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:	9781934414774
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	05/17/2011
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	577 KB

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 University of 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 University and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets. He also serves as Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Automated Town 2
Advice to Passengers 3
Your New Birthday 4
The Baby Catalogues 5
From Which Mortar Cities Rise 6
The Anodynes 7
The Archaeologists 8
Anniversaries of Bad Things 9
The House Rhapsody 10
Elegy for the Manhattan Project 11
Trade Deficit 12
Your Lover, Later 13
Elemental Picture of Boats in the Distance 14
Elegy for the Most People 15
Space to the West 17
Outside the Elevator Museum 18
A Short History of Friendship 19
In the File of Discontinued Things 20
Gun Control in the Occupation 21
Cars Moving at Reasonable Speeds 23
Domestic Light 24
The City Experiment 26
Your Father on the Train of Ghosts 27
Daily Life in Classical Antiquity 29
All Trains Leaving Penn Station Are Ghost Trains 30
The Circus of Probable Sighs 31
The Bridge at Rest 33
Error as Beauty 34
University Park 35
Meditation on Subjects 36
Red Shift 37
The Frackville Angel 39
Landscape with Missing Elements
40
Busman’s Holiday 41
The History of Entanglements 42
Elegy for Rosa Parks 43
The World Is Empty&a Splash of Salts 44
Candling the Bodies 45
Escape Strategies 46
The Great Migrations 47
Your Father at the Museum 48
The Sherpas of Canada 49
You Need Not Be Present To Win
51
At the Marina 52
And As They Waited in Their Baskets on the Hillsides It Began To Rain 53
My Father in Other Places 54
Movie Scene for Your Father on the Train of Ghosts 55
On the Performativity of Grief as Ecstatic Culture 56
Elegy for Henrietta Lacks 57
The Overgrown War 59
The Birthday Hand 60
External Sonata 61
Don’t Wear Our Your Welcome 62
Winter Acknowledgments
63
The Solitary Death of the Woolworth Building 64
The Night Autopsy 66
Making Love in the Balloon Maze
67
In the Later Measures 69
The Vanishing Days 70
Scandinavian Skies 71
On Your Smooth Ride 72
Maybe It Has Nothing To Do With You 73
The Radio Inside Your Health Plan Is Sleeping 74
As Mastery Declines into Altitude&Forgiveness 75
Flight of the Demolition Factory 76
Aromatherapy in the Age of New Form 77
Steps to Remove Limitations 79
Everything You Know That Isn’t True 80
Can’t You Sit Still For Once 81
Different From What You Bargained For 82
The Names of the Planets,&Heavy Water
83
The Carnegie System 84
Box with Noise Elements
85
Halls of Fame II 86
After the War, the Orchards 87
How Are Things in Glocca Morra
88
Ideal Boating Conditions 89
You’ll Get Nothing More from Me Today, She Said
90
Pharaoh’s Daughter (Chagall Motion Study) 91
Autoreply: Nuncio 92
Unheimlich Diorama 94
Apology re: The Second Viennese School 95
Your Father Seen From Space 96
Trenton Aubade 97
The Red Matter 98
Ode to Lyndon Baines Johnson 99
Elegy for the Developing Story 101
Would You Like To Try One of Our Specials 102
Limited Time Offer 103
Cedar Rapids Eclogue 104
Another Day at the Festival 105
Ethel&Myrtle Try To Avoid How Emotional They Get 106
Cesarean Selection 107
Fall in Istanbul 109
On a Raft, Relaxing into the West, Where We Are 110
Production Still 112
Your Mutual Trappist 113
I’ll Decorate My House with You 115
If I Die Before I Wake 116
Your Hands as the Third Law of Motion 117
The Other Palace 118
Stolen Crutch, Wrapped in Yarn 119
Your Reply Is Necessary 121
Because It’s Better Not To Know
122
Your Costume Drama Is Falling 123
Changes in Your Flight Plan 124
Of Certain Small, Valuable Kitchen Appliances 127
Baptism of Signs 128
A False Sense of Well-Being 129
A Short History of Kiki Smith 130
Parable of the Door 131
Nullstellensatz 132
I’ve Been Hoping To Catch You at Home 133
The Little Crisis in Summer 134
The Monkey Cages in Winter 135
This Is the Part Where You Whistle 136
Love Is Everywhere 137
Thousand-Year Reign 138
One Hundred and One Best Worlds
139
Having a Sense of Purpose 140
Eskimo in the Sahara 141
Parable of the Anorak in the Rain 142
In Praise of Hard Candy 143
This Is a Wolf with Many Sharp Teeth 144
On Imperialism, Part II 145
Single-Celled Organism 146
Sonata of Excess 147
Praise Impromptu 148
On the Fall of Constantinople 149
The Tourist 150
Approaching Helpfulness
151
Portrait While You Wait 152
On Liberalism 153
The Dream of Egypt 154
On the Death of Andrew Wyeth 155
Pain Can Warn Us of Danger 156
Welcome to the Next Project 157
After Music 158

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