The first poem that I read by John Tranter was in Poetry Magazine in 1969. It was one of those inchoate but incredibly ambitious poems, you know aspiring towards epic, typical of a young man just beginning to publish. The gawky title 'A Voyager Returns/Psychomimetic Paraboloid' was 'of its times' (and the poem has now shuffled off to posterity to yellow or mould in some cupboard in a garage). Poetry Magazine was published by a small institution called 'The Poetry Society of Australia'. It was a traditionally-styled society - it had a President, a Vice President and various office bearers. Roland Robinson, Robert Adamson, Robert Gray, and Carl Harrison Ford too, were all presidents and for a brief time John was a Poetry Society 'councillor'. The whole concept seemed very official, very male and very square to me then. I was about to undergo total immersion in Sydney counter culture - a group house, a terrace house, in Surry Hills, UBU scratch films in the living room, an underground offset printing press in the front room, pink inc. gay rights in Balmain, happenings, hippies, yippies and hashish. What fun.

    Today all of that can sound like an Urban Myth - legendary but did it happen ? In a parallel world in the same city, at the same time, John was finishing his arts degree at university. Then, in 1971, he got a job in Singapore where he and his wife Lyn lived until '73. Just after that he got one of the first Literature Board grants in 1974 and the following year, '75, they moved up to Brisbane where he worked for ABC radio and they got busy raising a couple of kids. (One of whom, their daughter Kirsten, has recently made John and Lyn grand people by giving birth to a boy called Henry)
    So I didn't actually encounter John in person until around 1977 when he'd returned to live in Sydney. I remember first seeing him at one of those Glebe poets' parties in Toxteth Road. He seemed quiet - hanging around in the crowded, smoke-filled living room in his mayonnaise-yellow skivvy. We didn't actually talk. I probably thought he was aloof and perhaps he thought I was - or maybe he was bored or possibly very cool or on something. Everyone else was on something.

   Anyway that's just to say that we've both, each in our own way, been around the Sydney poetry traps for a fair while.    And remembering the '70s affords the realisation that these days everything we do as poets seems counter-cultural because the 'culture' is filled with so much expensive mediocrity and lifestyle spin that there's not much space left for poetry.     However, as this big collection demonstrates, poetry as an art form is thriving in spite of commercial and lowest-common-denominator adversities.

    John Tranter has been an active and influential figure in Australian poetry for approaching-forty years now. It's impossible to be an Australian poet and not know about John Tranter. He has anthologised Australian poets in several key collections including The New Australian Poetry in 1979 in which he used the term 'Generation of 68' to describe the fresh direction some poets had taken in a deliberate turning away from high British tradition (and he's had to live with his use of that fateful phrase for a l..o..n..g time now). He co-edited, with Philip Mead, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry which collected a broad range of 'modern' poetry beginning with Kenneth Slessor, and included hoax poems from the 1940s by Ern Malley, an urban myth in his own right. The anthology covered up until 1993. John also published, via his early 80s imprint Transit New Poetry, the first books of well-known poets Gig Ryan and Susan Hampton, and books by Alan Jefferies and the late great John Forbes. For a time in the late 80s John was poetry editor for the Bulletin magazine. In 1993 he edited a collection of the poetry and prose of his friend Martin Johnston - another poet who died too soon. During his time at the ABC John invited innumerable poets to appear on radio broadcasts. In 1996 he started the international internet magazine Jacket which is flourishing - getting better every day in every way. Currently John is also working on an ambitious project begun last year called the Australian Literature Resources Index - a freely accessible index of Australian poetry that is set to become definitive. He's also doing his Doctorate.

    So he has been a very busy poet and as well as all of that, he has written many books. The one we're celebrating tonight is his 21st collection - Urban Myths.

    What is an 'urban myth'?
It's a sensational but apocryphal story that through repetition in varying versions acquires the status of folklore. Urban myths reconstruct as the story unfolds. They usually, in the case of writing, contain the kinds of information that trick you into believing that the writer is a real person and that they know what they're talking about. If investigated you'll inevitably find out that they either don't exist or they exist but never wrote the story.

    I'm not sure why John has called this collection Urban Myths - but I can speculate that he's signalling to his readers not to conflate him too closely with his poems and not to take the poems literally. He's letting us off the hook. As he traverses thirty six years of cleverly concocted experiments, we don't have to believe it. John Tranter is like a poetry scientist in his laboratory, peering through the microscope at the strange words growing mysteriously in the Petri dishes - into culture. And in everyday life, he also happens to love actual gadgets. He is interested in the technical - how things work – cameras, minidisc player/recorders, usb drives, pepper grinders, holograms, the angles of Furi knife blades, astrolabes - you name it. He also loves typography and can tell you the story of the invention of many typefaces from memory.

    This is background to the work in this compendium where John displays a panoptic proportion of formal skills with relish and the poetry becomes another technology. You'll find a panoply of form; elegies, odes, haibuns, sestinas, sonnets, pantoums, acrostics and, even, in the case of Girl in Water a poem about the movie Vertigo – a double acrostic. Style is also important to John, as to every poet, but here it's not mere sophistication.

    The range here, whilst being identifiably Tranteresque is very, very broad. There are uncollected poems and new poems as well. He has many influences and among them are the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who was a kind of proto-modernist and actually, as you know, quit writing poetry at a very young age. He was an early influence on John. Others include the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, who is deft at bringing politics into poetry, and the North American, John Ashbery who, like John Tranter, is very fond of language play and masquerade - however I'd say, to be utterly reductive, that John Tranter's writing is more accessible than Ashbery s.
Dazed in the Ladies Lounge or in At the Florida an entire suite of haibun and so on. (A haibun is twenty lines of blank verse for the first stanza and a short stanza of prose below it). Poetry on one level can seem incoherent but I'm certain tonight's gathering of poetry lovers doesn't have a problem with incoherence - you know how a good dose of wild language play liberates the imagination. As a kind of anchor as you read you'll find a note on the foot of each page that tells you in which book you are and in what year.

    Talking about imaginative language play leads me to The Alphabet Murders, from 1976, the title taken from a movie of an Agatha Christie novel. It's a set of, obviously, 26 poems that begin with the letters of the alphabet and then last, a 27th prose poem, returning to the letter 'A'. It's a wild trip through a personal theory of poetics where 'lyric poets/wander through like crippled birds'. It's witty, and it's disturbing - it's exhausting. It's a kind of investigative trip through the past and future of poetry. He desires a resolution of modernism or even hopes to abandon poetry itself and make some other leap.     There are some good essays on The Alphabet Murders - one by Kate Lilley but especially one by Kate Fagan and Peter Minter examining the poem's frequent muddy, scatalogical imagery, that you can find in Jacket issue 27. After reading the paroxysms of The Alphabet Murders you wonder how John got the mental energy or could have been so resolute as to ever write another poem . But thirty years later there are many more and mostly as intense, as this collection shows.

    John Tranter is also the poet of a kind of Australian suburban anxiety - in The Floor of Heaven and Studio Moon especially. Desperation and the darker side of disappointment, i.e. melancholy, in some poems and a kind of ordinary or domestic ennui in others temper any excess of imaginative revelation. And from Under Berlin there's a mid-life poem with this opening stanza - 'Although art is, in the end, anonymous,/turning into history once it's left the body,/surely some gadget in the poet's head/forces us to suffer/ as we stumble through the psychology of it:/the accent betraying a class conflict/seen upside-down through a prism,the bad luck/to be born in a lucky country'. These are part of John's exegetic pursuit of the humane, and the often comical fallibility of our feelings glimpsed beyond the feats of a twentieth-century fin-de-millennium stream-of-consciousness.
The poem in this book from The Floor of Heaven is a long poem of narrative melodrama, spoken monologues (mostly from some feisty, but not infallible, women) are over the top - kind of spoofy and very entertaining - in an unravelling kind of way. Is this the beginning of post-post-modernism ? I'm not sure. It's something I think best left to the scholars.

    There are numerous interests in these poems but two that seem prominent are film and drinks. John likes the vividness of film, especially British film noir, Alfred Hitchcock, (I mentioned the Vertigo poem earlier) - and the way film can leap from location to location, expression to shadow to something else just as unpredictably as lines in a poem can. There's a group of new poems called At the Movies.
    There are many alcoholic drinks in these poems from the opening lines of the book, a poem about poetry - the art of love, that is an emulation of the early 19th century German Lyric poet Friedrich Holderlin, setting the reader up nicely, it begins 'When I was a young man, a drink/often rescued me from the factory floor/or the office routine' Quite understandable too.
More poems with drinks or the after effects, hungover and drinking crème de menthe in Trastevere, or campy cocktail-party wit reminiscent of 1960s New York School poetry - that droll urbane sagacity. And, interestingly, for a poet who can deal with excess John abhors gush.
    And then there's the computer. John is a skilled computer-user and he made an improvisational collection called Different Hands by using a program called 'brekdown' to generate prose pieces that John says 'started out strange and worked their way back to meaning'. More from the poetry laboratory but this time like an OULIPOian automaton e.g .'Neuromancing Miss Stein' combines texts from Gertrude Stein's 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' with William Gibson's 'Neuromancer'. And 'The Howling Twins' blends Ginsberg's 'Howl' and 'The Bobbsey Twins on a Bicycle Trip'. Did someone say 'semantic flux' ?

    Perhaps my favourite poem here is The Beach - well it's actually a poetic prose piece set in Sydney in summer. The poet takes a philosophical bus ride from the inner west to the eastern suburbs beaches - Tamarama and Bondi, remembering and noting all manner of things along the way. He visits a Darlinghurst bar where a minor tiff with a topless cocktail waitress over the ingredients of a martini is followed immediately by one of those brief but chilling reminders of mortality. But all's well as, in the end, it's Sydney, it's summer, it's balmy and everyone's off to the beach.

    The notes for these 210 poems can be found on the internet - they're illustrated - there's a great photo of Col Joye and the Joy Boys for instance. As John is an extensive indexer and a stickler for detail they're worth reading as a piece in themselves. The notes are over 85 A4 printed pages long.

Urban Myths is a tour de force collection.
I could go on.
You should read it.
And look out for what John once said about 'postmodernity' - 'I'm not sure that it's in the work of art - hovering behind it, perhaps, or glowing like an electrical spark in the air, jumping the gap between the work of art and the consumer.'

 I think no one can better represent their poems than the poet so… John Tranter 'This Is Your Life' or, is it a Fantasy ?


This 'speech' was delivered at the launch of Urban Myths at Gleebooks Bookshop in Glebe, Sydney on May 19th 2006