Featured Poet Robert M. Gray Interviewed by Gurupreet K. Khalsa
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Robert M. Gray
Robert M. Gray, a native of Sylacauga, AL, lives a multi-layered existence. As an academic, he is an Associate Professor and heads the Program for University Pedagogy at the University of Bergen in Norway. Rob’s academic journey includes a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Alabama, and a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology, also from the University of Alabama. He has worked in the Innovation in Learning Center at the University of South Alabama and has also worked at Troy State University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His experience in leading university faculty to consider alternative, student-centered teaching methods has solidified his reputation as a man to ask if you need help with pedagogy.
Rob is also a poet and a musician. He has published three volumes of poetry, the most recent of which, Jesus Walks the Southland (2014, Negative Capability Press), won high praise from fellow poets and Southern writers; Hank Lazer noted that the poems were “an ambitious effort to save Christ from Christianity.” Ray McManus described the work as “poems that tour the hypocrisy of a landscape wild with blood and bibles.” One of the poems in that book was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His previous books are DREW: Poems from Blue Water and I Wish That I Were Langston Hughes, both from Negative Capability Press. As a musician, he plays bass guitar and has been known to sing in the occasional church choir.
As if that is not enough, Rob produced and directed a documentary film in 2014 titled Mobile in Black and White, which probed the issues of race relations in Mobile, Alabama. It was received with high acclaim, including being featured in thirteen film festivals around the US. It was also named one of the Top 50 Research and Creative Projects in the History of the University of South Alabama
Jesus Walks the Southland
tonight i saw jesus
in my rearview mirror
he was on the side
of the road in montgomery
and looked just like
he always did
in those paintings
except that he was
a bit thinner on top
and a lot dirtier
which i guess was
just from the shit
that’s been dumped on him recently
i couldn’t really tell
if he was hitchhiking or just walking along
it all happened too fast
but it wouldn’t have mattered
anyway because i wasn’t looking
out for him besides
i had somewhere to get to
and didn’t have room in my car
Robert Gray
From Jesus Walks the Southland, 2014
Negative Capability Press
The Day I Was Born
whenever i say i’m from alabama
people seem to want to ask
what it was like to hold that fire hose
if i ever had to answer i’d tell them
i was born the day that happened
they seem to want to ask
what it was like to bomb that church
and kill those little girls
i was born that day as well
i was born the day they marched across
the edmund pettus bridge
the day wallace made his stand
the day martin had his dream
the day he saw the mountaintop
and the day after that
i was born innocent
free of all the blood
shed that day
but i was born into blood
i am still washing from my hands
Robert Gray
From Jesus Walks the Southland, 2014
Negative Capability Press
Robert M. Gray interview by Gurupreet K. Khalsa (conducted via email April 8-20, 2020)
GK One theme that runs through your poems is that you are trying to make sense of Christianity, to reconcile the “southern” teachings about faith (Grandma, Fox News) with a different, what I would call “real” understanding of what Jesus was actually all about. You seem, in Jesus Walks the Southland, to have a pretty strong message that the world has missed, misused, misplaced, or misaligned his message. Are you angry about this? Why or why not? If not anger, what is the lens?
RG That has definitely been a major theme in at least one period of my writing career, but I don’t know if anger is the right emotion. It’s really more frustration, sadness, regret. If there is anger, however, it is more in how Jesus’s message has been misused for purposes that are directly opposed to that message. In some ways, I would like to think what I do is more about calling out hypocrisy than putting forward my own religious message. However, when we were in the process of publishing Jesus Walks the Southland and I was trying to explain to a friend who is a seminary professor how it wasn’t really a religious book but that it also wasn’t as sacrilegious as some might think (I have often called those poems “sarc-religious” because they take a very sarcastic look at religious hypocrisy, not Christianity itself), I had a realization that, at least taken as a whole, the book is a lot more religious than I had thought.
GK To follow on this theme, you say very clearly in your poems that you intend to ponder the meaning of life, and your poems seem to express a frustration about the shallow meaning that Christianity these days seems to provide. What have you found that’s deeper?
RG As I recall, the poem you seem to be referencing says that I would like to ponder such things, but that there are other more important things to write, implying that such pondering is pointless (although I don’t necessarily agree with what would seem to be my own assessment). If I’m totally honest, I don’t really know what to believe anymore. I still have a deep appreciation for the idea of Christianity as a way of living, as a meaning for our lives, but that is mostly in where it calls for us to sacrifice ourselves for each other, for the dignity and resurrection of the oppressed. I’m not so interested in the magical stuff anymore, and I am offended by the “what’s in it for me” ethos that has been so prevalent in mainstream Protestant and evangelical churches since at least the 1970s, when those groups joined forces with and essentially sold their souls to the Republican party to gain political power. I think that if someone is a Christian because they think they will benefit by going to heaven, they are doing it wrong…
GK Tell me a little bit about your early life. Were you a happy child?
RG I think so. I grew up in a small town in a rather well-to-do and fairly normal family. I was the third of four boys, which made for some discomfort, caught between the older two being bullies and the youngest being spoiled, which is pretty much like any middle kid in pretty much any family. But I was happy, had good friends, good schools, etc. I guess that one of the main influences on my life as a poet, however, was the centrality of the church in my childhood. A lot of my time, friendships, and broader social life was in some way connected to the church, particularly the youth choir and other related programs. Perhaps a bigger influence on my life, both as a poet and in general, was the death of my brother Drew when I was 21. That wasn’t really childhood, but looking back at 55, it definitely seems like “early life.”
GK Because you were raised a “mild” Christian (“encouraged to speculate but not too far”), has any other spiritual tradition/religion taken you to a different place? What is it that provides you peace? You write in “Deep Thoughts,” “the key to all understanding could really just be a pile of crap.” Is that true in some sense for you?
RG This is a dangerous question… However, I don’t think that comment in “Deep Thoughts” refers symbolically to anything metaphysical or philosophical; it’s just a silly commentary about biological systems.
And I’ve not really been drawn to other traditions or religions besides Christianity and what might be called post-Christianity (whatever that means). I have studied a lot of literary history over the years, and one of the more prevalent themes there is that after Darwin, most “canonical” Anglo-American literary texts are centered around the question of where do we find meaning in the absence of God? And I must say that I have long found beauty in that question and the efforts to answer it, even if I wasn’t sure which side of the divide I was on. But I have also come to doubt that divide. I think it is far too simplistic to think of whether or not there is a God as a “yes or no” question.
GK How do you work? In your poems you mention the arhythms of your keyboard as you ponder the existential. Do you compose at the computer, or use a notebook that you carry around with you? As you write, what is around you? Is there sound, music? Do you write any time of day, or in the deep of night? In isolation? Any work in writing groups? How do you think you make the leap from the ordinary to the transcendental when considering mundane, ‘normal’ moments?
RG This is a wonderful and interesting question, but I don’t really have an answer to it. I could answer it, perhaps, for individual poems, but I don’t have a routine or method for writing (which is probably why I don’t write as much as I would like…). I do almost all of my writing on the computer, though. When I started writing poems, I wrote them on paper and then typed them out, but over the last 20 years, I have done almost everything on a computer, except when I will occasionally jot out ideas on my phone. And the keyboard sounds are extremely arrhythmic, moving along in fits and starts, with almost as much backward motion as forward.
I prefer to write in silence, but I have written a lot of poems in the living room with my family while the television droned on in the background, although that usually only works when I am revising something I’ve already drafted out. And I write at any time of day. Some of my best poems have come to me in the middle of the night, but I usually just jot the main ideas down and then flesh them out during the day or evening (and I must confess some of what would have been my best poems never got written because I decided to wait and write them in the morning so that I could go back to sleep, only to find they weren’t there anymore when I awoke…).
I have hardly ever functioned in a writing group, and when I have, it wasn’t good for me or the others. I just can’t write on demand like that. I do, however, send any new poems to five or six friends whose opinions I trust. Some of them are poets and others are just lovers of poetry.
GK How do your poems stem from association with specific words, sounds, sights? In other words, what prompts a poem for you? Some of your poems seem to stem from an appreciation of the absurd or troubling in normal, everyday activities (such as the flowered dress on the girl at Grandma’s funeral).
RG My typical routine for writing a poem, if there is such a thing, is to wait around until a poem demands to be written. It can be anything, but is usually an image or a phrase that pops into my head. I will then carry that around for a few hours or even months or years before I sit down and write it out. And unfortunately, I am getting worse about that. I used to write things as a poem because that is how I tend to write things, but now I have to have a strong sense that this will indeed become poetry before I will bother writing it.
I honestly don’t remember how the poem you mention (“Funeral in Early Spring”) came about. I only remember struggling with how to finish it, but more often than not, my poems begin with the ending. Or, while that initial image or phrase that demands to be written might come in the beginning, what gives me the reason for sitting down to write it is a finding of the ending. I have been told that how I end poems is one of my strengths as a poet, and the ending of that poem was a struggle. I mentioned earlier that I usually share a new poem with a small circle of friends, and one such friend, who sadly died several months ago, objected mightily to how I ended that poem. And while I can’t remember specifically, it seems that I insisted on keeping that image of the girl’s dress being lifted up by the souls and empty silences of the dead flowing into her indifferent womb because that image is what gave birth to the poem.
With other poems, “Jesus Walks the Southland” was actually a real experience. I was driving through Montgomery with a car full of furniture. Traffic was horrible because of construction, and this guy seemed to just fall out of traffic from in front of the car in front of me. He was stumbling and dirty, and I thought “what an idiot!” as I drove by. But when I looked in my mirror, it was like he was staring right into my eyes, and his face and eyes looked exactly like those stereotypical paintings of Jesus. It was surreal. I then started thinking of the incident in terms of how there might be a poem in there, and when I got out of the city and traffic eased up, I pulled over by an exit ramp, grabbed my laptop from the passenger seat, and typed it out in probably less than a minute, almost exactly as it has been published.
“The Day I Was Born” began with my long-held impression that people seem to assume I was holding that firehose when I say I’m from Alabama. I carried that idea around for a while before doing anything with it. “When I Sing” took even longer. The opening image about the old woman’s priceless Steinway came to me when I was at a friend’s house recording a song in his basement studio. I kept thinking how I should be a better singer than what I was hearing on the recording, and that image came to me. It took me almost a year, however, before I could figure out where to go with a poem based on that image. And it’s funny, but that moment came when I was lying in bed one morning in that state where you’re halfway between wake and sleep dreading the alarm going off. Ideas for the rest of the poem started flowing, and I ran upstairs to my computer and typed it out. I ended up calling in sick that day (this was many years and many employers ago) so that I could finish it.
The opening lines of “I Wish That I Were Langston Hughes” and “We Still Need You Wallace Stevens” both came to me in the shower….
Recently, most of my poetic output has been focused on translating well-known Norwegian poems into English. That started as an effort to improve my Norwegian skills and has yielded some pretty decent results, I think. The process for writing them, though, is not that unlike when I write my own poems. I first have to identify a poem that demands to be translated and then find a compelling reason to go to the effort to translate it.
GK You describe, in your poems, an earlier life of reading the classics and poetry. Do you feel that these poets/philosophers have it right? Why or why not?
RG The only thing I have some absolute certainty about in regard to philosophy or religion is that no one has ever or will ever have it “right.” Well, William Blake may have had it right, but we can never know for sure because no one will ever be able to understand what he was actually saying…
All we can do, in my opinion, regardless of what purpose ultimately underlies it all, if any, is to keep trying to get it as right as we can while continually reminding ourselves that we can’t actually get there. I think it comes down to trying to achieve what Wallace Stevens called “sudden rightnesses,” and many poets and philosophers have stumbled upon those over the centuries.
GK I know you as a musician. One of your poems is about the magic (and difficulty) of singing. How, for you, does music (Pinsky writes about the surprise and variation, the structure of harmony or rhythm in poetry) intersect with the construction of your poems?
RG I have no idea.
One of the more unusual things about me is that I have such intimate relationships with music and poetry, but that those things are so completely separate. I know the words to almost no songs, including even songs that I’ve written (but I can probably only recite one of my poems by heart as well, so it might just be me…). So often for me, the lyrics to a song are just another sonic element to the music. I very rarely try to make sense of them. I know it’s strange, but I don’t understand why I’m like that.
In terms of the other direction, I think that my musical background certainly informs my sense of rhythm and feel when writing poems, but I don’t think I can say anything intelligent about that.
GK In Jesus Walks the Southland, which poem do you feel has the most punch, or is your personal favorite? Why is this?
RG There are certainly some poems that I think are better than others (in fact, it would be much easier to say which poems are the worst, although I won’t). I have often wondered if “On Letting Go the Transcendental Signified” is my best poem, but I don’t think I would say that it is. I have also often thought that “Twilight” is better than it seems to get credit for. I still think that “The Road to Demopolis” and “Sermon on the Mount circa 2008” are the best ideas for poems I’ve had, but I don’t believe either of them came close to achieving their promise. In the end, I suppose “The Day I Was Born” and “Jesus Walks the Southland” get the most credit, with “Humidity” close behind, and there is probably a reason for that. I also have some pretty good newer poems, but I am writing them at a very slow pace and have not published any of them yet.
GK I know you as a big man with a big heart. I also know you as being fairly snarky, politically. How do you reconcile your desire for social justice with your political misgivings? Is there any hope? How does change look for you?
RG I would like to think that I am fairly snarky beyond politics as well…
And I used to be more hopeful in regards to social justice issues than I am now. When Jesus Walks the Southland and Mobile in Black and White came out (both in 2014), I wouldn’t say that I had faith that things would get better, but I had hope. I thought there was a chance, as long as we worked hard and thoughtfully enough. I’ve become much more skeptical of that in the last few years, however. I think that what we had interpreted as progress on a lot of issues was not so much actual progress as repression or suppression. It had become so socially unacceptable to be a “racist,” that it seemed like racism, at least on an interpersonal level (e.g., using racist language or saying racist things), had actually become less of a factor. However, racism and several other isms (e.g., sexism and anti-Semitism, along with hostilities toward immigrants and the LGBTQ community) have been given license in the last few years, revealing that such things hadn’t gone away, only into hiding.
And while I will confess to having a bit of snarkiness in some of my political and religious poems, I believe it all comes down to audience. Other prominent purveyors of political snarkiness, people such as Rachel Maddow or Bill Maher, can fire up the already converted, but they aren’t going to change anybody’s mind who doesn’t already agree with them. More often than not, they are just going to strengthen the divide or disagreement. My poems are the same way, except that I’d like to think they are a little more subtle, that some of the snarkiness might go undetected (such as all of the surprisingly positive comments I’ve gotten on “Good Little Girl” from people I assumed would be offended by it…).
In what I would call my social justice work, however, most notably the making of and doing the work around Mobile in Black and White, I take on a much different tone. A great deal of effort went into making sure that MIBW was not off-putting to people who might not initially agree with it, that they would see the logic behind the position before they could recognize it as a position.
Several people have commented in the last few years about how the current political climate would seem perfect for my particular poetic lens (that is, my snarky political lens), but I’ve had a difficult time finding a way to write poetry about it. I can rant or scream or cry, but poetry is hard to pull out of this mess. It is important to me that what I write as poetry is poetry, and perhaps as I’ve grown older, I want my expressions to come forward with not so obvious an agenda. Perhaps the experience of Mobile in Black and White has played a role in that.