A Q&A With COUNTERCLOCK’s Next Managing Editor
We’re excited to welcome Maria Gray as COUNTERCLOCK Journal’s next Managing Editor! Maria is a poet from Portland, Oregon, currently based in central Maine. Her microchapbook “Universal Red” was released this summer by Ghost City Press; individual poems are forthcoming from or published in Best New Poets, The Columbia Review, The Lumiere Review, and others. Her poem "Rhythm 0" was selected by Luther Hughes as the winner of The Lumiere Review's 2022 poetry contest, and in 2021, she was named as an Adroit Prizes semifinalist for her poem "Where Were You When Mac Miller Died," which was selected by Paula Bohince for inclusion in the 2022 edition of Best New Poets from UVA/Meridian. She starts her MFA in creative writing at NYU this fall.
COUNTERCLOCK: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your own literary pursuits. When did you begin writing? Why poetry?
Maria Gray: As trite as it sounds, I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember—I was very fortunate to attend a grade school that really emphasized the importance of poetry and the written word, so I had that on my side as a kid. Our principal read Naomi Shihab Nye poems at assemblies. I wrote a lot of stories, but I don’t think I really started writing poetry until I was in middle school. I was really into Tumblr back then, and I read a lot of poetry on it. I remember I was in my early teens and encountered Ada Limón’s “Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds” there; my mind was absolutely blown by the alchemy of the words and their emotional impact on me. I wanted to know why and how that poem affected me the way I did. I mimicked the writers whose words stayed with me; I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and carried around my own copy of Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language until it fell apart. These writers made me feel seen. Poetry was vital to my sanity as a teenager; it was one of the only ways I knew to get in touch with my emotions and subconscious, and it helped me rationalize everything I was feeling. I had a teacher who encouraged me to submit my work to various creative writing contests and opportunities for high schoolers; having that one teacher who believes in you and encourages you to go the extra mile makes a world of difference for so many budding artists, and she and I remain friends to this day.
As a high schooler, I participated in The Adroit Journal’s summer mentorship program, where I was paired with poet Gabrielle Bates. What an eye-opener that was. My correspondence with Gabby helped me realize that making a life from poetry is absolutely possible, but even after that, I struggled to take poetry as seriously as I could have. Even after Gabby’s mentorship, during my freshman year at college, I assumed I would study something else and write poetry on the side. My advisor, Myronn Hardy, definitely helped me challenge this assumption. I’m not gonna lie, a big reason I initially majored in English and not psychology was because I would have had to take a psych stats class. I think it was inevitable that I would gravitate towards poetry and creative writing, but I needed a lot of guidance from my professors and various adults in my life to get there, and I also had to learn a lot about myself before I could understand creative writing as a lifelong pursuit, let alone one that was possible for me.
CC: Congratulations on your recent acceptance to NYU as an MFA candidate in creative writing! What is something you’re looking forward to experiencing in the program and/or in the city?
MG: Thank you so much! I’m beyond excited. I suppose the obvious one is the opportunity to learn from Ocean Vuong. I’ve been reading his work since high school, and the intimacy and muscularity of his poetry absolutely fascinates me. He’s definitely a primary poetic influence of mine, and was one of the big reasons I applied to NYU in the first place. I dropped by the Writers’ House a couple months ago while visiting New York and it got me so, so excited. I sat in on a Claudia Rankine class, which was beyond surreal. It’s so cool to know I’ll have a physical community of writers like that, especially one full of people looking to develop and sit with their craft further; that’s so rare and such a privilege. I’m definitely nervous because I’ve never lived in New York before and am a West Coast girl at heart, but I have so many friends there and there’s so much to be excited about.
CC: Describe your ideal submission. What is something you’re looking for when you’re reading journal submissions?
MG: My ideal journal submission is a closed universe unto itself—I look for pieces that are airtight in their poetic logic and grounded in their own necessity. Think of the poem as a Jenga tower. You should not be able to remove a word of it without it “falling over,” so to speak. Clarity of purpose is paramount—the poem is in the world because it needs to exist, and the poem should make its own case as to why. The poem should be surprising. Every line break should be deliberate. Poetry can and should mess with your autonomic nervous system.
The work should be grounded in itself, and a big part of this is giving it the time and space it needs to breathe. I like to think of poems as bread dough or wine. They need to be put away to prove or age. One of the big mistakes I made while starting to submit my work, and one I see a lot of young writers make, is submitting work that’s too recent. Make sure your work exists for you and you alone before anybody else sets their eyes on it. There’s a lot of emphasis on speed and quantity of publications, particularly now that most of the submission processes take place online. This puts a lot of social pressure on young writers especially. Just know you don’t need to be churning out poems and sending them out constantly. You do not need to publish a chapbook as a high schooler to be a poet. If I’d been publishing regularly as a teenager, I’d regret it now. I find that writing periods and submission periods are very distinct for me; I have stretches of several months where I accumulate phrases and poetic connective tissue from my everyday life, slowly putting them in conversation with each other to form poems; then I have periods of dormancy where I focus more on editing and submitting. Creation and analysis are separate processes that use different parts of the brain. Find what works for you and lean into it, but writing with the intent of publicizing the work is a great way to poison said work before it’s fully realized.
CC: Who are some of your favorite writers at this moment? What are some books that have really impacted you?
MG: I have so many favorite writers, but some of the first to come to mind right now are Diane Seuss and Gabrielle Bates, owing largely to the fact that my mind was recently blown by both frank: sonnets and Judas Goat. Other favorites: Ocean Vuong, Aria Aber, Molly Brodak, Ada Limón, Leila Chatti, Richard Siken, Nicole Sealey, Franks Bidart and O’Hara. Some of the most formative books I’ve read: Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Leila Chatti’s Deluge, Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things. I read Deluge in the thick of my own low points with chronic illness, and its impact on me was paramount. Leila Chatti is a fantastic poet and we are beyond lucky to have her. She reckons with womanhood, religion, illness, and questions of selfhood and virtue in such a brilliant way. I also love her emphasis on praise poems.
CC: Beyond literature, what other art forms do you like to engage with?
MG: I really love listening to music—some of my biggest poetic influences are singer-songwriters, such as Conor Oberst, John Darnielle, Phoebe Bridgers, and yes, Taylor Swift. Listening to singer-songwriters’ projects, following their artistic trajectories, and listening to both studio and live recordings of their performances has definitely made me a stronger poet, if only because singer-songwriting and poetry writing have the same confessional bent to them. I’m fascinated by how songs change over time, and individual poems obviously function very similarly. Conor Oberst in particular—he changes his lyrics all the time, and it’s always very deliberate, which fascinates me. I’m also interested in the public “personas” of artists while in states of performance, as a form of self-preservation or otherwise. It’s also exciting to see collaboration between musicians and poets. Ross Gay on a track with Bon Iver, for example; that shit had me on the floor.
I also love wearable art and fashion; I’m not great at working with my hands, but I definitely want to try making or altering more of my own clothes and accessories in the next few years, once I have the time and space and resources to do it well. Textile art, embroidery, collage: all of that is so cool. I would love to experiment more with visual poetry and incorporate elements of textile and collage art. I love seeing the interdisciplinary submissions to COUNTERCLOCK—they always provide me with so much inspiration. I took a class this spring on printmaking, poetry, and the materiality of text; for my final project, I made a series of found poems from texts exchanged between me and a late friend. I’m really interested in working on more projects like that.
I try to surround myself with art and beautiful things as much as I can. I’m a huge trinket person—I feel like that’s probably a poet trait—but the physical environment is so important and influences your creative output in such a profound way. I’m moving right now and it’s a nightmare because I have to haul all my random little objects from Maine to New York. I mod-podge little scraps of paper into my notebook, stuff like that. A lot of this is because my memory is like a black hole and I just don’t want to forget. You know? Definitely the same instinct behind writing poetry.