An Interview with Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (Poetry ’09)

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (Poetry ’09) was recently interviewed in the TriQuarterly Review. She was also recently featured reading her work on the DMQ Review (along with fellow 2009 poetry graduate Annie Kim) and was published in the Harvard Review.

Read an excerpt of the interview below:

TQ: You have been, in one way or another, working on this material for decades. How did the poem itself, as we have it, cohere?

ETG: I began the poems in the fall of 2013. I have notes from early 2014 that suggest an arc or purpose, but by early 2015 I had lost my way. No map or spell worked: The Missing couldn’t be found or summoned. What the soldiers went through was no longer accessible to us, or to our imagination—at least if the “we” is civilian. And nothing, absolutely nothing, could ensure one’s safety on that ground.

At that bleak, aimless, and disoriented moment I had a single, stark, important dream and spoke with John Peck about it. He drew an analogy to Jung’s conversations with the Dead at the end of The Red Book (which, as you might imagine, scared the living daylights out of me). The most important thing he said was that, whatever it was that connected me with The Missing, that connection had been forty years in the making, and I could not walk away from them. “So what am I to do?” I asked. “Keep reading, keep writing, keep walking the ground. It will come to you,” he said.

He was correct. In April 2017, after two weeks in Flanders, I woke one morning in Paris and realized that even though (a) The Missing could not be found or summoned, and (b) no words (e.g., a manual or amulet) could keep them safe, I knew that while the poem(s) were happening in language, while The Missing were spoken of in the moment of space-time that lyric creates, The Missing were both present and safe.

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://www.triquarterly.org/interviews/interview-elizabeth-t-gray-jr