Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.

"Albania" is one of three poems just published by the amazing Beloit Poetry Journal.

A prose poem I re-discovered this morning, by my good friend the poet and novelist Stratis Haviaras.

In 2008 Niloufar Talebi, the Iranian who founded the Translation Project, published a bi-lingual collection of poems written in Persian by poets around the world who, at different times and for different reasons, left Iran after the Revolution of 1979.  It's an excellent translation of varied works that offers us a taste of the rich work being done by Iranians in exile.  You can find my review of it in Issue #4 of HROnline, the online version of The Harvard Review, edited by the wise and talented Christina Thompson.

I woke this morning to find the most recent email blast from the Kenyon Review in my inbox.  Always interested to see what's up on their site, I clicked through to the editor's column that explains why they selected a specific poem to be included in KRO. Lo and behold, the poem was mine!  So, over coffee, I got to read--in great detail-- why they chose "Why We must Have Canonical Hours and Islands" for their Winter 2011 online issue.  I recommend it as a way to start your day.

Three of my poems have just appeared in Issue #2 (2011) of Little Star, the new literary journal founded by Ann Kjellberg.

What an honor (and a thrill) to have these poems--"In the Alleyway of the Beloved," "When We Thawed the Tomb," and "The Stave Church at Urnes"--sharing a binding and table of contents with Mark Strand, C. K. Williams, my college friend Mary Jo Salter and a host of other luminaries.

Treat yourself to a copy--300 pages of great writing.

Shiva, as Nataraja, in bronze.

Kannyakumari, at the southern tip of India, where the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea meet the Indian Ocean.

The great Shri Meenakshi Temple, in Madurai.

Welcome to South India, Lizzie.  

I am, at last, back in my beloved India, in Delhi for a few days working with a translation colleague, Siddiq Wahid, on plans to complete our translation of the Epic of King Kesar of Ling.  Here's the view from the India International Center.  Toto, I am very pleased not to be in Kansas anymore.

In a few weeks I will be off to my beloved India, exploring the source(s) of a wave of new poems that all seem to be centered in the river deltas and temple complexes of Tamil Nadu, a part of India I have never seen. It's going to be marvelous.  i know this because in the past few days, scattered through New York City, there have been all these auspicious Signs...

My poem, "The Corner," appears in this month's issue (# 48) of the amazing Cortland Review!  

President Obama and a New Math: In this article in the Huffington Post, 21 April 2010, Prof. Eric K. Clemons (The Wharton School) and I discuss the dangers of faulty analysis in dealing with the Islamic world.  How will punishing the construction of new housing in East Jerusalem result in changed Taliban behavior in Helmand?

At the blog of the Northwestern Center for the Writing Arts you will find a recent poem of mine, embedded in a longer piece by Reginald Gibbons on the truly ancient in poetry.  

BigJournalism.com asked me for my thoughts on what might happen in Iran on the regime's 31st birthday.  My response is here.

In the course of a week friends ask me what's going on in Iran. What to make of it? What do I think will happen? When BigJournalism.com, an Andrew Breitbart news site, asked me that question, I sat down and drafted an answer.

An essay on Girls on the Run proceeds apace. New work messin’ with Ashbery’s mechanisms continues to go forward in directions that I hope will seem interesting when I have time to pause and look at it carefully. But yesterday I paused, and sought an antidote to his glorious baroque. And I remembered Laura Jensen. I spent the afternoon overwhelmed by her careful clear language that is not simple.

Unfinished projects from the past and dim outlines of (long-deferred) poem sequences have been crowding in and demanding attention. My turn! Do me! No me! No, my turn! The poems that have been waiting patiently, in the rain, in the trenches near Ypres. Story-fragments dug up in gold from horse pastures in Norway and frozen tombs in Siberia. Pantoums riddled with the circular and disconnecting rhetoric found on jihadist web sites. The Narrow Road to the Outer Banks.

I have been polishing poems that have taken me forty years to get right, and a minute ago I was standing in the doorway with a cup of coffee watching them head off down the street—earnest and curious and confident about the larger world. Now there is this silence, the same silence that arrives when the maelstrom of last minute hats and coats and backpacks and athletic gear is done and the door to the city is gently closed again.