The Poetry of
Joshua Gray

Projects

York

One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon of all time lies in the great but simple word "smock".

www.dontknockmysmock.com/

I know how Hobbes feels - I feel the same way about the word "york". What a great word. So good in fact, that I decided my next major project is to make a chapbook of poetry with that word as the central theme. A chapbook, for those who don't know, is the poet's equivalent to the novelist's novella.

And so, I have already written the following poems:

• "Wartime River", another sympoe about two famous battles by the York River in Virginia
• "Manservant Blues", a blues poem about York, William Clark's "manservant"
• Alvin York, a soldier in the first war
• "Ode to Avro York", an ode for a plane in the second war
• "First Freemsons", a narrative. Some group had to be the first freemasons of the York Masonic Rite, right?
• "If York Minster Were My Old Cat", the history of York Minster using a cat as metaphor
• "House of York", blank verse narrative about Richard, the third duke of York
• "Peppermint Patty Left Behind", a political poem about George Bush's disastrous No Child Left Behind, with old York Peppermint Patty commercials as the poetic trope.
• Corpus Christi", a free-verse narrative about the York Mystery Plays (a cycle of 48 plays dating from the 14th century)

I plan to write more poems with the following subjects in mind:

• York, an area inside Toronto, ON
• One of many small rural American counties called York.
• Rebecca, daughter of Issac of York
• York College of PA
• York, PA 1777 continental congress

I need more ideas - feel free to contact me if you have any.

Mera Hindustan

Northbound On Logic Street
A manuscript in search of a publisher

The manuscript is a time machine. The poems move from the Paleolithic Period to the present and into the future. The book is a journey from drunken eras of spirituality and mythology to the blossoms of logic and science and their sobered importance.

Queen Nefertiti learns her lesson. Polyphemos has a chip on his shoulder. The Siwa Oracle receives her most famous guest. An elephant and a horse help describe an ancient battle.

A Hindu god gets his head cut off. Ovid casts judgement on a deadly sin as Shaka Zulu confesses his. Charles Darwin seduces a woman before his chance meeting with a poet. An American city and an Indonesian town learn tragedy first hand.

Each poem takes on a different style or form from the others that came before it. I write formal verse and free verse (both structured and unstructured), comedy and tragedy, traditional rhyming patterns and made up ones, metered and unmetered.