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 [Your Father on the Train of Ghosts] 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.”

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallaher,
_Your Father on the Train of Ghosts_
BOA EDITIONS