Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Recent poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books) and Salient (New Directions). She lives in New York City and raised her identical twin sons at the Met.

Describe your process writing ekphrastic poetry. Do you have a favorite prompt or way in?

I’m not sure I have a process, or a prompt, or a way in. Until I saw the prompt about the Met’s Hall of Arms and Armor, I hadn’t explicitly thought about writing an ekphrastic poem in years. And, while there is a sword at the center of the poem, and a girlfriend as an addressee, it’s really a poem for and about my son, and conjures those magical multi-dimensional locations in space-time that we come across and inhabit—all too briefly—with a child. If we’re lucky.

What attracts you to a work of art for ekphrasis? How do you know you have a good subject?

A piece of art simply seizes me—it must be dealt with in some way. It doesn’t happen often, this seizure. Usually, I wander by and take in artworks, always on the hunt for something that might cast a light on something I might write, or have written, or been thinking about.

You raised your children going to the Met. How did watching them interact with the pieces affect your relationship to the art? 

My identical twin boys and I spent many rainy (and some non-rainy) days at the Met when they were growing up here in the city. Usually there were two of us adults, one for each twin. The mission was always the same: Find something amazing and meet back here in 45 minutes. Then we’d spend the rest of the time sharing these new discoveries, and sometimes we would sit down and draw each of them in our small artist notebooks.

Initially they wanted a more specific assignment: “What are we supposed to be looking for?” Then realized the assignment was wide-open permission to look at anything and everything. (And of course, at the Met, pretty much every single thing is amazing, so it’s a pretty easy assignment…)

I have also become less programmatic in encountering art. Instead of “I need to understand X and the development and masterworks of X” I now build in some random permissions: “Find something amazing, Liz. Use only your eyes.”

Now the boys are 30, and each of them spends time in art museums, any kind of art museum. Two years ago my son Sam and I were both in Paris, and he asked me to go with him on his first trip to the Louvre. He needed to see the Mona Lisa and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Once those were ticked off his list, he just took off across Greece, Rome, and the art of Northern Europe, not quite at a run. For a moment I wondered how he could be so cavalier in the presence of such momentous art, and then realized that he was quite happily at home in an environment that had always felt like a playspace full of permissions. It was such a joy to watch him.

And of course my son William, when he brought his girlfriend to see his Met, made sure thatArms and Armor was their first stop. The photos arrived on my phone immediately.

Do you have a favorite piece of art at the Met?

I do! This 10 th century CE bowl from Nishapur, in what is now northeastern Iran. The calligraphy and the form and material of the bowl seem so perfectly balanced. I am drawn to art like this bowl: spare, colors muted and sparse, text and object integrated in some way.

Years ago, before they renovated the Islamic Galleries, this bowl sat quietly in a corner, and I decided that—given how unobtrusive it was—it was probably not on many people’s “when the Revolution comes what object are you immediately going to steal from the Met” list. When they renovated the galleries, there it was, smack in the center of the main entry into the galleries, beautifully lit. So I will need to be quick to snatch it.

Do you have a favorite ekphrastic poem?

Perhaps the description of Achilles’s shield in Book XVIII of The Iliad, if that qualifies. And Auden’s response to it, although of course neither poem was written from an encounter with the shield itself. I also think John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is a masterpiece. It changed how I saw poetry and his work, and changed my own.

As attested by my lust for that bowl from Nishapur, I’m always drawn to interactions between image and text. I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking at Islamic calligraphy and illuminated/illustrated manuscripts, and am always entranced with Zen ink drawings and the poems around or near them done with brush and (the illusion of) haste. Those Song Dynasty scrolls! The text and the image consist of a single piece of art, but they interact.

What excites you about the Metphrastics project?

It’s extremely engaging, asking us word-smiths to not just pass by but to have a conversation with a piece of art. The mission is a compliment to my favorite of the world’s great museums, and the portfolios of poems are a complement to its collections. I am so grateful for it all.