John Tranter, one of the foremost figures in Australian poetry over the last half-century, died earlier this week aged 79. Perhaps no one has done more than Tranter, as poet, editor, anthologist, publisher, critic and radio broadcaster, to place Australian poetry’s response to modernism (and postmodernism) into an international context. From his early interests in the the poetry of Rimbaud and the American avant-garde of the 1950s and 60s — whose formal experimentation became a rich source of inspiration in his own writing — to his revolutionary online magazine Jacket, Tranter seemed set to blow apart the provincial, Anglo-centric character of Australian poetry and open direct lines of communication to the rest of the world.
Described by the publisher and poet Michael Brennan as the “established agent provocateur of Australian poetry”,Tranter achieved a status in his home country similar to that of his good friend John Ashbery in the US: that of being a major poet accepted and acclaimed by both the avant-garde and the establishment. With his 22 collections, Tranter won nearly every major poetry prize in Australia. His poetry was relentlessly inventive. He seemed to live and die by the motto found in the early poem “Red Movie” (1972) that “an experiment which succeeds… is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious,” and maintained the urge to reinvent his poetry into to his later works through his embrace of technology, including a series of mistranslations of poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallamre using speech-to-text software. Tranter’s love of experimentation was matched by his mastery of form and a detached, ironic voice, distinctly Australian, that Tranter himself referred to as the “Laconic Mode.”
Born in the small country town of Cooma, Tranter grew up on a farm on the south-coast of New South Wales (in an interview with Toby Fitch, Tranter, tongue in cheek, draws a line between Rimbaud, Ashbery and himself as poets who all grew up on remote farms). Moving to Sydney in the early 60s, he studied intermittently for a decade, traveling across Europe and Asia before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Literature in 1970, the same year he was to publish his first full-length collection Parallax. Disappointed with the state of Australian poetry, and the country writ large, which he described as “suffocatingly dull and hideously authoritarian in those days”, he took a role as a publisher’s editor in Singapore after completing his degree.
On his return to his homeland in1973, Tranter became a vitalising force in Australian poetry as an editor, anthologist and radio broadcaster. He edited the two major anthologies of modern Australian poetry: The New Australian Poetry (1979) which confirmed the status of the “Generation of 68”, who, in Tranter’s own words, “rose to public notice on the crest of a wave of poetry readings, ‘underground’ magazines, and a generally expressed antagonism to the established mainstream of poetry at that time, which they saw as too conservative,” and were to change the course of Australian poetry; and The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991) co-edited with Philip Mead, which includes the entire oeuvre of the hoax-poet Ern Malley alongside works by indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty. Tranter also resurrected his journal Transit as a publishing company, publishing collections by friends including Gig Ryan, Martin Johnston and John Forbes. In 1975 he co-developed the first iteration of Books & Writing on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) radio. He would later take charge of a weekly, two-hour arts program, Radio Helicon on ABC Radio National from 1987-88 on which he interviewed a range of Australian and international poets including notable interviews with John Ashbery and John Forbes.
Tranter was early to recognise the power of publishing through the internet, and in 1997 began the international online poetry journal Jacket. His championing of Australian poets alongside internationally recognized names was instrumental in establishing contemporary Australian poetry throughout the world as a distinguished and distinguishable poetics. In 2004, Tranter established the online Australian Poetry Library which presented biographical and bibliographical information on over seventy Australian poets, as well as poems, book reviews and interviews.
Tranter’s own poetry, meanwhile, became renowned for its innovative style in which heightened disjunction and the use of surprising and irregular metaphor appeared to respond to the postmodern condition, in which we daily encounter a confluence of incoherent phenomena. 1976’s ambitious long poem “The Alphabet Murders”, in which each new stanza opens with the proceeding letter of the alphabet, begins:
“After all we have left behind
this complex of thought begins
a new movement into musical form, much as
logic turns into mathematics and automatics
turn into moonlit driveways — ‘form at the edge
of hearing’
Tranter’s increasing formal experimentation, including audacious pastiches, mistranslations and reimaginings of other poetic works, seemed to dislocate the poet almost entirely from the “I” of the poem. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald upon the occasion of the publication of 2010’s Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter compared his poetry in the light of Buneul’s quote about the ideal film having no names in it, and for the screenwriter and director to be anonymous. “In the same way medieval cathedrals give you this intense emotional experience yet you have no idea who designed them or built them, films and poems could be like that too, in a way.” The opening lines to Tranter’s poem “Having Completed My Fortieth Year” seems to confirm this outlook “Although art is, in the end, anonymous, / turning into history once it’s left the body.”
In my favorite poems of Tranter’s, however, the “I” is very much located, grounded in both a temporal and geographical space, and more often than not that space is the city of Sydney. In his verse novel The Floor of Heaven, Sydney appears almost as a character, while in “In Praise of Sandstone,” which takes the end words of Auden’s famous poem “In Praise of Limestone” and places them in a Sydney landscape, we get a portrait of the city’s topography, a short history of it’s convict past and a study of a typical workday. “Ode to Col Joye” takes its setting as a shower in Sydney, with the speaker trying to pin down which poet the day he has woken to most represents. Is it a John Forbes day? a Ken Bolton day? a John Ashbery day?
it’s the kind of day
where I notice that my Renault—
a beat-up Renault; how
Sydney, and how French!—
has the name RENAULT on its side in chrome letters—
how metonymic
that the name of the object is seen as
being part of the object to which it refers
This is the Sydney I grew up in—cosmopolitan, sardonic, colorful, confident, playful— the same features that we most often encounter in Tranter’s poetry, which, like “Ode to Col Joye”, begins in Sydney and spirals across Australia and the world, continually delighting those who happen upon it.
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Author: The Best American Poetry
