Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., would seem to write discrete lyrics but no reader gets far in her work without succumbing to an overwhelming sense that a quest is relentlessly underway. It’s a quest that can only be fathomed through a total immersion in history and landscape and immediate psychic needs of those en route: kids out for a journey to the east, soldiers heading into death, the somewhat hidden but ever present presiding consciousness of her two long poems, Series India and Salient, the poet herself as a pained and adamant devotee to some ancient faith on a pilgrimage to the edge of the abyss. The immersion is at times so deep that we might doubt the existence of the wisdom that the figures in her poems are in search of and that the poet herself feels an unassuageable need for, and yet the force of the imagination brought to bear on this imperative for transcendence, and the acute mastery of cadence, phrasing, and image, make us want it too: to see the other side of death, to feel within ourselves some ecstatic completion.
Her first book, Series India, reveled in the counterpointing of two realities—that of the naïve and pained journeyers with that of an uncompromising narrative intelligence devoted to the divine. The book moves back and forth between the authentic pains and foibles of the partially informed on a spiritual spree, and the informed curiosities of a poet deeply at home in thinking about ritual practice, worship, and yes, the fate of the soul. Salient, too, arises from an extreme schism between this world and some other. In the case of Salient, this world is a hell, and the other, where the gods are, is far away in Tibet. There would seem at first to be, in Salient, no pilgrimage, no stations, no rites of purification, just slaughter and would-be sacrificial victims in a world amok with Moloch. The poem is single-minded and relentless in its approach to annihilation. Whereas Love ruled Series India, Death rules the World War I battlefields of Salient with their trenches and wire and mortar fire and bayonets gleaming in the moonlight. While deeply respectful of those who died there, the poem has an oblique but immediate concern: the spiritual state of the poet, elusive, distant, who studies, visits, lives with the histories of the battles fought, but encodes in each section her own desperation and desire.
—Joseph Donahue
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?
Salient
by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
(New Directions, 2020)
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.
Much of Salient is a collage of many kinds of documents that took you years to find, including visual documents. What is the difference between writing a book like the one you wrote and writing a conventional historical narrative of the battle that might have all the same documents?
Every historian or archaeologist selects and arranges the fragments they use to serve a purpose. To describe the sequence of assaults that eventually took the Passchendaele Ridge. To analyze the assumptions, intel, and pressures that drive commanders in theatre to make the decisions they did. To illustrate, at the level of the individual soldier, the unimaginable horrors and tedium they faced on a daily basis. I guess I arranged my fragments for a different purpose—as a means, not an end. I began with texts from two kinds of manuals, military and spiritual. I trusted that if they seemed connected, and I had been deeply interested in them for decades, something would appear through and in language. Maybe I would find a way in to ground, and into a time, that I could not see.
Salient combines texts from and about the Third Battle of Ypres with Tibetan ritual manuals and reports. Why do these such putatively different things come together for you?
In 2013 my answer to your question would have been, “I have no idea.” I just knew that these two things—the Passchendaele battles and the [Tibetan] chöd rite—had for some reason grabbed my imaginative attention in 1967–1968 (itself a time of great turmoil and violence in the US and in Southeast Asia) and never relinquished that hold. And that, somehow, they seemed to be related in my psyche.
Speaking to you this afternoon, in 2020, I see the convergence. The Tibetan ritual manuals—military or religious—are about deadly ground, about threatening beings. They offer advice in the face of dismemberment, of vanishing utterly. They offer ways to locate and identify those who seek to harm you. Here is how to map the sources of danger (demons or enemy batteries) hidden in the landscape. Here’s the right way to build a trench in frozen ground. Here’s an amulet. Here’s how to pre-register artillery. Here’s a charm to prevent rain. The manuals want you to believe that if you follow the instructions you will come through all this, and be safe. None of it could keep a soldier safe. That’s the intense grief.
So, for you, the specialist language of the science of modern war—the language of cartography, of artillery manuals, of intelligence reports, with their strange alienated vocabulary, whose purpose is to conceal what the tools do, to strip of affect one’s attitude towards the sordid business the tools are involved in—is also ritualistic in function, in the way that Tibetan manuals are ritualistic?
The military texts are instructional, and the language is arcane, and I do feel there is a “ritual” element to it. If, on unforested chalk upland, you build your trench in the specified way you will in fact be safer than if you do not. If you fire a long-range gun according to the specified steps—each man has a role in aiming, loading, firing, and unloading the gun—your gun can be fired more quickly, efficiently, and safely than if you do not. There was instruction, training, and practice for each bit and for all of it. Men from Battery A could easily step in (over the dead) to help work the guns in Battery C because they knew exactly where to stand, what to do, and what words to say. All in the name of more effective, preemptive “defense”: they could more accurately silence the German guns hunting them in turn, German guns that imperiled infantry being brought up into the front lines for tomorrow’s attack. This rhymes with ritual, maybe, but it’s not magical thinking. If you managed to locate and register your artillery piece correctly, you might have a slightly better chance of staying alive, but perfectly executing steps A through G didn’t make the Germans magically disappear.
Machik Lapdrön, Tibetan Buddhist Saint (1055–1149)
Your book reads as if its main concern were really epistemology—the epistemology of military conflict not only for the actors, none of whom can see what is going on, not the shooters, not the people being shot, not the engineers, not the mapmakers, not the general staffs—but also for your trying to see the conflict a hundred years later. In the great cloud of unknowing that is a modern war—or also our trying to make war out in hindsight—what place is there for ritual or for magical thinking?
Soldiers, like sailors, are superstitious. You carry your lucky object, the one that you hope will keep you safe, or the one that has proven its ability to do so. Think the lucky charm your girlfriend gave you when you left England. Or the cigarette case that stopped that piece of shrapnel on the retreat from Mons back in September 1914. You never let a third man light his cigarette off your single match because it would result in his imminent death. There were rituals, and ritual objects. If you did it all correctly, if you followed the instructions to the letter, maybe you would be safe, maybe you could placate or avert the harm headed your way. I totally get magical thinking in this personal context. Yes, the book is epistemological. And the magical thinker in me somehow believed, at the outset, that if I had the right maps and the right texts on the right ground at the right moment, I would be able to see and maybe understand.
British trench map of German lines running through Chateau and Sanctuary Woods, near Hooge, east of Ypres, 1915. (c) Imperial War Museums.
What—if anything—is so specific for you about polytheism, or perhaps about Tibetan polytheism, that made you link it with mechanized war? You are an acclaimed translator of Hafiz, where divinity appears in monotheistic garb. So why Tibetan polytheism, why not the Islam of Hafiz? Does one of them appear more rationalist to you than the other?
You’re right, my upbringing and scholarly translation work are firmly rooted in the monotheistic religions, especially the mystical traditions of Islam. Why the polytheisms of Tibet and India? When I encountered Tibetan Buddhism, in my early and uninformed and naïve way, it just made more sense to me. It comported with my own experience of the world—the material world and what I guess you’d call spiritual world. The idea of a chain of lives; the possibility of learning to understand and see beyond death. It was comforting to believe that the beings that terrified me were merely the wrathful avatars of compassionate Bodhisattvas or were Guardians of the Law who, if approached correctly, might become Tutelary Deities. All this was attractive, a relief, and made sense to me. I’m not sure that makes it “more rationalist,” but there you are. It seems to me that the monotheistic religions are centripetal, all the variety in the universe points to a central divine essence—the Attributes of God point inward toward God. The deities of the Tibetan, Bön, and Hindu pantheons seem visible manifestations of a centrifugal dynamic, hundreds of thousands of colorful and captivating and benign or terrifying forms of a core divine. So many ways to meet God! I came across a village goddess who protects members of a certain caste in Tamil Nadu from smallpox and was told she is simply a helpful local manifestation of Devi, the Great Goddess. So the polytheistic universe makes more sense to me. And it has female divinities of great power. And it’s definitely more interesting.
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is the author of two books of poetry. Her Salient, which draws on materials from the Third Battle of Ypres in World War I and from Tibetan protective rituals, was released in 2020 by New Directions. Her SERIES | INDIAwas published by Four Way Books in 2015. Her translations of Hafiz are now available in a revised edition, Wine and Prayer: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz of Shiraz, from White Cloud Press. She is currently translating Forough Farrokhzad for New Directions.
Eugene Ostashevsky is one of the Online Editors for Poetry at Music & Literature.
Banner image: Palden Lhamo, a Tibetan Buddhist wrathful protective goddess. Public domain.