John Tranter is reading tonight at Kelly Writers House at 6:00 PM here in Philadelphia & I wonder just how large a crowd will turn up. The major variable, of course, has to do with whether or not anybody at Penn is teaching Tranter’s work this term. Which in turn suggests that somebody at Penn would be teaching Australian poetry . . . the odds on that are pretty slim, even given that the school probably has one of the best faculties in the country if poetry is what you want to study, right up there with the B schools (Buffalo, Brown, Bard), Naropa, Maine, Iowa, Temple or UC San Diego.

 

The reality is that, even in this age of the web, English language poetry is still largely a series of national literary traditions that don’t always mesh, for reasons that are linguistic, cultural, historical and political. This is of course changing – the web has a lot to do with that. And John Tranter has a lot to do with that, perhaps more than any other individual poet. Jacket, the e-zine that Tranter has been editing since 1997, has been – and remains – the very best example of the web’s potential for literature, bringing together as it does the mostly post-avant literary traditions of Australia, the U.S. & the U.K. Clean & consistent in its design, comprehensive in its presentation of back numbers, forward-thinking in its approach of building each issue online¹, deftly combining poetry with critique & memoir, there isn’t one editorial position that Tranter has taken I can find fault with. If anything, he sets the standard by which I judge my own efforts in this rather different form here.

 

It’s not surprising, therefore, to find that Tranter is the co-editor of the best anthology of Australian poetry I know, The Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry, on which he collaborated with Philip Mead & which came out a decade back. Beginning with Kenneth Slessor & A.D. Hope, the book contains over 80 poets born between 1901 (Slessor) & 1963 (John Kinsella), and even includes Ern Malley, the fictitious poet whose spoof of modernism’s intelligibility had a lasting impact down under. I’m sure that someone closer to the scene than might argue as to which poets were included, or to suggest that the relatively few aboriginal authors included is too few or whatever, but for somebody operating at a distance like myself, the volume is comprehensive, lacking only introductory paragraphs for each poet to add a little context.

 

But if Tranter-the-editor is how he most well known in the United States, it’s just one of his many persona in Australia. There is Tranter the critic, known as the leading Ashbery scholar in the southern hemisphere. And, even more, there is Tranter the poet, a leader on the scene in Australia now for nearly four decades. Trying to peg Tranter’s position in Australia from this vantage is impossible, but as near as I can tell, he occupies a space somewhere between those occupied on our shores by Charles Bernstein, say, and Robert Creeley. Or, if you consider Tranter’s work with the computer text generation program Brekdown, possibly a role akin to Steve McCaffery’s in Canada. As with any of the above, you can also find scathing, almost frothing negative reviews of various works of his from Australian School-of-Quietude types if you Google about the web a little. He has, it would appear, disparaged the sonnet (a favorite form with him) & ravaged the literature, taking no prisoners.

 

To an American ear (I have two), Tranter’s interest in Ashbery might prove the easiest road into his own verse. For one thing, Tranter has a similar sense of humor in his work: dry, eye-rolling, over-the-top, wry aspects that might seem at odds with one another until you actually see them in practice. Dig “Sonnet: Lullaby”:

 

I'm not jealous of your pet executives -
their coma therapy, their new guitars.
The latest boyfriend's hardly seventeen,
isn't that what the tabloids say?
In the cheap hotel, the heaps of magazines -
You Can't Go Back to Woop Woop, sobs
the big print. And the speed jerking
up the spinal column to its spasm above.
Now the sea heaps itself on the pillow
with its wacky promises, and you're floating
through the ceiling again. Tell sex to go
back to the playpen where it came from. Your
future's waiting: suburbia loud with radios,
telling you to wake up now, and do the shopping!

 

Harder to hear, because the dialect & enunciation really are different, continent to continent, are Tranter’s more subtle (or at least less flashy) works – it’s really those that I hope to hear at Writers House. An example might be “Elegy”:

in memoriam Martin Johnston, 1947-90

Not the smoke from the truck driver’s cigarette
wreathed with gold by the early morning sun,
a delicate arabesque of light and shade —
                he’s unloading flagons of moselle,
                hock, white burgundy and claret
                in the driveway of the Toxteth Hotel —
 
Not the scent of meat hissing on the grill
at the Balkan — the tables are filling up —
early one evening somewhere in the seventies
as the shops along Oxford Street come alight,
buses winding through the traffic, and
                Nicholas puts up the Mickey Mouse poster
                in the window of Exiles Bookshop
                advertising a poetry reading —
 
Not the sound of his wife’s voice — ‘Oh,
put out your bloody cigarette
and stop snoring!’ — as she
                tucks the blanket in — late winter,
                the cat curled at the foot of the bed —
 
Not a tricky ploy with a bishop in the final moves
of a game that seems to have fallen into a pattern
remarkably similar to Botvinnik’s closing tactics
in the 1949 Russian Chess Championship — don’t you
                think? — the party still going at 4 a.m.,
                an old Miles Davis record on the gramophone,
                the ashtray spilling over — your move —

Not the pop! as the cork
comes out of a bottle of cold retsina —
                Malamatina brand, the green and yellow label
                picturing a little man drinking
                from a tilted glass, the rays of sunlight
                blazing down from a Mediterranean sky —
 
None of these things can now delight
Martin Johnston, his journey at last
written out in full, Sydney to Sydney, via
                Greece, love, alcohol
                and the art of poetry.

Might be, I say, because even Tranter’s least flashy work can dazzle the mind. So Tranter’s presence at Kelly Writers House today represents the peak of its programming this term – something an American audience rarely gets to hear & see, up close & personal. I’ll be curious to see just who shows up.

 

 

 

 

¹ The current issue, for example, is number 26, yet you can see the gradual composition & construction issues 27 through 30 currently on the web, with 27 close to completion & 30 barely sketched out at all.