with great editors for both translation and my own poetic work, and they used a very light touch. Their questions and insights have been a gift to me and to the work.
9 - What is the
best 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 has
it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see
as the appeal?
Curiosity about poems by Hafiz drew me to learn classical Persian. Translating Persian was an intense education about English, about poetry, and about writing my own poems in English. To bring something into your own language forces you to push your assumptions about what your language can and might do. It forces you to consider innovative syntactical or lexical moves you might never have considered.
In
translation you push your own language, and it pushes back. For example, in
Persian, there are no gendered pronouns and no capital letters. This forces you
to make, or evade, difficult choices in your English translation—and these discoveries
enrich your own repertoire.
Translation is also a way to train and exercise your “writing muscles” in a fallow time. It’s the ultimate close read of an author’s work. It opens a world.
While
there is the danger that the voice of the work/author you’re translating can
enter and overwhelm your own, I’ve only found that intrusion to be valuable,
expanding the range of possibilities in my own work.
I love
moving back and forth between them.
11 - What kind of
writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
The morning, early morning: coffee plus an hour or two of quiet time is when I am most creative, most able to absorb difficult poetry or critical work by others. Revision, corporate work, the administration of daily life, that can all be done later in the day.
12 - When your
writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better
word) inspiration?
I read literary criticism, preferring brilliant readers/critics on complicated or difficult writers. I find constraints or procedures that may provoke interesting work—in a fallow time I used pairs of random Tarot cards as a prompt, or lines from other poets. I translate, or pore over someone else’s translations from languages I know slightly or well.
13 - What fragrance
reminds you of home?
Since my brain surgery I have no sense of smell. What I miss most is the scent of a southwest wind coming over the Atlantic in late August, laden with honeysuckle and 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 forms
that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Archaeological artifacts and the excavated ground from which they came, the drawings from those expeditions. Megaliths, as on Orkney or in central Turkey. Visual art, largely sacred in nature, preferably Tibetan. The music that interests me most is improvisational music from India or Iran.
15 - What other
writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of
your work?
Oh gosh. What a list that would be after 50+ years of reading and writing. I truly don’t know where to begin. It’s possible that the writer who most recently (ten years ago) blew apart my assumptions about what writing can do is W. G. Sebald, especially Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. Poets Rosmarie Waldrop, Rachael Blau DuPlessis, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Nathaniel Mackey, Renee Gladman, have also been important recently. Heimrad Bäcker, Eugene Ostashevsky, Donna Stonecipher, Uljana Wolf. Critics DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Peter O’Leary, Joseph Donahue.
16 - What would you
like to do that you haven't yet done?
There’s nothing left on my bucket list. Somehow my ferocious self got all those boxes got checked… I feel pretty blessed.
17 - If you could
pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what
do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I love the law, I love negotiation and complex decision-making. I loved being an entrepreneur and corporate consultant. I still work with individuals and their organizations to develop and implement strategy, to help them reorganize themselves or their operations, or to manage a collaboration with another organization.
18 – What made you
write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing poetry was the most important thing, I had to do it, regardless of talent or product. It was a spiritual practice. Of course, I needed a day job…
19 - What was the
last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished the first two books of Danish author Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, in which the speaker finds herself trapped in an day that endlessly repeats—but that doesn’t begin to explain the book, or why I’m completely drawn into it. If I could explain, I would.
20 - What are you
currently 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 appeared
and shoved all of this late 2010s work aside. Neolithic archaeology,
divination, and the loss of an imaginary beloved who in fact never existed. I
have no idea what will come of it all.
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