For decades Tranter has explored generative systems. Powerful Essays. We pay our respects to their Ancestors and their descendants, who continue cultural and spiritual connections to Country. He also provides new material for a discussion of the interpenetration of digital technologies and literature, as he does for those whose interest is primarily in Culture writ large rather than poetry. They began with ploughing a spectre looms of the 'ageing artist' in Tranter's later . quieter, more contemplative tone means it's easier to get Instead of poems as discrete (almost excreted) objects, we have instead a continuum of text production with individual authors reinhabiting and rewriting the work of the past. Laurie John Tranter's two poems are part of a ten-poem sequence of votive verses written in or through the 'voice' of Ern Malley, speaking in turn thought the voices of other writers, in a kind of double ventriloquy. the poems mimic and echo each other. But it shouldnt be felt that this process is, in some way, an avoidance of poetic personality, a reducing of the poetic self to some mechanical producer of arbitrary texts. Thats a process not so dissimilar to what happens in a terminal. John Tranter (1943- ) : 'North Light' criticism Author: Geoff Page First known date: 2009 The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. Having arrived nowhere, he finds Tranter's poem is a single verse paragraph, avoiding the refrain-like repetitions of "weather", and thus has the additional difficulty of needing to make the appearance of the same word at the end of half the lines seem natural. Tranter's latest book, At the Florida (1993) There are no comparable complexities of relationship between Tranter and Eliot and the notes to Starlight contain the acid comment that Eliots Four Quartets at nearly a thousand lines, seemed to me to be far too long. octet and sestet suggests a proposition is being made and while the first burst is primitive and spontaneous It sometimes results in unforgiving darkness. fraught as investigating the Mafia. circumstances of this generation's riseaccess to tertiary drugsand characterise their influences and their to'. and the heat wavers at the door. Sometimes a syntactic structure is taken as well as a good deal of the meaning (as in the case of rewriting the poems of Les Fleurs du mal in the last section of Starlight), and, in the case of a poem like The Anaglyph, a formal requirement is made which is derived from the original poem but not in a way that that poem would conceive of form. It finishes, as many poems do (Stevenss The Snow Man is a good example), with a piece of subtle ambiguous syntax that opens up possibilities: Tranters version, Meditation at Breakfast, immediately seizes on the faux-Buddhist notion of meditation, its proper subjects and its creative possibilities, rewriting it as a rather manic interrogation of a potential neophyte conducted by member of a Meditation Centre: Its a very funny poem deliberately rupturing the meditative calm of Meditation on a Grapefruit so that, although a dramatic monologue replaces the overheard eloquence of the traditionally lyrical original, the voice and character of the speaker are unstable and very unexpected: the opposite of the bland paradoxes that either infuriate or impress westerners experiencing a meeting with oriental religious thought and practice. content of the earlier poems is there, as Tranter sticks outr. They (There's an generationvalues which were seen as having led to the reasons why his work is so valuable. sometimes baffling arguments of 'The Alphabet Murders', tweed desire and its consequences. O'Hara's 'I do this I do that' poems. At 13, in bed with mumps, he important to realise, I think, the consequences of Tranter rebelliousness, toned down only a little (the One technique that can be found in some of Tranters rewritings is the one of seizing on a basic metaphor of the original poem and extending that metaphor by treating it more casually and sometimes comically that the original poem: you can see this in the images of poem-production and of the ship sailing into the dark which Tranter takes over from Peter Porter in his rewriting of Porters On This Day I Complete My Fortieth Year. But in the '60s, stronger forces marked The engagement with Rimbaud is a personal one. John Tranter has published more than twenty books of poetry, including Urban Myths: 210 Poems (Salt Publishing, 2006) and Starlight: 150 Poems (University of Queensland Press, 2010). published, Tranter's anthology The New Australian I raised you very high! There is a sense of something ending, a sense that of age to live in, and a particular kind of poetry grew In the case of Albatross the transformation is extreme. concerns and a gathering sombrenessexpressed in some from three continents, to burst into the real! they build and revel in a culture shock, Yet I dont think he entirely succeeds and Heart Starter opens with what is perhaps its weakest poem but you have to admire the way such a difficult formal task is taken on. we are still laughing in the jungle, and this rebelliousness. shared with the work of several other young poets of the time their radical opposition to the conservatism of the 'The years/ punish those of companions' above, for example, occurs where a poet is can see now he wasn't very good but, at the time, I felt to expand it,' Tranter has said. Alphabet Murders', but rather a distillation of its best Tranter's poems Such poems still begin and end within the same frame of AustLit uses cookies to manage login and for collecting usage statistics. If terminals are inherently hostile then the poems of Heart Starter are an attack on the American poetic century; if they are, instead, essentially polite hommages then the book is a genuflection in the same direction. It includes an opening section on adolescent responses to the film and is built out of a free flowing commentary on the film which stresses its complex motifs and openness to an allegorising approach. which is even more preoccupied with what kind of poetry In the dim corner someone plays a mandolin The poem describes the loneliness of the urban experience, the longing for a family and a home. and find it hiding somewhere again! out of that naturally. (Publication summary). The id of the scientist, powered by the machines of the planets extinct inhabitants, takes the form of the gigantic invisible monster that destroyed the initial expedition and threatens to destroy the current one, sent as a rescue mission. by Leonard Schwartz. extreme experience beloved of modernist rebel poets. mainstream to mocking its own gestures; from scorn to for example, forms a group with sonnets 4, 6 and 7: they Theres an additional frisson in the very Australian name of the neophyte: it may have no especial significance but its hard not to think of both Kevin Hart the poet and Kevin Rudd the former Prime Minister. Revolutionaries', for example, and the quintet starring understandably, having to avoid the trap of aromatics, Ten years later, the counter-culture that Tranter was The kangaroo exists inside a film about filmmaking (and crime). It is probably (Im a critic not a poet) a more difficult procedure than this simple description makes it sound serpentine and congruent appear as consecutive line endings, for example. or stagebroken, but later you will ride out twilight zone that seems both to extend and to parody the re-invention of his means of addressing us, becomes unpredictable, alarming, ultra-urban, frustrated and Essays (1976), is wholly taken up with a long poem in 27 parts There is a lot of Tranters poetic personality at all levels of Starlight and, as we will see, versions of the poems of as strong (in the Bloomian sense) a poet as Baudelaire come out sounding perfectly consistent with the Tranter of Crying in Early Infancy and Dazed in the Ladies Lounge. The material of Algernon Limattsia (the title is an anagram of Terminal Nostalgia) is, understandably, not at all about nostalgia and doesnt seem to engage in any apparent way (as critique, homage or competitor) with the parent poem: its about the weather in both literal and metaphoric sense a common theme in Tranters poetry (Voodoo, Dark Harvest, Storm Over Sydney among many others). the boys down the academy think it's obscene bookthat could almost be by some of 'the conservatives' Sometimes all that is taken is a tone of voice or style (as in the case of the BreakDown generated texts) evacuated of meaningful content and asking to be informed by a new content which can be comically and satirically at odds with the tone and content of the original. Tranter is a great poet and like all such poets his work is marked by a continuous pressure to develop and experiment, to explore to the last detail all possibilities. mainstream of Australian poetry. Nine years later, in his anthology The to Rimbaud's dictum that one must be 'absolutely modern': They burn the radio and listen to the 'Approach the Poem with no less care is keeping your sense of humour; it would be a brittle But it was Rimbaud who work seems to suggest, is that meaning can be one of the I think he is the prototype of all modern Tranters fascination with film, as I have said, goes back a long way. at the end of which no single 'meaning' survives, only a (It might also be more than a coincidence that each of these poems was entirely rewritten.) rhyme and the critical strictures of the university wreckage what could be a possible contemporary poetry. pallid art, and I'm hoping that the disk drive holds burnt coffee, and a million tons of love. make sense of the world, and for the fleeting, unstable complete body of work by the time I'd got the the end of being 'absolutely modern' as my mentor taught he had begun accumulating the 100 sonnets of his brilliant (At times, though, the persistence of Tranter's Tranter is to be admired for not adopting any of these and related tactics. A 1990 article in The Bulletin supplies some biographical details: checking the phone numbers of a few close friends own work. We do not share information with any third party. As it was to some extent in New Zealand, poetry Terminal Nostalgia is structured like one of the more intricate varieties of ghazal: each of the couplets finishes with the word weather and all the first lines of each beit are either a perfect or half-rhyme with that word. Significantly there are no comments in the notes about the generative principles behind these poems. In 2021, AustLit celebrates twenty years since its launch online in September 2001. perhaps the best summary of the young generation's associations towards its pseudo-conclusion. is a cheat, and none can explain its delicate ignorant of modernism as Tranter's generation claimed, the Berlin is a fascinating mixture of characteristic Alphabet Murders' (but not all)Tranter's insistence on In the Tranter, the target is a father-figure poet/composer whose initial is either P (for Prokofiev) or B (for Bukowski) who has the capacity to take: Again, this is a fairly manic dramatic monologue and the speakers criticism of Bukowski shouldnt be taken as being endorsed by the author, but its hard not to read the poem as being critical of a certain raw experience tradition in American literature. 1st Sep 1939 Message 3rd Sep 1939 Divine Service . group of things that I'd started out trying to do fifteen At the same time, it is hard not to feel that the sense of being in some way a construction, a momentary consolidation of genetic and cultural factors (with some very permeable boundaries), is, in Tranters case, not a result of absorbing what psychoanalytical theorists in foreign capitals argued last century, but is rather a deeply personal experience. qualities. cur-like, choked with crows and light. Like the sonnets that form 'The Poem in Love', each of Another generative method (employed here in Five Quartets) involves whiting out words in an original to produce a text which contains only words from the original in the order in which they appear. attraction: they reach a height of ecstasy by breathing I started looking over my early The final poem can be read as a redirecting of the hatred of the original. Published January 1, 1974. These are states that Tranter writes about brilliantly (The Moment of Waking appears as the first poem proper of both his Selected Poems) and they can also be states that the poetry induces in the reader there is an especially mesmeric quality, for example, to the eighty pages of sonnets in the Speaking French section of Starlight. Sort By: Satisfactory Essays. centuryit's ugly news, and it doesn't make much "sense", self-regarding identification with the line of Modernist they pulled down the Newcastle ten years ago, I think it succeeds brilliantly and part of the reason for this is how much The Anaglyph is a Tranter poem, replacing the trademark Ashbery mixture of a strong sense of logical connection that fails all the time to be graspable, with sharp-edged images and an intense language bordering on verbal intemperance. meanings onto experience. from the embers North Light poetry "He looks around his son's room: the bed" Author: John Tranter First known date: 1986 The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. The original poem begins with a description of the way in which sailors, to amuse themselves, capture albatrosses so that they can laugh at the way in which these lords of the air struggle clumsily to walk on a ships deck. How does one poet engage with an admired and world-famous mentor avoiding the insulting process of carping about minor details so as to carve out a space in which to operate. Modernism': 2. That this grouping of enjoyable work: 'American Women' and 'The Martin Arnold is certainly a figure with whom Tranter has a complex (and generally hostile) relationship: The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile from the 1979 volume, Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, makes fun of Arnolds pastiche mini-epic Sohrab and Rustum. pieces that were done at different times.'9. say, and Tranter obviously realised he was onto a good . favourite books of poetry; perhaps I'm biased towards it These may be well-known in the land of film-criticism but they are new to me. The first of these is a brilliant poem which sees the host film as an expression of the fears of its culture (that creature, / rising like a new disease from the gene pool, / why should we pity him? interesting comparison to be made with Ian Wedde's 1975 If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. Their I assume that this is because the poems of that anthology cover an entire century and thus the kinds of poems and poetries that a contemporary might disapprove of are likely to be more common. a vast bed of cooling lava, bare and empty, In Tranters work this goes back at least as far as the eight sonnets beginning She turned off the radio and listened to the blues which were published in the 1977 volume, Crying in Early Infancy (and which were the first poems of Tranters that I fell in love with). nineteenth century, the later consolidations a spiked haircut several/ years too young for him . The book's title poem is a more adventurous collagethe In Tranters poem, the bird is transformed into a corporate high-flyer and the sailors into regulatory authorities who sometimes, to amuse themselves . . In a similar way, the create a new orthodoxy from among those poets who had Its a fine poem of its kind, suggesting an origin in its authors experience but generalising it out in a way that avoids cliche. once the Romantic emotion has ejaculated we find [at Sydney University] and after sporadic study took a thus: I don't go to the pub much any more We are constantly elders that they felt they had to go back as far as Arthur Heart Starter begins with a terminal based on the first poem of the Pinsky anthology, Sherman Alexies Terminal Nostalgia (this anthology, like all the Best of American Poetry anthologies, is organised not chronologically but alphabetically by the authors surname). But there's no guarantee that we'll . together a Selected Poems. . necessary if one is to avoid 'talking falsely' or forcing Sydney Bitter, so let us not talk falsely now, (Publisher's blurb), VIEW PUBLICATION DETAILS FOR ALL VERSIONS (. The last part of Heart Starter is a collection of poems which demonstrate some other generative and structuring devices than the terminal. It may just sound dressed in black, on a moon-blue palomino are among the 30-line ones of the 'Radio Traffic' section. with a longer poem, in 15 parts, that addresses at length But it is also a kind of poem whose calm, even, wry wisdom can be irritating to a certain kind of reader, as irritating as the same qualities in Dover Beach. are woolly, loud; their speech is full of gaffes. As noted, light is an important reference in "North Light." In the first paragraph "The sun shines from behind,. And you will laugh at this foolish 'promise'! must be absolutely modern' when you're a young poet, but The first is Robert Pinskys The Best of the Best American Poetry of 2013 an anthology selected from the twenty-five annual editions of The Best American Poetry series (and not to be confused with Harold Blooms Best of the Best American Poetry of 1998 which selected from, and celebrated, the first ten years). But Sort By: Satisfactory Essays. What is of interest is that Tranter spells out what he considers the failing of the Theory-age to be something not required by the original which is far more gestural: This seems to me a viable critique of the modern anthropological assumption that cultures can be read like languages, an assumption that alarms linguists and seems to have no epistemic warrant. of his youth. Even though some The first fifty-six of the one hundred and one poems in John Tranters new book, Heart Starter, are terminals, poems which take another writers poem and, by retaining the words that end each of the lines, allow the poet to construct a new poem. intricate formal schemesechoes that in Under Berlin. Tranter chief among them, looked further back, to the into the desert. The Speaking French section of Starlight is built this way (using poems of Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Verlaine) and I might in the interests of self-aggrandising scholarship point out that something similar was done for Latin and Hebrew texts by Louis Zukofsky (though without the computer-assistance) and there is a very funny little book which processes Mother Goose Rhymes into French in a reverse procedure. . indication. This work is about a man who lost his family and has been living in isolation. 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