Word has just reached us that John Tranter, the brilliant poet and editor, died on April 21, just eight days shy of his 80th birthday. We will be running a tribute to John Tranter and posting some of his poems in the coming days. For now, let us let Thomas Moody introduce American readers to Australia’s leading poet and literary editor. Part one of Moody’s essay is below; click here for part II, which we posted on September 1, 2021
— David Lehman
An Introduction to John Tranter [April 29, 1943 – April 21, 2023] (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]
The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an “international phenomenon”.
In the course of his more than twenty collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, “Red Movie,” that “an experiment which succeeds… is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious.” Tranter’s poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he’s hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he’s employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a “larrikinism” that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously.
The poem I’d like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter’s oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. “After Hölderlin” is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter’s too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter’s poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.
After Hölderlin
When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.
As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre’s satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.
You characters caught up in your emotions
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.
I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn’t let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone,
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.
Posted by Thomas Moody on August 04, 2021 at 10:45 AM in Australia | Permalink
Comments
Thank you, TM, for this column on the “international phenomenon” that is John Tranter. I love the poem — perhaps the more so because, for me as for the two Johns referenced (Ashbery and Tranter), Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry is and has long been an inspiration. Looking forward, I am, to more Tranter — and more Moody.
Posted by: David Lehman | August 05, 2021 at 12:24 AM
How good to be reminded of Tranter’s excellent poetry which doesn’t get seen much here in the US.
Posted by: Mark Pawlak | August 21, 2021 at 08:59 AM
From the archive; first posted August 4, 2021
See also
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/an-introduction-to-john-tranter-part-1-by-thomas-moody-1.html
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Author: The Best American Poetry
