After exchanging poems via email at a sometimes furious rate for a year, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep were left with the task of turning this abundance of poems into a more manageable manuscript.  In part three of a six part series, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep return to discuss the collaborative effort involved in shaping Your Father on the Train of Ghosts into a cohesive collection that remained true to the spirit of writing the poems.

You can read earlier parts of the conversation here:

Part 1: “On the Conservative vs. the Real”
Part 2: “Don’t Answer the Door (or Do)”

On the Plenitude

John Gallaher: Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is a little over 200 pages, culled from more than twice that in manuscript.  We accumulated a lot of poems over the months of our collaboration.  On the one hand, it feels like a long book to me when I read it—and usually people like books of poems to be much shorter than that—but other times, when I’m reading it, I think of all the poems that aren’t there, and it seems short.  The competing impulses, to take poems out, and to keep poems in, kept tapping on my shoulder throughout the process.

I think about these competing impulses when we give readings from the book.  When you asked in the last post, “To what extent does each poem imbibe or express its ancestors,” I thought of this again.  To what extent do the poems of YFOTTOG imbibe or express each other, and the ones that aren’t there?

G.C. Waldrep:  We kept trimming the original manuscript of 700+ pages to something we hoped would be publishable, even readable (!).  We even considered disentangling the poems and publishing separate volumes under our own names.  But that seemed untrue and unfair to the generative process.

As for the ultimate length, it seemed to me that nearly every volume of poetry I encounter these days (with the exception of a few Selected compilations) is of a length any intelligent reader can sit down and get through in an hour or two, a single sitting.  It’s the tyranny of the 48-to-64-pp. manuscript submission protocol.  Since there were two of us, it seemed appropriate to me that YFOTTOG have something of a “double album” quality.  And I wondered what would happen if we made the book long enough—just barely long enough—to frustrate that tendency of reading poetry books as bite-sized pieces.  Rightly or wrongly, I wanted a book that would force a reader to read some of it, then put it down, and then return to it.

Or, to put it another way:  Charles Simic writes, “A toy is a trap for dreamers.  The true toy is a poetic object.”  Simic goes on to describe visual artist Joseph Cornell’s central question as “How to construct a vehicle of reverie, an object that would enrich the imagination of the viewer and keep him company forever.”  I wanted a book that was simultaneously a trap, a toy, an object, and a vehicle—a companion and a “forever.”

JG: And I was just looking for the restroom.  Ah, the old jokes are the best ones.  But that’s also part of the toy, isn’t it?  The toy that can kill you, I think you referred to it as once when we were driving from The National Circus Hall of Fame Museum in Peru, Indiana?  That’s one of the things I enjoyed the most about writing this book, the way, in collaboration, various strands of meaning, of idiom and intent, weave in and around each other, so that either one of us might have written something like “Driving from the National Circus Hall of Fame Museum in Peru, Indiana” and the other wouldn’t know if that was an invented or real place, would then populate it with little painted figurines of children fighting, covered in cobwebs.  It’s another version of the door:

PARABLE OF THE DOOR

You tell what’s on the other side of the door
by the odor of the door.

There are rules to this game, you feel sure.
You tap the crumbling edge
of the off-season Olympic pool
impatiently, with the toe of your left foot.

All around you, fossil fuels are being liberated
from the crushing burden of use.

You want to be responsible for things
that are necessary, things nobody else does:

finishing the potato cannon.  Wearing white
at unfashionable moments, like funerals.

For there to be a funeral, someone must die—
That’s one rule, you’re guessing.  And
the politicians at the viewing, all crowded
around the little tables, with their little trays
of credit cards and baked brie with honey.

You get as close as you can to the door.
You don’t smell anything, but maybe
there’s a sort of humming noise
coming from the other side.  You’re not sure.

All the photographs in your wallet are of
politicians, honey running down their chins,

and of you, with your mouth sewn shut.

You’re waiting for someone,
for the right season, only there’s this terrible
pressure coming from somewhere.

Your swimsuit feels tight.  It’s winter.
You pretend there are orders at the factories.

I want what you’ve got in your hands.

G.C. Waldrep’s previous collections of poetry include Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), winner of the Colorado Prize; Disclamor (BOA, 2007); and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Boston Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and The Nation, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature and received a 2008 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. His anthology of creative, critical, and personal responses to the life and work of Paul Celan, co-edited with Ilya Kaminsky, is forthcoming from Marick Press.  He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis poetry prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

Two of BOA’s recent stars, Nikola Madzirov and the inimitable team of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep, were recently featured in the Bloomsbury Review, a bimonthly “book magazine” devoted to sharing the best contemporary literature. “Our mission,” they write, “is to seek out those quality books that are underserved and undeservedly overlooked by other media—bringing you reviews of books from large publishers that don’t receive the promotional budget of their bestsellers, and new books from small, regional, nonprofit, independent, and university presses you won’t discover elsewhere.”

Besides this, the Bloomsbury Review is “simply lively writing about good reading and great writers,” and it is in this way that both Waldrep and Gallaher’s Your Father on the Train of Ghosts and Madzirov’s Remnants of Another Age fit quite neatly into their publication. Of Remnants, Bloomsbury’s reviewer writes, “[t]his first book of his work in English is a beautiful and moving collection by a young master of the short poem. A surreal, multidimensional tone… carries them beyond history, war, or cultural fragmentation. … His poems reach out to galaxies, rooftops, and ‘womb[s] of the earth,’ and examine what is and what might be, if the maker of language wishes it.”

Of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, the “odd and fascinating” collaboration between G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher, the reviewer writes, “After reading this book a few times and coming up for air, it is clear to the reader that G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher have written an important book in the continuing exploration of the poetic moment of exhilaration and breathless reaffirmation.”

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is available for purchase here.
Remnants of Another Age is available for purchase here.

Don’t Answer the Door (or Do)

In this second of six part series, poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep continue to explore their experience writing Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, the product of a year-long exchange of poems via email, discussing the interior life of the poems and the collaborative nature of their book, a collection that John Ashbery referred to as one where the pair write within “a growing region, but there are others too, regions/ and examples of regions,’ together with ‘rhubarb futures’ and ‘this child’s chalk drawing on the sidewalk/of a sea monster on a Tilt-a-Whirl.’ ‘We are free/for a limited time,’ one of them writes (we don’t know who wrote what), and that augurs a peculiarly American kind of happiness.”

John Gallaher: One of the things I like about that epigraph from Spicer that we were talking about last time (“Like somebody knocking on your door at three in the morning, you know. And you try to pretend that you aren’t breathing”), is a lot of it depends on how one reads the “you know.”  Is he meaning the person knocking on your door is someone you know, or is he meaning the “you know” as simply a gesture, asking if the people in the audience are with him, understanding him.  My feeling is he means it in the second way, but sometimes when I read it, when I’m braced with it out of context, it feels like the first way.  This, then, is another version of your definition of conservative as “saving with” perhaps?  Which feeds into our desire to conserve, to take care of, to minister to.  Here’s one of our poems on that subject:

AND AS THEY WAITED IN THEIR BASKETS
ON THE HILLSIDES IT BEGAN TO RAIN

I meant to write “saved from drowning”
but wrote “drowned from saving”
instead.  When I look up from my notebook,
I realize I am writing
once again at the desk made out of the war.

Later, after the lights are turned off,
I hear the jake brakes of passing trucks and litanies
the crickets make.  It’s as if
at some point, or maybe in some other,
earlier life, they’d all been weavers, artisans of great skill,
but then, somehow, forgot how that all went.

In the fields outside town,
the crickets are trying to piece something
impossibly complex together,
only this time it’s going to work, this time
it’s going to be about acoustics
and devotion, rather than about covering the body.

It’s the war, I tell myself—in the dream—
before letting each fragment drop.

Come down to the water, whisper the cripples
on the tall banks of the levee.
We call what we’re doing dancing
because we like that word better than some other words.
It’s the sort of thing a god might do,
a god in the shape of a river, in the shape of a bird,
in the shape of a bone tucked inside a scar.

G.C. Waldrep:  As it happens I just finished reading John Yau’s recent monograph on the painter Jasper Johns, and I can’t stop thinking about the comment he makes opacities in some of Johns’s paintings—the idea that overpainting or mere overthinking conceals something, that the art object simply is incapable of delivering in an explicit way.  In particular, a door.  It’s not so much that we want to know what the door conceals—what’s behind the door—as that something we can’t see is inside the door itself.

So, when I think about a poem like “And as They Waited in Their Baskets on the Hillsides, It Began to Rain,” I’m wondering less about what’s behind it—what it “means”—than I am about what inheres within it, within the plane of experience represented by the poem, inaccessible to anyone else.

What if the knocking is coming not from the other side of the door, but from inside the door itself?

JG:  Well, then it’s time to call pest control.

I was reading about groups of musicians, or a scientist-musicians, awhile back, who have created (or translated might be a better term) music from DNA and proteins.  So, following that, the door could be singing.  Either way, it’s just about as mysterious.

One of my pet theories is regarding empathy, the idea that if one were empathetic enough one could walk through the door itself, as we’re all mostly empty space.  In that economy, it’s more about the communal nature of all things (in the science version, which is where I feel most comfortable keeping it), than a question of singular operators.  That’s one of the things I really liked about our collaboration.  It was ours.  We were we, and the poems invoked that we.  As Oppen has it, “the shipwreck of the singular.”  And still the door continues to be the door.  It opens and closes.  It knocks and sings.

You can read Part 1 of the discussion here

G.C. Waldrep’s previous collections of poetry include Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), winner of the Colorado Prize; Disclamor (BOA, 2007); and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Boston Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and The Nation, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature and received a 2008 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. His anthology of creative, critical, and personal responses to the life and work of Paul Celan, co-edited with Ilya Kaminsky, is forthcoming from Marick Press.  He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis poetry prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

In a recent review of G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher’s Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, blogger C. Moniz at California Poetics highlights the glittering electricity of their words, finding that “[t]he lines could stand on their own without the reader having to know a single detail about ‘the performance,’ which could be any number of life’s glittering spectacles.” Moniz references the poem “A Short History of Friendship,” saying, “The power of these lines is intensified by the dismissive tone of ‘just’ and ‘anyway.’ … The downplay of these phenomena—a luminescent insect, a celestial body, a shard of geologic history in a modern roadway—works to intensify their extraordinary nature and their unlikeliness.” One might even go as far as to notice the poem’s hints at the extraordinary nature of Waldrep and Gallaher’s own friendship, from the midst of which comes this new and indeed, luminescent collaboration.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is available for purchase here.

Read the full review here.

In his debut short story collection This New and Poisonous Air, Adam McOmber brings the influence of Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, and Edgar Allen Poe to the next generation in stories that are a blend of the fantastic and the macabre.  The book, a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly, explores in dense, richly written stories the nature of fantasy and the obsessions that too often drive them. Recently profiled in Time-Out Chicago, McOmber is also the author of the upcoming novel Empyrean. His debut novel details the story of Jane Silverlake, a woman living in Victorian England with the unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of manmade objects. Jane’s greatest joy is wandering the wild, surrounding heath with her companions and neighbors, Madeline Lee (daughter of shunned photographer Adolphus Lee) and Nathan Ashe (son of Lord William Ashe). But as the friends come of age, their idyll is shattered by the complex feelings both girls develop for Nathan, and by Nathan’s growing interest in a cult led by Ariston Day, a charismatic mystic popular with London’s wealthy elite.  Day offers his followers the opportunity to explore dream manipulation, with the goal of discovering a new virtual reality, a place he calls the Empyrean.

Through his nuanced, lyrical prose, Empyrean describes the story of a dear friendship as it evolves into a complicated love triangle where the object of both girls’ affection disappears from the streets of London without a trace. Adam returns to many of the themes that made This New and Poisonous Air so compelling: fantasy and escape, history and myth to create a deeply imagined new world and investigate the dark yet familiar corners of the human heart. McOmber’s interview with BOA’s own Albert Albonado discusses the influences on his work, the role of fantasy and simulations, and his writing life.

Read the full interview here.

In celebration of 35 years, BOA is holding a 35th Anniversary Summer Celebration Summer Sale.  All BOA titles are discounted 10% now until August 31st.  It is one way for us to thank our readers and offer some quality summer reading!

For a link to the BOA Editions bookstore, follow the link here.

Over a year-long period, poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep exchanged poems through emails, sometimes at a furious pace. Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is the culmination of these exchanges, and represents one of the most engaging and expansive collaborative projects, a collection that Bin Ramke refers to as being “Powerful and elegant.”  What emerged from these poems was not a voice that either could say belonged wholly to Gallaher or Waldrep, but a third mysterious voice. Gallaher and Waldrep return to that experience in a series of conversations to discuss the process of writing the poems. In the first of six parts, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep tackle the aesthetic and philosophical concerns that often informed the poems in the collection.

Part 1: On the Conservative vs. the Real

G.C. Waldrep:  What, then, is the real?  Is the life of the imagination continuous with what we might call external (i.e., “consensus”) reality, or is it something else entirely, something that lies outside of that fabric?  And what lyric form(s) does the real, this Real, take?

I have been thinking about this in connection with those vexed terms we so easily bandy about in the larger poetry conversation:  “conservative” vs. “innovative” (or elliptical, or avant-garde, or post-avant:  what have you).  What, then, does “conservative” mean?  A “saving with,” from the Latin:  com-servare. So, a truly conservative poetry partakes of the tradition it extends—rather more obviously than what passes as innovative, avant, or new.

To what extent does each poem imbibe or express its ancestors, is another way of putting it—in the context of the imagination?  Is it a question of posture, rather than of gesture per se?

John Gallaher: And once we say “posture” we have all manner of tones and counter tones that enter. Is this a posture or is this some sort of natural position to be in, right? This is fun. Let’s just ask each other fraught questions for a while. I think, for me at least, that is the real.

George Steiner’s Real Presences, which I read in graduate school, is a foundational text of how I’ve come to these questions. It’s been some years since I last looked at it. I think I’ll go back to it this summer. As I recall, it’s centered around/within paradox, a similar paradox that one finds in Wallace Stevens, that could just as well be termed a Real Absence. At least that’s how I remember it. Charles Wright, in what I consider his finest book, Chickamauga, works directly with it as well. I think he even dedicates a section of the book to Steiner.

And that “real” part of the real, as in “how things really are.”  I remember listening to a couple actors from The Royal Shakespeare Company talking about the changing acting styles over the last century…the way we look back to the stage acting of early to mid-twentieth century and think it mannered.  They had a very different take on it.  They were in agreement that the style then was not to approach a manner, but to participate in the real.  The Real, then, in that way, is cultural.  What seemed real to Great Britain in the 1930s, with how they saw themselves in the world and as a culture, now seems mannered, stylized.

GC:  The fraught questions are real, and they lead to imaginary answers.  Does this mean imaginary questions will lead us to real answers?  Or are we just stuck in Moore’s garden again?

We’ve talked about YFOTTOG so many times by now that it’s starting to resemble (in my mind) a Cubist version of its former self, all shimmery explosion-in-the-shingle-factory.  What we thought and did blends into what we think we thought or did.  I listened to Spicer’s radio—or my version of Jack Spicer’s radio—tuned daily by each of the poems you sent me.

One of the epigraphs we chose for YFOTTOG was from Spicer’s third Vancouver lecture:  “Like somebody knocking on your door at three in the morning, you know. And you try to pretend that you aren’t breathing.”  In Spicer’s lecture, the poem is the knocker-on-the-door; the poet is the one in bed, more responsible for non-reception than for reception as such.

I like to think of poems, books of poems, as intruders, as that which wants the reader to wake up.  Wachet auf, in the German.  Sometimes gently. Sometimes roughly.  Wake up, friends, wake up.

G.C. Waldrep’s previous collections of poetry include Goldbeater’s Skin (2003), winner of the Colorado Prize; Disclamor (BOA, 2007); and Archicembalo (2009), winner of the Dorset Prize. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Boston Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, Colorado Review, Tin House, Harper’s, and The Nation, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. He was a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature and received a 2008 Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. His anthology of creative, critical, and personal responses to the life and work of Paul Celan, co-edited with Ilya Kaminsky, is forthcoming from Marick Press.  He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.

John Gallaher’s previous collections of poetry include The Little Book of Guesses (2007), winner of the Levis poetry prize, and Map of the Folded World (2009). His work has appeared in such journals as Field, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, New American Writing, Colorado Review, and The Kenyon Review, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2008. In 2010, he won the Boston Review poetry prize. He is currently co-editor of The Laurel Review, and, with Mary Biddinger, The Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher’s collection Your Father on the Train of Ghosts has been hailed before as the seamless product of a collaboration which, rather than producing a host of call-and-response or exquisite corpse poems, comes through with a third, somewhat different voice than either poet alone. In Newcity Lit’s recent review of the book (and it’s hard to call it just a book), however, the interlacing of American Life as subject matter with this new voice is also examined. Tackling “an undeniably complicated, expansive subject,” Waldrep and Gallaher’s poems “slip fluidly from topic to topic, from the interior of a house (’… and what do we have to show for it / around the dinner table, or the sound like a dinner table’), to the exterior: parkways and botanical gardens, chapels and hospitals.”

It is this third poetic voice, produced by a year of back-and-forth emails between Waldrep and Gallaher, which illuminates the landscape of the poems. “It is this voice, among the mass of American voices it represents, that was most consistent and illuminating. … With a sturdy assurance, this voices explores the commonalities we find within our shared physical spaces and places, the imprints left on the objects we interact with on a daily basis. In a web of doors, windows, phones and groceries, Gallaher and Waldrep allow us to see how we can leave impressions on our tangible environments that rival the emotion effects we can leave on family members and lovers after we pass on.”

“By bringing the inanimate to life,” the review continues, “there is a revival of the mundane.” And what else could be more poetic?

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is available for purchase here.

Read the full review at Newcity Lit here.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher received praise for their collection of poetry, Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Boston Review notes that this poetry calls in a unique perspective of collective voice between the two authors.  The poetry is seamlessly assembled into poems with “real strength.”

Waldrep and Gallaher’s poetry is a pleasing “example of contemporary work” that seeks to “express the exhaustion of excess.”  Not one poem is wasted in contributing to the collection.  Each poem dives into the communion of speakers and souls as they share awareness and become a whole new creative voice together.

Together, Waldrep and Gallaher “create a closed conversational loop” but one that simultaneously creates an “effect…of welcome.”

Aleš Šteger’s poem “Egg,” from his collection of translated poetry The Book of Things, was chosen to feature as today’s Poem of the Day by the American Academy of Poets. Translated by Brian Henry, Šteger’s poetry often focuses on simple, everyday objects, but in his poetry these normal items become strange, new, and utterly other. Today’s “Egg” is written in this tradition, juxtaposing the tranquility of breakfast with the threatening images of the eye, the gaze, and questions no one wants to answer before coffee.

Egg

When you kill it at the edge of the pan, you don’t notice
That the egg grows an eye in death.

It is so small, it doesn’t satisfy
Even the most modest morning appetite.

But it already watches, already stares at your world.
What are its horizons, whose glassy-eyed perspectives?

Does it see time, which moves carelessly through space?
Eyeballs, eyeballs, cracked shells, chaos or order?

Big questions for such a little eye at such an early hour.
And you- do you really want an answer?

When you sit down, eye to eye, behind a table,
You blind it soon enough with a crust of bread.

The Book of Things is available for purchase here.