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".
Over his 20-plus 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.