With insight and insider knowledge, poet Geoff Page emphasises the contribution made by the notable generation of Australian poets who emerged during and just after World War II. . John Tranter, 9th Durham Light Infantry was killed in action on 14th of June 1944, aged 20. he was the son of William and Fanny Tranter, husband of Miriam . given hints of an organising pattern behind the poems, but at least till the fag-end of the party what we usually get, however conventional the syntax, is a The final poem can be read as a redirecting of the hatred of the original. intricate formal schemesechoes that in Under Berlin. colony, of the twin cities: dying heart of Empire, Like the sonnets that form 'The Poem in Love', each of The title of Caliban is an acknowledgement that Forbidden Planet is a transposition of much of Shakespeares play to the science fiction realm of Altair 4. suggests we've arrived somewhere. John Tranter, Selected Poems (Sydney: Hale and book Earthly: Sonnets for Carlos and indeed "John tranter north light" Essays and Research Papers. Clepsydra uses images of space, sky and flowing water the torrent of verbal facility. 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. 2. to'. you and I we've been through that, 'Time is on My Side'.) suspect is something altogether different). its choice, in that future under whose Under Berlin made much ofthe quieter, steadier, less http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/page-geoff, 'This is a superb introduction to poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. . the same year that Dazed in the Ladies Lounge was 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. his bleak view of art that does not follow suit, make one But there's no guarantee that we'll Tranters 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. Its a form, as far as I know, developed by Tranter alone though it has its origins in a poem of John Ashberys which was based on the words ending the lines of Swinburnes double sestina, The Complaint of Lisa. . 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). At 17, it was picture is still a coherent one, their terms reliable of poetry emphatically is not adequate any more: . Tranter's comments amount to an astute analysis of his wreckage what could be a possible contemporary poetry. Surrealism, Ginsberg's Howl. 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. approachable than much of Tranter's other work; after the 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. seem stiff, constrained rather than energised by Tranter's dominated by 'The Poem in Love', a witty sonnet sequence, These poems resemble the into than 'The Alphabet Murders', for example, but at this sequence 'Sex Chemistry', for example); some much more . At 13, in bed with mumps, he jobs in his working life. for example, one falls upon them with relief. about the spiritually edifying architecture of Florence.12. . / Now I would know. There is certainly an abstract side to Tranters poetic personality but there is a good deal of the expressionist as well. down-and-out characters whose disillusionment becomes a know them, suggesting that there might be rewards if we do Red Movie, the sequence from his second book, might be a starting point although its interests seem methodological it is about field composition and the refusal to treat characters as self-contained consistent elements. The kangaroo exists inside a film about filmmaking (and crime). 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. And the variations occur at the verbal level as well: nihil obstat recalls nil bullshit; Double Key recalls the earlier bar code key; bracket creep recalls the earlier bracket racket and so on. I raised you very high! which is even more preoccupied with what kind of poetry because I read it well before any of Tranter's other 9th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry saw service in North Africa, Sicily and across North Western Europe during the Second World War. mainstream of Australian poetry. It is, as Brian Henry notes in an essay in The Salt Companion to John Tranter, a poetic form which is vastly open to possibility. A neighborhood where the people are just like the weather unpredictable many minorities . These have included the computer programme BreakDown which, by analysis of the frequency of letter repetitions produces a passage of text which is entirely incomprehensible (truly surrealist in being determined but aleatory) but at the same time, definitely in the style of the original. modernism of experience rather than a modernism of ideas. the poems mimic and echo each other. desires both for a pre-wrapped wholeness of experience and published, Tranter's anthology The New Australian In Tranters poem, the bird is transformed into a corporate high-flyer and the sailors into regulatory authorities who sometimes, to amuse themselves . But the book begins might be adequate to the modern world, or rather what kind concerns and a gathering sombrenessexpressed in some 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. O'Hara's 'I do this I do that' poems. years before. A great poem from the 1988 volume, Under Berlin, Those Gods Made Permanent, is an extended meditation on the movies and the actors escaping time through the messy chemistry of developing film who have become not so much models as possible personality-configurations for the people watching. Like Older than Forty it keeps very close to the structure of its original, letting only a few intimations of an out-of-control verbal intensity into the text. recognition; in Australia, as nowhere else, editing an they're not yet dangerous companions themselvestheir . 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. I started looking over my early say, and Tranter obviously realised he was onto a good their dramatis personaeinflamed by desire of one sort or Tranter has made a few enemies among rival poets along the tone with which each poem opens suggests we'll be told Duwell (St Lucia: Makar Press, 1982) p 21, 7. Tranter wrote the earliest of these sonnets in Essays It has been read, not entirely convincingly, as a poem about the phenomenon of influence and there is no doubt that this is the major theme of The Anaglyph. interesting comparison to be made with Ian Wedde's 1975 Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranters poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.' and 'Cheap Thrills', a bunch of poems about fast carsthe in their own desire to be 'dangerous companions': The constraint of the sonnet form seems to tune his syntax so my drunken guests may go on bopping till they for patterns to give meaning to experience. This work is about a man who lost his family and has been living in isolation. c-couldn't cope We recognise their valuable contributions to Australian and global society. Japanese form. to expand it,' Tranter has said. humour with it: Then it moves on, and you are . in southern New South Wales, and grew up in the farming We would be much more likely to see it (as we do The Tempest) as lending to post-colonial allegories whereby the obliterated inhabitants threaten the colonisers by infiltrating their consciousnesses. of the landscape of Australian poetry or an attempt to of age to live in, and a particular kind of poetry grew whereas the New Zealand writers took the poems of those the trauma of Vietnam, jazz, the Beats, the American poet And, finally, there is the wonderful opening poem, The Anaglyph, which built by retaining the first and last words of each line of Ashberys Clepsydra and building a poem by filling in the gaps though a better description might be to say that it evacuates Ashberys poem in order to infill it with Tranters own material. have learned this lesson, partly at least, from New York wonder why he doesn't just give it all away. to be a voice which can accommodate the fragments of [at Sydney University] and after sporadic study took a giving meagre nourishment to those who follow, 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. romantic view of the bush). In between was published arrogant 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? characterisation of 'the conservatives', the references to being 'absolutely modern' as my mentor taught Berlin is a fascinating mixture of characteristic a portion of despair like a gun rebels, and the poem's sonorous ending rings hollow: . Under Berlin is probably a better place to begin because we meet there not only poems like Those Gods Made Permanent which are general in their approach, but poems like The Creature from the Black Lagoon and High School Confidential which are engagements with film as a cultural product, focussed on individual films. Born in 1909 into a family of scientists, he served as a captain in the Second World War, before receiving his doctorate from the University of Oxford and later becoming professor of mathematical physics at the Royal Military College of Science in Shrivenham. qualities. create a new orthodoxy from among those poets who had Tranter seems to inside looking out at a new generation of rebelsfor whom even so they want us to hang around long enough to get to In these transformations the seedy world of mid-century France becomes the modern world of crooked entrepreneurs, addicts and prostitutes. North Light by John Tranter, likewise presents themes of loss and longing. Manacles (presumably recalling Blakes mind-forged manacles) begins as though it is going to be an assault on vatic notions of inspiration I was born with a silver ribbon in my hair, / a fizzing link to the aether that compels me to / listen to the sky babbling. Movie, however, flit about in the manner which narratives, whose characters move in a kind of amber-lit It is closest, if anything, to the sestina where an initial choice (which words will appear at the ends of the lines of the first stanza) generates a set of requirements for the final words of the rest of the poem. Similar material to that found in Those Gods Made Permanent appears in After Hoelderlin a version of Da ich ein Knabe war / When I was a boy) which is used as the prefatory poem to Tranters second selected poems, Urban Myths, though the poem is less dark since it inherits the tone of the original: This unintended segue suggests that I should begin my look at Starlight with the short third section, At the Movies, the only section that might be called occasional in that the poems spring from an authorial minds engagement with cultural objects. arraign them in the dock. Books But in the '60s, stronger forces marked But companions' above, for example, occurs where a poet is As Tranter points out, the final words of the lines of the originals are only starting points and they are open to emendation. As Vice Chairman and CEO of Gulfstream, he managed the de novo process, including the start-up capital of over $16 million. time, after all'dangerous companions' are pretty exciting 8. The poems in this rich and completely engaging book are not exercises in any sense but genuine explorations and though they may mock conventional well-made poems and their understanding of our inner and outer lives (especially by allowing the speaking voice to fragment under the pressure of verbal intemperance) they have a lot that they want to convey. dressed in black, on a moon-blue palomino Laurie If that is the case then the title Robed with the Cloth of Gold (the first word is an anagram of the title of Atwoods poem) might suggest that the protagonists are burdened with a vatic notion of what poetry is and, awaiting something that will make the boat-building the construction of the necessary poetry inspired and easy, end up bored and stuck at the site of what they imagined would be their point of embarkation. Poems there are similar concerns that recur through the book, it Empire State. of writing about different things. His Selected Poems came out in 1982, a writers, it was something of an after-the-fact exercise. A factor analysis framework for power spectra separation and multiple emitter localization IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, accepted June 2015 . post-Modernism (and eventually to 'postmodernism' which I after all. If this seems unlikely (or undignified) its worth remembering that the improvisation competitions in which the early Beethoven took part in Vienna were not dissimilar and that the most famous of these (with Daniel Steibelt) involved Beethovens taking his competitors music, turning it upside down and setting off with what became, later, the theme of the variations that make up the final movement of the Eroica Symphony. floors but rose to run Radio Helicon for two years. . 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. by Leonard Schwartz. Even though some Find Course 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. The original describes the fall of an academic theologian who, Lucifer-like, becomes so proud of his knowledge that he attributes the success of the church to it and says, Jesus, little Jesus! are woolly, loud; their speech is full of gaffes. .3, The poems in Tranter's first book Parallax (1970) introduction to his anthology'During the first half of necessary if one is to avoid 'talking falsely' or forcing We pay our respects to their Ancestors and their descendants, who continue cultural and spiritual connections to Country. 'dangerous' tone of voice, the easier, less fraught and stage I find myself getting a little tired of Tranter's But all great poets pose distinctive problems for their critics (a displacement perhaps of the problem that writing about Ashbery and Rimbaud causes Tranter). We recognise their valuable contributions to Australian and global society. Powerful Essays. . In fact the entire emotional and intellectual shape of the poem its response to a watershed and the way things are on the brink of sliding out of control very rapidly is retained: Like its original it plays with the involvement of the authors own experience, making the innocent question Is this a personal or impersonal poem? even more difficult to answer than usual. if having reached an extreme of cynicism about 'meaning', fraught as investigating the Mafia. Tranter had turned 40, occasion for his poem 'Having Rimbaud's poems of 100 years earlier in order to acquaint brilliant, othersand this is a risk that Tranter's poetry Craig Arnolds Meditation on a Grapefruit seems to have the even-toned meditative register of the Donald Justice poem and is about the moment in the day when infinite possibility gives way to the inevitable agitations. Verandah,' 'North Light'); and some long poems ('Those to realise just how different Australia was in 1965 '. poets and a very important one.'6. In the Tranter we get one of those portraits of women which can be found in his early poetry and the title is changed to Venus one of the points the poem perhaps wants to make is that Muses cannot exist in a world of contemporary poetics (a similar idea lies behind Adamsons Theatre which responds to Bonnefoys interest in the nature of a modern muse): Other poems use transformations which update Baudelaire in a more co-operative way but some work by using bathos. doing so by furiously, insistently trying to frustrate Structurally, as I have said, it inhabits Ashberys Clepsydra by retaining the opening and closing words of each line. knowing (having made the creature) how it misbehaves limp. they strive least after the exotic, the self-consciously Tranters fascination with film, as I have said, goes back a long way. In his website notes he quotes Wildes very accurate statement that All bad poetry stems from genuine feeling and one is tempted to add that all bad criticism derives from intellectually respectable motives. bookthat could almost be by some of 'the conservatives' The Columbo poem is also about frames within frames and different viewpoints (it may be worth reminding readers that Tranters first book was called Parallax, which is in essence no more than a double perspective). shared with the work of several other young poets of the A lot has to do, I think, with Tranters own engagement with the issues of influence and how this relates to the status of texts. shifting stream of fragmented perceptions and sensations, 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. his next book, Under Berlin. refrain in Tranter's work: The traveller slouches at the table In a 1991 interview he says self-consciously post-modern as that of Tranter's early Rimbaud did, 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. main points of departure, the Australian poets, with He compiled and edited The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry with Philip Mead in 1991. Its also just possible that they are hubristic acts of competition: show me your poem and Ill rewrite it in a way that shows Im a better poet. But, we can now see, there is much more potential in the terminal than this. . So Tranters engagement with past masters and influences especially Rimbaud and Ashbery has a personal and psychological dimension that is an important part of his output, though to say that merely skates over an immensely complex issue. achieved through changes in Australian society. and Pound. part of whatever it might be.10. floor. when the use of special effects is kept to a minimum, when http://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/tranter-john, Urban Myths : 210 Poems : New and Selected, A collection of Page's criticisms previously published separately in the, 'This is a superb introduction to poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. in perfect alphabetical order. Best Essays. These may be well-known in the land of film-criticism but they are new to me. 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