An Interview with Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., a 2009 poetry graduate, was recently interviewed for Music and Literature. Read an excerpt below:

Your Salient is a book of poetry about the Third Battle of Ypres in World War I, a battle that is also called Passchendaele. Do you think of it as epic poetry? Or is it part lyric? If any part of it is epic, what are you singing—what is your theme? 

I never thought about genre before or during the writing of it. Nor retrospectively. Let me think… There are lyric moments. Formally, it can be read as a sequence of lyrics, although I think of it as a single poem. It was very hard to pull out individual poems for a submission or a reading. But it’s not an epic. It’s not narrative, there are no named heroes. The war itself—courtesy of the machine gun and the artillery barrage—broke any lingering ideas of heroic conquest. No imaginable Achilles thereafter. One could say that there are elements of epic that have been picked out and used differently. It deals with a war. It alludes to examples of individual and collective courage. And, of course, as in the Mahabharata and the Iliad, it turns out there are gods hanging around in theatre. But if I had to tick a box, I would choose threnody, a song for the dead. A sub-genre under lyric, I think. Maybe this is a monody for The Missing, who, for the duration of the song, may be present, and safe within its confines. But there’s another layer, the speaker’s quest. Whoever she is. Her effort to see without quite knowing what that means as she wanders around between the lines in this temporal and geographical No Man’s Land.

You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://www.musicandliterature.org/features/2020/11/8/a-conversation-with-elizabeth-t-gray-jr