AUSTRALIAN POETS AT WORK SERIES 1
John Tranter
Selected by Coral Hull
[Above] Photo of John Tranter by John Tranter, 1987.
CH: What book of your own is your favorite and why?
JT: Heart Print, published recently (October 2001) by Salt Publishing in Cambridge England. It's my latest book, and my latest book, whatever that happens to be, is always my favorite. Once a book is published, you can't improve it any more, and the longer you think about it, the more things you see that could have been done better. So you look forward to your next book, which will be perfect; and when that one's published, after a while you look forward to the one after that.
Heart Print contains about fifty pages of new work and about the same amount of older poems that haven't yet been published in Britain. For the first thirty years of my writing life I published in Australia and found it impossible to interest a British publisher in taking my work, so there's quite a backlog of poems that have seen print south of the equator but not elsewhere.
I'm not quite sure how the older work sits alongside the new writing. It will be interesting to see the reviews. Sometimes you can learn things from reviews; sometimes not. It depends on how intelligent the reviewer is. And let's face it - if you have the brain of an Einstein, why would you spend your life reviewing slim volumes of verse for peanuts?
I'll be living in England for six months (I have a residency at Cambridge University until late March 2002) engaging with the British poetry world. Naturally I hope that people there like the book. It has a very Australian feel, to me - there's a long prose-poem about Bondi Beach, for example, which is in fact in the form of a superhypermetrical sestina. That might put the English off, or then again they may like the 'colonial exoticism' of Australian beach culture.
CH: What did you want to be when you grew up?
JT: My father, for complicated reasons of his own (to do with his relationship with his own father), wanted me to be a farmer. I grew up on a farm. I found it really boring. I had an uncle who had been an Air Force navigator in World War Two (he died in Borneo) and perhaps that influenced me, because when I was eleven or twelve I wanted to be a Fleet Air Arm pilot. Then again, perhaps it was the Biggles books I was reading at the time, fictional boys' stories about a plucky British airman.
Then I wanted to be a Buddhist monk, then I wanted to be a painter. I didn't particularly want to be a poet until later, and in some ways that was a reluctant acceptance of what I seemed to do better than other things which I should have preferred to do, given the talent and the appropriate psychological attitude. Right now I'm a company director, and that's a bit of a surprise, career-wise.
CH: What are your favourite websites?
JT: I like to check out the weather, that's one thing, so I have a few weather sites I go to from day to day. And I find news about developments in computer hardware and software interesting, so I often check out CNET's site at http://www.news.com/ and Byte magazine at http://www.byte.com/.
For cultural news I go to Arts and Letters Daily, at http://www.aldaily.com/. The poetry sites I check out are the Electronic Poetry Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo, at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/archives/poetics.html, and Gary Sullivan's vast collection of news, interviews and links at http://home.jps.net/~nada.
CH: What kind of working environment best suites you?
JT: A quiet room with a view of foliage, a desk with a cup of coffee and a good fountain pen and some paper, and the presence of my full-time unpaid typist, filing clerk and office assistant, also known as my computer, which contains everything I've written since 1984 when I got my first machine. I also like listening to music, especially mellow jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, but not when I'm writing, because if there's something playing, I have to listen, and it distracts me.
CH: What is your most memorable childhood incident?
JT: The first journey I can remember happened when I was about four, a car trip from the Southern Highlands (where I was born) to a town on the coast, where I was to spend most of my youth. On that journey, late at night, on a dirt road in the bush near the coastal village of Dalmeny, the car door accidentally opened and I fell out - I'd been asleep in my mother's arms - bounced off the gravel, through the blackberries and down into a gully. I can still remember getting up, my head wet with blood, and watching the tail-light of the car disappear around a corner in the road. (It was a ten-year-old 1939 Chev coupe - one tail-light). It's very dark in the bush at night. It took them a moment or two to realise what had happened, and stop the car. For those few endless seconds it felt very lonely there in the dark.
CH: What is your favourite animal and why?
JT: Currently, my Manchester Terrier dog Tiger. He's brave and loyal, and he thinks I'm wonderful - he doesn't realise how stupid I am.
CH: When did you first fall in love?
JT: Too long ago.
CH: Name an incident that has astonished you?
JT: The night early in November 1875 when the young French poet Arthur Rimbaud burned all his poems in a bonfire.
| |
Epitaphs
It seems so long ago - tell me, did you bring your family
to our marriage of convenience and regret? I remember
your hearty cousins fresh from the Home Counties, so
pleased with their good selves, ready to chance an arm,
their knack with spoon and needle an astonishment.
Didn't you find time for a quick shot of something
with the blokes? That one with a noticeable tic, that other
nodding and leaning on a stick, their brave future
shouted on the back of a toilet door?
I admit the first funeral was a fright, like
losing a finger in a kitchen appliance. As the clods
were shovelled in, a last drum solo thudding on the lid,
I thought I spied at the back of the straggling rabble
your old mates peering anxiously about. Could they
score, in this dismal field with thistles looking on?
Perhaps a snort behind the brick pissoir . . .
at the wake, propped up beside the urn,
their dopey equanimity was like an insult.
And then the hard slog, the mirror
suddenly an enemy with cruel things to say,
the slope steeper now, the promotions, when they came
at last, agog with thunder. When your father's
daughter graduated from the school of hard knocks,
tell me, did you ask your trembling addicts?
And did they come, shambling? And remember
the party for the famous writer, gallons of grog,
tubs of meat and garlic? Oh what a throng:
magnates and turds, princesses and prostitutes
in a storm of money, and howls from the microphone.
Of course you brought your mewling, puking pals,
indeed, we had to hark and listen to them
barking in the lavatory like rottweilers, then
donating their vomit.
And then another coffin - of course,
there had to be, it's only logical - and so again they lurk
and dawdle out the back, your dirty dozen, your disciples
imprisoned in their shabby discipline: thong, candle,
ecstasy.
No parson so tied to his parish, no
bookkeeper so enslaved to ranks of numerals
as they to their feeble creed, as you to your bookish
memorials.
Now dusk gathers and buses
trundle back to their depots, a whining machine
hosing down the gutters: you can hear the century
grinding towards midnight and the stroke of the clock.
Do invite your bony junkies, sheepish and shivering;
they will haunt the lawns, frail now, drooling,
their handshakes clammy, weeping for what's been lost
and stroking you with their spidery hands, one on
crutches, one on his knees, the others shaking,
grinding their teeth and rehearsing your epitaphs.
Backyard
The God of Smoke listens idly in the heat
to the barbecue sausages
speaking the language of rain deceitfully
as their fat dances.
Azure, hazed, the huge drifting sky shelters
its threatening weather.
A screen door slams, and the kids come tumbling
out of their arguments,
and the barrage of shouting begins, concerning
young Sandra and Scott
and the broken badminton racquet and net
and the burning meat.
Is that a fifties home movie, or the real
thing? Heavens, how
a child and a beach ball in natural colour
can break your heart.
And the brown dog worries the khaki grass
to stop it from growing
in place of his worship, the burying bone.
The bone that stinks.
Turn now to the God of this tattered arena
watching over the rites of passage -
marriage, separation; adolescence
and troubled maturity:
having served under that bright sky you may look up
but don't ask too much:
some cold beer, a few old friends in the afternoon,
a Southerly Buster at dusk.
Voodoo
From his rushing-away, from his
ever-receding throne, under a rainy
canopy of trees and scraps of cloud
that topple back, shrink and disappear,
embalmed behind his rear window in a nest of
crushed velvet plush, the flash wog's nodding dog
blinks out his witless approval to the vehicles
that shadow him forever.
His twin the dipping bird sips and sips,
tilts back, cools off, dries out,
dries out utterly, totters weakly
on the lip of philosophy
then dips again.
These two critics teach us how to live,
rehearsing the gap between the no-no
and the drink-again. Their motto? Every day
I will get better at embroidering the lingo
of the tongue-tied doctors of letters; every night,
in the lack of light, I will get better
and better at the negative virtues, telling
girls to piss off, who needs them, swimming off the edge of the rock
ledge into the plunging broth of deeper waters,
soaring up to the stratosphere, bothering the angels
and yarning with God. My left hand does it,
my right hand tells me that it's right.
In the pre-dawn rack and bash of winter peak hour
traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge you notice them
hefted up over the city like ju-ju dolls
in the trance of a terrible gift. You note
the man with gauntlets and the goggled girl
on motorbikes, the nurses' giggles
in the fogged-up Mini Moke, an ambulance weaving
and howling in the rear-view mirror, the tablets
rattling in the Emergency Bucket, the icy rain
furious and seething on the road, and Noddy
and his loopy brother brooding on it all
for our sake, so that we can see it whole.
The Green Buick
'You remained for me a green Buick of sighs, o Gladstone!'
- Frank O'Hara, 'Second Avenue'
I'm off, he said. He shrugged on a soft dark
overcoat, and wrapped a check scarf around his neck.
He stuffed his sighs into the Buick
ignoring the way the late afternoon cloud-light
glittered along the strips of chrome and gold trim.
A few spots of rain glistened on the metallic
lemon-green paint shine but somehow not on the
actual paint. What is it with the New Yorker, he said,
as he heaved his old suitcase into the back seat -
he had the white canvas top down,
the car was full of junk - that the writing
has to agree with the faux-naïf cover art,
as well as the advertisements for English raincoats
and cruises to the Bahamas? You'd think
one humiliation would be enough! Look at it,
he said. He looked around for the last time.
We're talking New York circa 1960,
the Apple just beginning to go
bad at the core. As for the San Fran-fucking-
Cisco Renaissance, he grunted,
the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit -
he thumped the flank of the car with his hand,
and it was like jolting a slide projector:
in his brain a magazine clunked to the right, then
slithered left, and dropped a fresh splash of colour
in the slot - he could see the Buick already swaying
over the wooden planks above the swollen river
and then down the track to his childhood home -
ah, the blue gloom under the trees, he said,
the neon burning outside the motel
in a halo of rain sparks - ecstasy!
Acknowledgments: London Review of Books (UK), Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), New American Writing (USA), Times Literary Supplement (UK), The Australian (Australia). |
About the Poet John Tranter
|
John Tranter is a leading modern poet. He spent his youth on a farm on the South-east coast of Australia, attended country schools, and took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing and radio production for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and has travelled widely, making reading tours of the United States, England and Europe. He has lived at various times in Melbourne, Singapore, Brisbane and London, and now lives in Sydney. He has received several senior fellowships and other grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. Fourteen collections of his verse have been published. His work appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. In 1992 he edited (with Philip Mead) the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, a 470-page anthology, published in Britain and the USA as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. He is the editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket. |
[Above] Photo of John Tranter by John Tranter, 1987.
I Next I
Back I
Exit I
Thylazine No.3 (March, 2001) |
