The Red-Tinted Grammar of the Day: The Polyphonic Poetics of Jay Wright: A Review-Essay by Gray Kochhar-Lindgren


What is it to read, to write? What is it to attempt to read Jay Wright? I grope about in an obscure darkness, grasping for straws, but straws do not, not on their own, allow us to stay afloat on the surging waters. I will, on occasion, get down on my hands and knees to trace a partial footprint, or what I take to be a footprint—although it may have been left hundreds of millions of years ago by trilobites or kelp—on the wet sand of the rocky sea-sucked strand. A night-wind blows through this indomitable and difficult work, but I will attempt to trace out a rough itinerary of the event of the pitching and illumination that emerges from  the event of the mixing-and-matching of poetics, reading, and philosophy. This attempt will fail, but perhaps a few more traces might be added to the archive of futurity. 

Much to my shame, I am one of those benighted souls who had never read a single word of Jay Wright’s work before running into Will Daddario and Matthew Goulish’s Pitch and Revelation. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I have been impoverished, but even now as Daddario and Goulish (D & G) have opened multiple portals into Wright’s extravagantly ambitious and complex poetics, I am still embarrassed that I understand so little. How can I even begin to read Wright, when so many of his sources—from the anthropological to the mathematical to the musical and the zoological—are just beyond my capacity to understand? His bravura techniques of his cosmopolitical poeticizing are dazzling and yet often the most I can do is to read aloud slowly and let myself drift in the currents of the sounds, images, concepts, and histories. I am awash.

I take this, however, to be a general problem of reading which I very often encounter: how do I read writers who are exponentially more intelligent than I am? How can I enter into a sphere of their writing that is far beyond my capacity to comprehensively understand their work? This is the very question of the possibility of learning, which first of all requires exposure to the unknown and then, to the best of our abilities, a negotiation of retrieval, comprehension, enactment, and passing along. The authorial duo of D & G have, thankfully, offered an extraordinarily articulate Virgilian guidance to the complexities of Wright’s oeuvre and provided precisely what they claim to provide: a reconfiguration

This torque is focused on poetizing and philosophizing, but there are innumerable—and I mean that literally—other knowledge domains and histories operating in Wright’s extraordinary craftsmanship. All of the exegesis in Pitch and Revelation is intimately enmeshed with what it means to read such texts (or to read at all) and I will follow this  thread through Wright’s philosophically inflected poetics and D & G’s thematization of these poetics. 

They begin Pitch and Revelation with an introductory meditation called “How to Read.” It is not a question, in this context, but a kind of initial guidance for reading. Of, for instance, Jay Wright’s poem Boleros. I have now begun, but just barely begun, to read Wright. Apparently, though, I am not alone in my ignorance: “[S]o few have read Jay Wright. Perhaps this is so because of the stamina required to read him. WouIdn’t, then, an exercise in reading Wright help others to find astonishment?” (23). Yes. Like Dante, I need a guide, and one with more stamina than I have. Such a reading lesson of the soul would “certainly be devoted to reading as a polyformous enterprise, reading as equal parts deconstruction, meaning-making, dance, and song. To read Wright, one must move in many directions” (23). At once, in sequence, turning devilishly, a dervish. I am already exhausted from the exertion, but also feel the first adumbrations of a strange levity and levitation. I’ll get out my hiking boots, ice-crampons, flippers, mask, air tanks, and dancing shoes. 

Already there is joy in the air and here comes Spinoza with the blessedness of the love of God, although we will not enter into those definitional thickets here. With Wright, “joy leads not to an understanding of God, per se, but, rather, to a visceral sense of what we call the great weave of the world” (24). The first chapter is “Methexical Reading: Forays into Wright’s Wor(l)ds” and off we go. Whirling, whorling, wording. D & G open with a passage from Wright’s Disorientation: Groundings, a title that says it all:

Early winter

Eboussi-Boulaga waits

for the first 

snow, the face

earth’s cloud chamber will reveal. 

              Jay Wright, 77

Early winter, waiting, and a face through which earth manifests itself. And something or someone called Eboussi-Boulaga. This immediately takes us into the “process of initiation into Dogon cosmology” (35), beginning with an “origin story of the Dogon supposedly relayed to Griaule by Ogotemmȇli” (35). Griaule is the French Anthropologist who studied the Dogon in depth and an immense scholarly corpus, of which this is just one example, murmurs through all of Wright’s work and through D & G’s readingly writing on Wright. Ogotemmȇli will return.

Eboussi-Boulaga is now “transformed from glyphs and sounds into the African philosopher concerned with...how language functions within the human being (in the African condition known as Muntu)” (38). The glyphs and sounds, like the soundings of any poetry, are a kind of asignifying structural necessity that expresses itself as rhythm and configuration as a pre-condition of “meaning.” Poetry, as we all know, is not merely about discovering the meaning of a work, but about a kind of physical-conceptual-spiritual swaying in which each of us dances in our own idiolect in ways that move along the edges of meaning. (See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense.) 

Needless to say—a phrase after which we always say it anyway—meaning is not static. It is produced, in flux, and it dissipates with less than a gust of wind. D & G bring us close to Wright in the form of a great turbulence that we experience without always understanding (an experience we have with all great writers). “The act of reading involves reading both the structure and its actualization as if such a distinction might be possible” (39). Reading as a Philosophie als ob that necessarily pretends—after all there has to be syntax that juxtaposes and connects—to be able to make distinctions between structure and actualization, system and creativity. 

And then we are, suddenly and without transition, deep into Michel de Certeau’s “Reading as Poaching” (a great concept). “Wright’s creative act has not been primarily one of pioneering an interdisciplinary mode of thinking. Rather, his creative act has been to demonstrate that no authentic boundaries or disciplinary lines actually exist. That is, there is no natural division between Ancient Greek philosophy, Pythagorean number fanaticism, Dogon astronomy, bullfighting, abstract set theory, and Isabelle Stengers. To read Wright is to explore the more scenic route, which, though radically open, is so densely populated that fatigue will likely set in” (45). Fatigue does set in, but so, too, does rejuvenation. You just must pace yourself in “forging one’s own creative activity” (45). Wright reconstitutes our reading subjectivity and temporality as we read, forcing us—with his invitation and intelligence, the lines of letters on the page—to become co-writers and accompanists, but only in the form of a stuttering and stammering, of a being-wounded by our own stupidity and incapacity, and of scribbling quasi-inane notes in the margins of his, and D & G’s, text. It is, though, a start.

“A reader will create or produce meanings within Wright’s text, but the ‘meaning’ is less important than this activity of participation. Given Wright’s affinity for the Ancient Greeks, we might think of this participation through the theatrical and philosophical event of methexis” (47). Reading Wright is to actively get mixed-up, to be caught up in the mix of the mixture of all histories, punctuated in particular, by the poets, the dramatists, the mathematicians, and the philosophers. Poetics is theatrical, philosophical: it shows-forth to an audience in a site. We are inside and outside Dogon cosmology and so-called Pre-Socratic—a misleading designation to my mind—philosophical fragments of verse, having been written before a genre called “philosophy” emerges more formally with Plato and Aristotle. All we have are fragments.

But Wright’s poeticizing is happening right now, in the now of the presence of our present of reading. Poetry folds times, and spaces, toward touch-points that converge on each of us:

I thought of myself, invisible, twinned

to a magnetic wave, to the higher

intent of being nothing could rescind

to a brain of compassion set afire.

                       Jay Wright, The Guide Signs, 10

Wright, D & G reminds us, is undertaking a work of speculative experimentation, a kind of quantum poetics. “Wright, the poet, understands the necessity of abstractions, and Wright the philosopher understands the continual need to interrogate, revise, and reform abstractions” (65). Red wheelbarrows in the rain notwithstanding, this enigmatically vexed relationship between conceptual abstraction and the putatively concrete image, of that famous thing-in-itself to which we are called in various ways and in various times to return to, are necessarily twinned, and must be constantly rebraided. (See the “Sense Certainty” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.) 

The pitch-and-revelation of the title “describes this two-part process, speculation’s flight and landing, the detour and return of image. With pitch as proposal, and immanent revelation as that wonder of extension beyond initial instance, we comprehend Wright’s primary poetic of inquiry” (66). Stengers, Whitehead, Barad, and the history of science and philosophy are in the closest proximity and this poetics of criss-crossing sets the stage for an encounter, a jolt, a gut-punch. A kind of shockwave hits and passes through us, dis- and re-orienting us as we undertake the simple act of reading. Finally, and gasping for air, we have stumbled into “Études: Boleros,” also known as chapter 2. 

What is loves form when the body fails,

or fails to appear? What is love’s habitation

but a fable of boundaries, lovers passing

athwart all limits toward a crux ansata?

I have carried your name on velvet

knowing you are free, having never suffered

the heartache of patience that love and naming

that this our divided world requires.

Jay Wright, Boleros, in Transfigurations, 500

D & G thread the bolero, a dance originating in 18th century Spain, with the bullfight, the male and female, and the traditions of painters representing the vanitas of the vanity of vanities that is the folly of the human. “Present, too, in the word `Bolero’ are official edicts, seals, and various words associated with bumps and blisters” (70). Always concerned with that act of opening worlding called “naming,” the “presiding twin thematic of Boleros reveals itself to us when we read it in a certain way: the freedom of the dance and the compulsion and bounding of the name (where `bound’ signifies both to ‘leap’ and ‘to fasten’). This `certain way of reading is rhizomatic, a reading that drifts horizontally through the poems and raises vertical chutes of interest...” (73). The leap binds and every binding provides a moment of reconfiguration. (See Michel Serres’ final book, Religion [Relire le relié, its original title, says this better] and well as The Natural Contract.) As we read, we are headed from the Greek muses to the Egyptian form of the crux ansata, the ankh as the breath of life. 

Constructing a reading matrix of verticals and horizontals—imagine the bamboo scaffolding used in building construction in Hong Kong—D & G note that it seems that “Wright guides the reader into the land of the dead and gives words to the first-person experience of the resurrection in this new land. The first-person experience is not, or not only, Wright’s; rather, it belongs to an enharmonic of historical figures...” (81). Poetry is a matrix, but a matrix created word-by-space-by-word that vibrates across all possible entities, causing them in turn to vibrate as a cosmic string theory that is incessantly instantiated in the most mundane and the most sublime of things. There is, finally, no difference of category between the two. Everything hums. 

The poet plucks the matrix of strings into being, which then resonate, always touching through othering-in-relation, but only through a vast mediation of relays, hand-offs. “The system—the manifold singularity, the set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole—realizes the operation of putting-into-relation. It provides common transport between the material and the spiritual. Such a transport takes the form of a constellation or a dance” (86). The whole, of course, is never a closed and completed whole, but always bends around and back, creating space for the next instant of an immanently poeticizing physis. “We come to know Boleros as this dance of reading and unreading the world” (125). The exact determination of syllable, word, line, space and stanza—all echoing with historical resonances—determines a kind of directionality of this reading, that which carries along to the next thing, the next proposition, the next relation. 

The next relations are elaborated in chapter 3, “Wright’s Rhythm, or “x” marks the weave,” which is impossible (like everything else) to summarize. If we think in as many ways as we can, however, about “rhythm,” “x,” and “weave”—across mathematics, music, anthropology, and treasure-maps—we will at least enter the edges of the territory of Wright’s wri(gh)ting.  Let me once again ignore the specific readings of the poems—although what else are they doing but this throughout the entire book?—and extract some extrapolations on the relationship between poetry, philosophy, and rhythm. 

“If we consider philosophy, after Whitehead and William James, as the practice of bringing the spectrum of disciplines into alignment with the most advanced among them, we come to an understanding of Wright’s practice as one of philosophy within poetry. If we consider creativity as first and foremost the mobilization of relationality, we see the near-perfect alignment between the two fields of operation. What if we call this near-perfect alignment `rhythm’ and begin to count-off our philosophical practice in time to this rhythm?” (132). Poetry and philosophy are “two fields of operation” that are almost, but not quite, aligned with one another. Poetry, I would also add, is not quite aligned with poetry and philosophy is not quite aligned with philosophy. 

These slow perturbations extend across and through each field, creating irregular oscillations, vibrations, and resonances of language-thought: rhythms. Rhythm is a Penelopean art of (un)doing as a making through delays as we await the nostos with its piercing death, reunions, and further leave-takings; it is “fashioning a common axiom between the differential relations of the diverse, contrasting elements put in play, a discovery and actualization of resonances between, say, mathematics, music, and rites of initiation [for example, those of the Dogon]” (161). This is, among other things, the very definition of poetry. Poetry and metaphysics are twins, but not identical twins. (See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,and Kant, “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”) Wright turns the lathe of language at astonishing speeds, simultaneously slow and fast, and creates his own rhythm, which draws us into its turbulence and calm slow swirlings. 

Ammitai Aviram reminds us that “The Greek word rhuthmos had originally meant something quite different (than its typical definition in scholarship on poetry). Akin to the verb rheō, to flow, rhythm in its pre-Platonic sense denotes the shape (schēma) of a moving object such as the water of a stream or the body of a dancer” (cited on 170). I defer from speaking of all the scheming schemes of the schema—Kant is too close at hand—but I will say that rhythm is the temporal shaping of materiality, a concept of the movement of immanence that is absolutely essential to reorient ourselves toward here in the Anthropocene. It is a pulse, a beat tending toward “pure music,” which is an impossibility. Flaubert, in another genre, wanted to write a novel about “nothing,” another impossibility but a completely understandable goal for those seeking rhythm and nothing but rhythm.

“X marks the weave” launches itself past the “Diagrammatic, dialectic: on the extra-linguistic markings” and through Wright’s biography, back through Dogon ritual, through Langer and Whitehead, into Chinese ideograms, and back to music and masks. (Yeats and Pound are chanting in the shadows of the wings.) “How then,” D & G ask, “do these ideograms and signs guide our reading? In some cases they direct the tenor of the speech, calibrating a pause or a turn like a musical rest. In others they offer a channel of interpretation, informing nuanced differences and inflection of voice. When we read the poems aloud, what do we do when we arrive at these signs? We cannot enunciate them, yet they measure and mask our speech. In a sense they speak us. They speak through is, and we follow their lead as we read” (202). 

Wright forces us, with great generosity, to ask these questions about what we are doing, about what is acting upon and through us, when we read? A text or an utterance of any sort at all depend on “non-linguistic” markers, on silences, rests and pauses, spacings: on that which we cannot, not directly, “enunciate.” Enunciation, in other words, depends on that which is not accessible to voice: poetics is the experiment of taking both of these dimensions into account through an interweaving of meaning, music, and rhythm. “Finding the `Fit’ (The Tuning of Grammar and Syntax and Benjamin Banneker),” chapter 4, echoes these themes while moving us forward, more deeply, into Wright’s work. A tuning of attunement is still at work as well as meditation on the poetics of “fit.” What fits with what? What might a fit reader or writer appear to be? How do we name that which fittingly fits things, the world, and language into something like a poem?

Wright claims that his “project is one of recovery and revelation. His poems uncover the weave that already exists between seemingly disparate objects and concepts. Could both claims be true? Could Wright’s poetics disjunctively fuse an act of creation and an act of revelation?” (204). Usually we take revelation and recovery, the new and the already, to be in opposition. D & G, in their own (un)ravelling, claim that both are active simultaneously. They first set up the field of quantum fields through the “agential realism” of Karen Barad, claiming that all of our actions “including writing and reading poetry emerge intra-actively through undulations within the entangled web [of spacetime]. But while this may actually be the case when ascertained through the notion of entanglement, the case can only be thought by making a precise cut in the web...” (206). Look around you, touch the screen or the paper, smell what is nearby, taste the coffee, close your eyes and let the undulations of flux wash through you. Those are cuts.

In order to write a word or a line—to speak in a fundamental sense—a disruption or an interruption of the flux must occur, or be made, as an act of saying.  The first cut is perhaps the deepest, but we always arrive on the scene too late and have to reconstruct the firstness of that cut, the origin of origins. This is the “recovery” that D & G talk about as one of Wright’s strategies. The other side of the unified doubleness, “revelation,” has perhaps a dual sense of that which is shown in the recuperative act of writing memory (the already) and the creative function of composing, and reading, poetry (the now). Poetics is a weaving of temporalities and weaving has a beat.

This entanglement, though, is part of an even larger picture, as indicated by Wright’s unpublished The Tuning of Grammar and Syntax. If the entanglement and the cut are one part of the more expansive problem, the other part is aesthēsis, which is co-foundational (of that for which we can never find a foundation) and co-generative. This too, however, is not the crux of the matter. The fastener between entanglement and aesthēsis is what Wright, and the rest of us, wants to understand. Wright calls this the `fit’...he, and by extension we readers, will need to dance through the noun-ness of the fit, the action of fitting that creates the joint between aesthēsis and entanglement, and all the other valences of `fit’ that we can possibly wrap our minds around” (207). This, in an extremely compressed version, is the “grammar and syntax” of the worlding of the world that Wright calls into being. The entanglement of all things; the aesthetics of the experience of such a filigreed web; and the “fit” between the two. Poetics and metaphysics. Twins.

D & G then proceed to an analysis of harmony and harmonics. Passing through the etymology of “harmony” back through ancient Greek of a joining together of a ship’s planks, we enter into the term as the ship of poetics takes shape and begins to sail forward toward unpredictability in a pulse of pitch and revelation, a recovery of history—especially in this context through a recovery of the biography of Benjamin Banneker that conjoins “the crafts of building and writing in a distinctly American grain” (210). (See Heidegger’s “Anaximander Fragment.”) All of this enables us to discover that the “distinctions between poetry, physics, [history, biography], and indigenous cosmology are less important than the threads woven between them. We have, in other words, a glimpse into the materials with which Wright will make his craft, and we even have an idea of the shape this craft will take—a kind of mosaic vessel or bricolage” (217). We begin to understand, perhaps, this differentiating mobility that creates provisional points-of-contact that fasten and fit.

This leads directly into a discussion of Leibniz, the modes of the monads, a perspectivism which is not the change of position of a subject on a stabilized object, and the creation of “accords.” The individual, Deleuze remarks in his reading of Leibniz in The Fold, produces an “accord each time [s/he] can establish in a sum of infinitely tiny things differential relations that will make possible an integration of the sum—in other words, a clear and distinguished perception” (The Fold 130-31). 

The red roof tiles                               The oriole has established

Slip into the morning fog.                an evasive coherence,

There is a red silence                            infinite, exact,

                 all around us.                      with its place, there where

It will take years to learn                 the day seems set to honor

this coherent grammar                     the bird’s expressive deceit.

                                       Jay Wright, Music’s Mask and Measure, 22-23

This explicitly drawing out of crisscrossing lines, where there were none before, provide a doorway into a vibrational space of an accord where we can “arrive to participate in the red-tinted grammar of the day” (223). 

D & G take up in great detail one of these lines through Wright’s work, that of the biopoetics of Benjamin Banneker, which leads us across an itinerary of American history, its entwinement with slavery, a loop back through the Dogon, and then leaps through mathematics, clocks, cicadas, Matteo Ricci, and “figures of pure affirmation” (246). The chapter concludes, if that can ever be said without either crying or laughing, with power, craft, and fit. What fits? What doesn’t? How? Unlike Ancient Greek mathematicians, Wright “registers his findings in the sound and structure of his poems and the method of his philosophical examinations...the underlying poetics of the fitting, which is to say the ongoing process of writing (and Wrighting) the harmony of the world” (258).

D & G roll along through chapters titled “Reading as n+1” (with Deleuze again close by) and “The Geometry of Rhythm.” The first opens up the performativity of Wright’s plays (and Daddario has very recently completed a 3-volume edited collection on the plays) and takes us through the mathematics of the cosmic harmony of rhythm, about which they admit that “Students of the arts and humanities will find this task daunting...” (319), which I indeed do. Indeed, I have no capacity in mathematics at all, which when I approach too closely causes a slight rash to break out. But, again, it’s rhythm and harmony at stake, established through differentials. Yes. And yes again. But as I am running out of time, running out of energy, and running out of words, let me ask your leave to loop in a great loop to the last chapter, “Coming Back Around: The Prime Anniversary and Poetic Orbitals.”

We have come back around, through reading, and have reached a prime anniversary. The gyres, the gyres: but not quite. “To avoid the lure of aimlessness that can capture a writer when `exploring’ is the primary verb of the expedition, Wright calls upon his signature rhythmical rigor, the cadence, grammar, and syntax that keeps him, and by extension us, locked in orbit with the truths in question” (384). Having become elliptical extensions of Wright, we, too, orbit around a set of fundamental questions. We are back among the pre-Socratics, the pre-Athenians, the pre-Platonists. Through Wright’s verse, and D & G’s Talmudic commentary, we have come back to look ahead toward Empedocles and Pythagoras, with an elemental imagination and a mathematics of meaning. (This return is occurring in all sorts of ways as we explore “post” humanism, “new” materialism, and all of their affiliations with the Anthropocenic turn.) 

We are travelling through a geometry of experience and harmonics, vibrations: “Through the analytic strain of Ptolemy’s thought shows the influence of Aristotle on his philosophical method, the focus on mathematical underpinnings to music reveal his Pythagorean roots” (400). 

Ogotemmȇli stands on his own green terrace

The lines and planes of that garden should remind

him

of imaginary things, no finite and slim

number of his body’s diagram, or slow pace

of a logical relation tuned to Athens.

                                                     Jay Wright, The Prime Anniversary, 14

Passing back through Empedocles, with Love and Strife fastening and untying the elements, we move through the “zero-point” of Celan’s poetic architecture of mourning and then enter again into the vast circumambulations of Dante. “Wright returns to Dante frequently and in turn carries away from Dante a belief that the body is a gnomon, the γ ν ώ μ ω ν, the `one who knows or examines.’ Bodies travel around and around ‘the mountain’ and learn to sing the chord formed by the union of grief and praise” (418).  Poetics is this mixing up, this sifting-and-sorting. Grief, praise.

Will Daddario and Matthew Goulish’s Pitch and Revelation, like Wright’s poetic oeuvre, is daunting in scale and scope and I am overwhelmed by the undulations of the immense waves coming in from every direction. We cannot understand it all, but we come out of the experience of being-lost, of being embarrassed by our ignorance, of being at the mercy of the merciless waves of the sea with more than we started with when we opened the first page. The waves carry us elsewhere so that we can make discoveries, make traces and maps, form a new people and a new earth.

What we call 

our own might only be

the first stroke upon

a stellar

clock, an instant shift

of center...

               Jay Wright, Music’s Mask and Measure, 32

Ding-dong bell. Shift, a stroke of our own, stellar. We are learning, albeit with agonizing slowness, to keep a different time. Under the masterful guidance of Daddario and Goulish, we have begun, but only barely begun, to lash together the planks of our own ship as readers on the high seas. Reading, poetry, and philosophy have begun, through the labors of love of Jay Wright and the commentators who follow in his wake, to be fastened into the rhythms of a rough harmony, a staccato of a symphonics of vectors, fragments, and trajectories of promise.

References

Aviram, Ammitai. (2002). “Rhuthmos,” Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History. Ed. Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch: 161-70. London: Continuum.

Daddario, Will. Ed. (2024). Glimmerings and Constellations: Creative and Critical Responses to the Plays of Jay Wright. Chicago: Kenning Editions and Every house has a door.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1994). Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.

—. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

—. (1990). The Logic of Sense. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press.

Griaule, Marcel. (1975). Conversations with Ogotemmȇli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spriit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heidegger, Martin. (1975). “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row. 

Kant, Immanuel. (2018). “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” Kant: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Serres, Michel. (2022). Religion: Reading What is Bound Together. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

—. The Natural Contract. (1995). Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulsen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wright, Jay. (2007). The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two. Baton Rouge LA: Louisiana State University Press. 

—. (2007). Music’s Mask and Measure. Chicago: Flood Editions.

—. (2000). Boleros, in Transfigurations: Collected Poems. (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press.

—. (2016). The Tuning of Grammar and Syntax. (Unpublished manuscript)

Gray Kochhar-Lindgrenis the co-founding Director of Wild Studios Consulting and Creative Productions LLC.Recently retired as the Director of the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core, Gray continues to serve as an Honorary Professor of the Humanities and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature. Prior to HKU, he was the inaugural Associate Vice-Chancellor for Undergraduate Learning and Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at the University of Washington-Bothell. A Fulbright Scholar, a Principal Fellow of AdvanceHE, and the recipient of four teaching awards, Gray is the author, most recently, of Urban Arabesques: Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality and Pintxos: Small Delicacies and Chance Encounters.