Kim Addonizio released Tell Me in 2000. The title invites us to sit and let it all out… and that’s exactly what Addonizio does. The poems in part 1, “The Singing,” introduce us to Kim’s” letting it out,” night after night wondering who else is still awake in her neighborhood of bars and weary voices.  In “Target” Addonizio shoots a gun with so much satisfaction that we wonder when we’ll get our chance to fire. Come to think of it, maybe it’s about that time:

It feels so good to shoot a gun,
to stand with your legs apart
holding a nine millimeter in both hands
aiming at something that can’t run.
Over and over I rip holes

Time and time again throughout Tell Me, Addonizio shows herself as a woman with as much control over her voice as she has over a handgun.

In fact, Tell Me reveals a poet’s voice so intimate, so close, you feel compelled to turn the book over to the cover and say “there she is, right there just like in the poem” and wonder if someone is about to come up and hit on her in that dingy bar.

“Blue Door,” “Last Call” and “Good Girl” are sections 2, 3 and 4 of the book. ”Good Girl” contains the poem “‘What Do Women Want?’” which has become an Addonizio classic many times reprinted:

“What Do Women Want?”

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

Tell Me was a 2000 finalist for the National Book Award for poetry.

Kim Addonizio’s writer profile and books can be found here.
Tell Me is available in the BOA store here.

Adam McOmber, BOA poet

NewPages Book Reviews had high words for Adam McOmber’s most recent short story collection, This New and Poisonous Air, which blends historical fiction with fantasy and the macabre.

NewPages critic, Patricia Contino praises McOmber’s eye for detail as well as his sense of storytelling, stating that “every page has a paragraph or more worth savoring.” However, “McOmber’s gift for detail never infringes on the narrative.”

Stories such as “Fall, Orpheum” – in which “a small town movie palace becomes the temple for an entire town’s devotion and sacrifice” – not only exemplify McOmber’s sense of narrative balance, but have “the power of capturing celluloid and real life.”

As the review highlights, the strength and refreshing nature of  McOmber’s style are not showcased in just one or two stories but are consistently prevalent throughout This New and Poisonous Air. Each of the protagonists lead “ordinary lives with secrets and daydreams until something distorts their world.” And while some things are better left unexplored, these varied and innovative encounters ” further sharpen a need to know,” according to Contino.

McOmber utilizes his time with the reader by focusing on ideas such as “fantasy and reality” and succeeds in revealing the false dichotomy between them. This New and Poisonous Air, Contino explains, “proves tenfold, those two realms go together—and their meeting ground is neither safe nor predictable.”

This New and Poisonous Air is available here

To read the full review follow the link here

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is the culmination of a year-long exchange of poems between the poets John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep.  Over the past few weeks, the poets discussed the process of this collaborative endeavor. The conversations have tread a wide range of territory, and now, in the final of those exchanges between Your Father on the Train of Ghosts authors  the pair revisit their haunting experience at The International Circus Hall of Fame, providing personal stories that helped fuel their writing that allows them to go where no one goes.

You can read earlier parts of the conversation here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The Show Where No One Goes

John Gallaher: I’ve always been drawn to the Terra Incognita that improvisational jazz can get to, and that Neil Young also speaks of as a wall. There’s this wall, he says, where well-trained musicians can play right up to, but when they get to it, they stop. He likes going through that wall. It’s different than rules, or forms, it’s a version of playing away from what you’ve learned. Apples and monkey wrenches, say. It’s also why I like Spicer’s metaphor of the Martian radio. These are all metaphors for going, for listening to what is from someplace else, and hopefully bringing something back.

This idea we had during the writing of the book, this “show where no one goes” that is both “the show no one goes to” as well as “the show where everyone stays”—these are two versions of community, aren’t they? “Let’s go somewhere that isn’t completely played out” and “Let’s go somewhere where we can all remain, accounted for”? At least that’s how it felt for me, as we were exchanging emails. One of the things you’re fond of saying, how you don’t play the music, the music plays you, comes back to me in this regard.

And then, quite literally, we visited The Circus Hall of Fame Museum in Peru, Indiana, which seemed a place where no one went, a place full of ghosts, mildew, and cobwebs, where these pictures sprinkled through these exchanges came from. You found it on a roadside attractions website of some sort? It’s an amazing place.

G.C. Waldrep: The International Circus Hall of Fame. I’ve known about it for years (vaguely) (but the curious can find it at either www.circushof.com or www.roadsideamerica.com). Somehow I always thought of it as a modern museum, depressingly antiseptic—lots of plexiglass and state-funded enrichment programs for elementary school students. I had no idea it was what it is, a fabulous trove of obsessively-collected circus memorabilia in a cavernous dilapidated barn in the middle of a field in Indiana.

It felt like the perfect coda to the book (and by “perfect,” I mean both appropriate and standing outside the book itself). I liked it best when the lone volunteer guide couldn’t see us, didn’t know we were even in the building (barn). We walked around the exhibits a few dozen paces behind him, listening to him offering his spiel to the one other human being on the property.

After that other person left, we were human again. (I think I preferred being a ghost.) I can’t decide which photo caption was my favorite: “The Canvas Spool (1927)” or “Tusko Before He Broke His Tusks.” And there is something poignant about the carefully archived badges from the Circus Model Builders National Gathering….

There are tribes out there that we can barely imagine. We may turn out to have been one of them.

JG: A field by a river that floods. It seemed we were visiting something that was no longer there, or, as you say, perhaps it was we who were no longer there. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it turned out there was no one there that day. “George Washington enjoyed the circus” was my favorite thing the guide said. There was enough in that to ride out the rest of the week. “Clown Six-Shooter” was the sign beneath a perfectly realistic looking pistol. “Father Will Take the Children to the Circus” was the caption beneath a young woman with a fetching look over her left shoulder on the cover of a Chicago Sunday Tribune from July 15th, 1923.

Fathers have always been a complicated subject for me. I’ve had two. The first one named me Martin Lynn Enquist, Junior, and when I was adopted by the Gallahers, I became John Jerome Gallaher, Junior. It’s interesting how this book, a collaboration, gave us the freedom to explore subjects such as these in some ways more directly than in the past. I always thought, or I was always led to believe, that collaboration was a party game. Maybe it is, but, as you said when we were driving, it’s a game that can kill you. Or save you, I suppose. Or both.

GC: One of the earliest poems we actually worked on—that made it into the final book—was called “The Circus of Probable Sighs.” At one point one of us probably knew what prompted that poem. There’s a Doppler effect where poems are concerned: we move away from them in time, become other people, remember and forget. This is true whether we’re the writer or the reader. But the poems don’t change.

JG: My inclination at such times is often to give a sort of shrug, and say the father still takes the children to the circus, though they all speak Esperanto and wear silver jumpsuits. It goes back to what you were saying before about who is the actor and who is the acted upon. Often when I go back to things I’ve read, it seems that it’s not just me who has changed. Sometimes it seems everything has changed. It’s my version of hopefulness, I suppose: if everything changes, then what’s to say it doesn’t change back? It’s at least a mathematical possibility, I’ve read, if highly improbable. But we, at least in possibility, can return to the show where no one goes. In fact, we can be that show.

GC: Sometimes, in our present culture, I wonder whether poetry isn’t itself “the show where no one goes.” This is part of the irony and intimacy of the art: we can go where “no one” goes. And the show goes on, whether we’re there or not: Stevens and Clare and Stein and Ashbery and Hill, all of them, all of it.

We are that show anyway, maybe. Maybe the poems watch us. Maybe we keep them entertained, after all.

.

.

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.

Adam McOmber admits he’s been an ardent fan of the macabre and horror genre since high school. His own writing reflects the exquisitely unhiemlich, “the fantastic moments when the strange breaks through our daily grind.” In a recent interview with the New School’s LIT writer Mike Gillis, McOmber talks about his passion for the mythology and the fiction like his This New and Poisonous Air and the upcoming Empyrean.

“I think that these type of stories- stories of the fantastic- reach back to mythology. Because that’s what myths are,” he said in a phone interview. “I think humans in general are drawn to these stories because they create this rupture in daily, general experience, and humans in general want that. So I think there’s a staying power in that type of fiction.” McOmber himself tends to stay away from the genre convention and tropes popular in most horror genre pieces, saying, “You don’t want to write something that is purple in a gothic way, because that’s really grating. … When I write I look for a certain kind of density. I avoid those kind of stereotypically gothic things. If I ever write and image that feels like that I’ll try to flip it or figure out another way to present it.”

Asked about the recurring images of simulacra in his work, such as the automatons in the opening story, “The Automatic Garden,”  or the wax figures of Madame Tussad’s museum in “There Are No Bodies Such as These,” McOmber admits laughingly that “Yes, my work is kind of like these little machines. … It’s like the Automatic Garden itself. It’s something I can lose myself in.”

So can we, Adam, so can we.

This New and Poisonous Air is available for purchase here.

You can read the whole review over at Newcity Lit, here.

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is one of the most extensive collaborations in American poetry. Over the course of a year, acclaimed poets G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher wrote poems back and forth, sometimes once or twice a week, sometimes five or six a day. As the collaboration deepened, a third “voice” emerged that neither poet can claim as solely their own.  In Part 5 of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep’s engaging discussion about the ircollaborative process, the pair continue their exploration of community in poetry, challenging the notion of the individual artist and reminding us of the voice that haunts every poem.

You can read earlier parts of the conversation here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Part 5: Literature & Community

G.C. Waldrep: Following up on the “you” and the speaking voice—one thing I had long been wondering, before we started working together, was why poetry had to be such a lonely enterprise, the act of composition something that takes us away from those we love. It certainly wasn’t for the Dadaists & Surrealists, and it still isn’t in other genres: musical performance, architecture, the larger visual arts with their fabrication requirements, etc. Somehow in poetry, though, it seemed to me that we’d all slipped back to the Romantic notion of the tortured soul toiling away in his or her garret, into the night. Sometimes it is like that, of course (pax Virginia Woolf). But weren’t there other possibilities? What might a poetry of community look like?

IN THE FILE OF DISCONTINUED THINGS

It looks like no one’s showing up
again. But let’s do the show anyway. The one called
Lincoln. Or Ban the Bomb.

There’s a reason for it
as there are reasons for most things. Smoke.
Chocolate. The way old paint
looks like a sunburn. The floor
of overlapping shadows
from the television
and approaching fires.

Let’s say the show is over, or everything
is over. The next show or the war show,
where the teenage male is obsessing
over girls, which we take to mean teenage males
obsess over girls. It’s late,

I’m watching television
while reading the Constitution. Which is easy. (We
the floor shine.) (In order to
order faster delivery.)

It’s winter. And snow. Whole wedding gowns
of snow. Towns under wraps
and we know this already. Hey,

let’s be the town anyway. We are free
for a limited time.

We can go to the show where no one goes.

I like the way this poem moves back and forth between the “I,” the “you,” and the “we,” and between that intimate triad and everyone else—the larger social organism in which we are implicated. And it does so tenderly, or with a tenderness I couldn’t otherwise have placed.

JG: We’re having this exchange just as I’m re-reading the Dean Gorman piece from Gulf Coast I mentioned earlier. A friend turned my attention back to it, because in it Gorman talks a bit about this ongoing romance of the Romantic: “The romantic concept of the Individual . . . will probably never go away,” he writes. It’s part of what he sees as a general skepticism a lot of people have about collaborative work. But, as you say, this isn’t the case in the other arts. Poetry seems to be more like painting in this regard. Collaboration, as I see it, and as we’ve discussed, is really just a more overt version of what we’re all doing anyway. Gorman gestures toward that, as well, when he writes that collaboration brings us to the question that have always been there: “Can something be truly singular, or is it always built from what preceded it, what already exists?”

In our case, that is specifically how we wrote the book: each of our poems was written directly from what preceded it, even if that no longer directly tracks, now that we’ve had to take many of the poems out for publication. Even so, all the parts are out there in space somewhere, in sequence. But more generally, all artists work in something akin to that way, one thing begets another. In the things one reads or views, we’re all tuning into a version of Spicer’s radio, finding out what the Martians are broadcasting today.

GC: Or the ghosts. Sometimes I think every poem is haunted. And yes, YFOTTOG is haunted—at least for us, the authors—by the poems that didn’t make it into the book, their ghost presences. There’s a great silence in between poems in any collection. The difference in this case is that we know what some of that silence is concealing.

Some of what that silence is concealing, mind you. Nobody knows what the rest of the silence is concealing. Or we think about it, for a long time, as in Keats or Donne or Oppen or Stein. (Stein used a lot of words to conceal the silence itself, inside a constant flow of language.)

The thing is, as you say, every writer, every artist is already working from other art—collaborating with ghosts. For a poet, Keats and Donne and Oppen and Stein (or Dickinson or Whitman or the Gawaine poet, substitute as you will) are all still communicating presences. Their poems are their traces.

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.

John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep continue their candid and insightful discussion about the process of writing the poems for their collaborative book Your Father on the Train of Ghosts.  Written over a year, John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep exchanged emails almost exclusively in the form of poems.  In this next part of the conversation, the two discuss the nature of address found in the poem, the use of the “You,”  the role of community in poetry, and the mysterious, haunting nature of the voice manifest in their poems.

You can read earlier parts of the conversation here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

On the You

G.C. Waldrep: I didn’t notice it much as we were writing, but as we edited the manuscript, it dawned on me that most of the poems are in the second person:  you do this, you do that.  I tend to get mystical about just who any given poem is addressing:  I wonder about the “you.”  Is it a friend, a(n unknown) reader, a lover, God?  Is it merely a pronoun without any fixed referent?  In this case, everything was even more complex because the writing voice was not exactly an “I”—it was a third voice, closer to a “we.”

YOUR NEW BIRTHDAY

You sink when you think about it. You sink
when you think about
other things, up again at night, the town slowing shifting
back and forth.

The dolls are around the doll table
having a pretend doll party.

It’s four in the morning. They’re in the window
of the only room with the lights on
in the house.

A figure in the dark around the garage,

and the different things animals can do
which make them look almost like people
for a second, until you blink.

Which is make-believe.

In the child museum it’s 4 a.m.

You wake, and all the squirrels of the city are in a circle
around your bed, watching you intently.

There’s a periodic loneliness inside this book that I’m tempted to blame on the postmodern conditions of consciousness, etc. etc.  It’s a book—the voice of the poems, the third voice that emerged from the collaborative process—that wants company, that sidles up to this “you.”

The animals weren’t quite up to meeting our needs, I’m afraid.  Nor are the dolls.

Then again, in the child museum it is always 4 a.m., isn’t it? As it is in Giacometti’s palace. Maybe Giacometti’s palace is the child museum, after all? I like that. I think I would like that.

John Gallaher: The “you” and the “we” in these poems were the ways I felt most comfortable writing. As soon as I first wrote “I,” it felt, more that it has to me in the past, rather lonely and, well, me-ish. The “you” and “we” on the other hand seemed more natural. The “you” was particularly interesting to me in the writing of these poems, because it felt very you, very much like I was saying G.C. Waldrep. I had a lot of fun with that, picturing you, G.C., as the you in these poems (in the ones you wrote as well as the ones I wrote). G.C. Waldrep on a train, on a bridge, having a birthday. G.C. Waldrep walking around town. You, G.C., became both actor and audience for these poems. I miss that. It was a way of imagining audience that was completely new to me. For years I’ve been hearing poets ask and try to answer the question of “who are you writing for,” or “who do you picture as your audience.” I had no problem with that in these poems.

Dean Gorman, in his essay “The Third Mind: American Collaborative Poetry & Its Roots,” speaks about collaborative poetry, as a genre, as “the international waters of poetry.” I find that a nice way to imagine collaboration. It belongs to everyone who’s there, equally and without flags. So, we met in international waters. Artists usually have a very strong sense of authorship. There’s a lot of “I” statements in the arts. What I’m trying to do. What I want. That’s fine and all, it just doesn’t appeal to me the way community does. This book was my trebuchet, sending me over the fence and out into international waters. It’s been difficult coming back to shore.

I never told you about that you I was seeing in our poems while we were writing. I was enjoying it too much and was worried that might make you approach to the “you” differently, but now I have. I think I mentioned that at a reading first. You were a little surprised. I enjoyed that moment as well.

GC: Well, surprise is worth something on its own terms, no? For me, part of the generative mystery of the collaboration was wondering just who this “you” was, as poem pelted into poem from either side of the e-net. Of course, this paralleled the evolution of the speaking voice, the third voice.

Another one of the beautiful things about the collaboration we haven’t mentioned here is that we had little to no meta-conversations about the poems as we wrote them. Indeed, while we were writing, we didn’t much talk at all, otherwise—in e-mails, on the telephone, in person. So the poems became their own sort of conversation. It was a strange and beautiful way to live, to have a friend, for a little while.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.