Your Father on the Train of Ghosts

by John Gallaher, G.C. Waldrep

Overview

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.

The poems of Your Father on the Train of Ghosts read as lyric snapshots of a culture we are all too familiar with, even as it slips from us: malls and supermarkets, museums and parades, toxic waste and cheesecakes, ghosts and fire, fathers and sons. Ultimately, these fables and confessions constitute a sort of gentle apocalypse, a user-friendly self-help manual for the end of time.

G.C. Waldrep is author of Goldbeater's Skin (2003 Colorado Prize for poetry), Disclamor, and Archicembalo (2008 Dorset Prize). He has won awards from the Poetry Society of America and Academy of American Poets, fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony; and an NEA fellowship. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and teaches at Bucknell University.

John Gallaher is author of Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls, The Little Book of Guesses (Levis Poetry Prize), and Map of the Folded World. His poetry has been included in The Best American Poetry series and numerous journals and anthologies. He co-edits The Laurel Review, GreenTower Press, and the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics. He teaches at Northwest Missouri State University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781934414484
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/17/2011
Series:	American Poets Continuum , #126
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

John Gallaher: John Gallaher is the author of the books of poetry, Gentlemen in Turbans, Ladies in Cauls (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001), The Little Book of Guesses, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books, and Map of the Folded World (The Universityof Akron Press), as well as the free online chapbook, Guidebook (Blue Hour Press). His poetry has been included in a volume of The Best American Poetry series, and has been chosen by Rae Armantrout for the Boston Review poetry contest. He is co-editor of The Laurel Review and GreenTower Press, as well as, with Mary Biddinger, the Akron Series of Contemporary Poetics.

G.C. Waldrep: G.C. Waldrep is the author of three previous full-length collections of poems, Goldbeater’s Skin (winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize), Disclamor (BOA, 2007) and Archicembalo (winner of the 2008 Dorset Prize), as well as three chapbooks, most recently “St. Laszlo Hotel” (Projective Industries, 2010). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Tin House, as well as in Best American Poetry 2010. His work has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, the Campbell Corner Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, as well as a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He has held fellowships at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. He was a 2007 Literature Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts. Waldrep earned a Ph.D. in American history from Duke Universityand an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell Universityand directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. He also serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review.

Table of Contents

I

Automated Town 13

The Baby Catalogues 15

The House Rhapsody 17

Your New Birthday 19

From Which Mortar Cities Rise 20

The Anodynes 22

The Archaeologists 23

Anniversaries of Bad Things 25

Advice to Passengers 27

Elegy for the Manhattan Project 28

Trade Deficit 29

Your Lover, Later 30

Elemental Picture of Boats in the Distance 32

Elegy for the Most People 33

Space to the West 35

Outside the Elevator Museum 37

A Short History of Friendship 38

In the File of Discontinued Things 40

Gun Control in the Occupation 41

Cars Moving at Reasonable Speeds 43

Domestic Light 45

The City Experiment 47

Your Father on the Train of Ghosts 49

Daily Life in Classical Antiquity 51

The Circus of Probable Sighs 53

All Trains Leaving Penn Station Are Ghost Trains 55

The Bridge at Rest 56

Error as Beauty 58

University Park 60

Meditation on Subjects 62

On Your Smooth Ride 64

The Frackville Angel 65

Busman's Holiday 67

The History of Entanglements 69

Elegy for Rosa Parks 70

The World Is Empty & a Splash of Salts 72

Candling the Bodies 74

Escape Strategies 76

The Great Migrations 77

Your Father Calling from the Museum 79

The Sherpas of Canada 81

You Need Not Be Present to Win 83

And As They Waited in Their Baskets on the Hillsides It Began to Rain 85

My Father in Other Places 86

On the Performativity of Grief as Ecstatic Culture 87

Elegy for Henrietta Lacks 88

The Overgrown War 90

The Birthday Hand 92

The Tourist 94

Don't Wear Out Your Welcome 95

Winter Acknowledgments 96

The Solitary Death of the Woolworth Building 97

The Night Autopsy 99

Making Love in the Balloon Maze 100

In the Later Measures 102

Scandinavian Skies 103

Landscape with Missing Elements 105

Maybe It Has Nothing To Do with You 106

The Radio Inside Your Health Plan Is Sleeping 107

As Mastery Declines into Altitude and Forgiveness 109

Flight of the Demolition Factory 111

Aromatherapy in the Age of New Form 113

Everything You Know That Isn't True 115

II

Ideal Boating Conditions 119

Pharaoh's Daughter (Chagall Motion Study) 121

You'll Get Nothing More from Me Today, She Said 123

Apology re: The Second Viennese School 125

Trenton Aubade 127

Your Father Seen from Space 129

Ode to Lyndon Baines Johnson 131

Elegy for the Developing Story 133

Would You Like to Try One of Our Specials 134

Limited Time Offer 136

Can't You Sit Still for Once 138

Different from What You Bargained For 139

The Carnegie System 140

Box with Noise Elements 141

Halls of Fame II 142

How Are Things in Glocca Morra 143

After the War, the Orchards 144

Cedar Rapids Eclogue 145

Another Day at the Festival 147

Ethel & Myrtle Try to Avoid How Emotional They Get 149

Cesarean Selection 150

Fall in Istanbul 152

On a Raft, Relaxing into the West, Where We Are 153

Production Still from Adam-l2 156

Your Mutual Trappist 157

I'll Decorate My House with You 159

The Apple in Chrome 161

If I Die Before I Wake 162

Your Hands as the Third Law of Motion 164

The Other Palace 166

Stolen Crutch, Wrapped in Yarn 168

Your Reply Is Necessary 170

Because It's Better Not to Know 172

Your Costume Drama Is Falling 173

Of Certain Small, Valuable Kitchen Appliances 174

Baptism of Signs 175

The Welcome Chamber 181

A False Sense of Well-Being 179

A Short History of Kiki Smith 180

Parable of the Door 184

Nullstellensatz 184

The Little Crisis in Summer 186

The Monkey Cages in Winter 187

This Is the Part Where You Whistle 189

Love Is Everywhere 190

Thousand-Year Reign 191

One Hundred & One Best Worlds 193

Having a Sense of Purpose 194

The Sahara as Anecdote 196

Parable of the Anorak in the Rain 197

In Praise of Hard Candy 199

This Is a Wolf with Many Sharp Teeth 200

Single-Celled Organism 201

Praise Impromptu 203

On the Fall of Constantinople 204

External Sonata 206

Portrait While You Wait 207

On Liberalism 209

The Dream of Egypt 211

Pain Can Warn Us of Danger 213

On the Death of Andrew Wyeth 214

Welcome to the Next Project 219

After Music 220

Acknowledgments 222

About the Authors 225

Colophon 230

Editorial Reviews

This ample and sometimes witty collaboration between up-and-coming poet Waldrep (Archicembalo) and up-and-coming poet, critic and blogger Gallaher (Map of the Folded World) could get attention for its unusual methods: over a year of incessant e-mails, the pair came up jointly with each of 200+ poems, some of whose titles would stand out in any collection: "The Radio Inside Your Health Plan Is Sleeping," "The Sahara as Anecdote," "Ethel and Myrtle Try to Avoid How Emotional They Get." But if the titles convey novelty and excitement, the world-weary, slippery poems may not: Gallaher and Waldrep keep returning to figures of sad confusion: "All the fathers/ of Indiana, for reasons unknown,/ are falling... The fathers of Indiana/ are so modern/ they haven't happened yet." With their estranged speakers, fluid situations, and shifting pronouns, many pages come very close to the postmodern comic techniques of John Ashbery in the 1970s, or to James Tate's more recent books. "It makes it just like playing a game," one poem says, "pretending/ these new ideas are old ones/ or perhaps the old ones are new, depending/ on our current relationship/ to this clutter no one can remember accruing." Many of these poems rise above pastiche to shine in their own evening light. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"This is not a typical collaboration. It is not a book of exquisite corpse poems or turn–based Mad Libs. It is also not a G.C. Waldrep or a John Gallaher book; rather, a hybrid speaker emerges wearing Waldrep's hat and Gallaher's sneakers."
— Sycamore Review

"This ample and sometimes witty collaboration between up–and–coming poet Waldrep and up–and–coming poet, critic, and blogger Gallaher could get attention for its unusual methods."
— Publishers Weekly

"Your Father on the Train of Ghosts may be the first email renga, but it probably won't be the last. The co-authors inhabit '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 Ashbery

“Your Father on the Train of Ghosts is an extensive, joint undertaking developed over the period of a year from an email correspondence between two of the finest younger American poets writing today…what is more interesting than charting their differences is seeing these two poets lose their individual voices as the boundaries between them fracture, widening into yet another distinct voice—a third voice, dissimilar from either of their own, which operates like the ghosts suggested by the title; a voice that is as profound as it is endearing, as familiar as it is confiding.”
— Diagram 12.2

From the Publisher