Article
Interview with John Tranter
June 23, 2011
Michael Brennan: When did you start writing and what motivated you?
John Tranter: I wrote my first poems in 1960 at the suggestion of my history teacher, John Darcy, while a boarder at Hurlstone Agricultural High School, on the outskirts of Sydney. One of the two poems I wrote, a drippy landscape piece, was published in the school annual magazine and won a five pounds first prize, about a week’s wages then. John Darcy was a remarkably sensitive man with a lovely sense of humour. He drank a lot, to placate his demons I suspect, and died the following year in a car crash.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
John Tranter: John Darcy recognised my literary potential and gave me three books of poetry to read (as well as The Catcher in the Rye, a smart thought for 1960): poetry by D.H. Lawrence, a Penguin paperback of Chinese poetry translated by a Professor Davis, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. What a clever selection: beautiful and deeply felt poetry, but not a rhyme anywhere. Naturally I thought “Maybe I could write something like that!”
Later I was attracted to Rimbaud, twentieth-century French poets, Enzensberger, Sir Thomas Malory, the Beats, just about any US American poet from 1940 to 1970. Notice the general lack of rhyme, again, except for the more academic Americans.
What writers do I read now? I hardly have time to read much, and I feel I’ve read far too much anyway. I like Proust, in translation, to my surprise. I watch a little television, usually old movies, say from 1940 to 1970. That’s the period of my youth, of course. And quite a few contemporary poets, some of whose work I discovered editing Jacket magazine: Maxine Chernoff, Elaine Equi, Rachel Loden, Gig Ryan, Ron Koertge, J.H. Prynne. And I think the novels and stories of Robert Bolaño are wonderful.
What’s changed? “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That’s what old men usually say. I’m less interested in rebellious gestures, and more interested in writing really well. What stays the same? The worst sin is to bore your reader.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
John Tranter: Well, ‘everyday life’ is everything, really. A novel you might read, an inspiring conversation, a cup of coffee, failing a job interview, four million people killed in the Korean War, an incomprehensible dream that bothers you all day, all these things happen in the everyday. It seems odd to grade experiences as ‘more important’ or ‘less important’ to my writing.
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
John Tranter: The Buddha said (in the Diamond Sutra, I think) that what we are is the result of all we have thought. I feel that subjectivity and objectivity are perhaps mistaken ways of looking at the same thing.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
John Tranter: Literary traditions, of course. We only know what literature is by knowing what it has been, from age to age. What is a poem? One of those things (pointing to an epigram by Callimachus), or one of those (pointing to a strange poem by John Ashbery). And of course any literary movement is the product of its age, that is, the political and cultural movements that allow it to happen in just that way. The creation of Romanticism (and its best brand, ‘organic form’) was conditioned by the French Revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and of course they all conditioned each other. If you examine enough labels on bottles of Scotch whisky you’ll note that nearly all the great distilleries were created between 1790 and 1820, when Romanticism was invented, as part of the same forces that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. The same with tartan pattern cloth: Wikipedia tells us that “By the 19th century the Highland romantic revival inspired by James Macpherson’s Ossian poems and the writings of Walter Scott led to wider interest [in the tartan] . . . The pageantry invented for the 1822 visit of King George IV to Scotland brought a sudden demand for tartan cloth and made it the national dress of the whole of Scotland rather than just the highlands and islands, with the invention of many new clan-specific tartans to suit.” A smart person casts a cold eye on the concept of authenticity as a discursive effect.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
John Tranter: The struggle to make my writing live up to the richness and variety and sheer skill of the best writing of the past and the present. But of course a man would say something like that.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
John Tranter: When I studied for a degree in the 1960s I felt that my three-year course in Psychology was as important as my studies in English Literature. It took in the mathematical background to statistical analysis, experimental design, Gestalt psychology, developmental psychology, Freudian theory, behaviour modification theory and practice, the psychology of perception, and lots more. To come from a class in the responsibility of good experimental design to a seminar titled ‘In what does Blake’s greatness lie?’ is to step from the a room full of thoughtful adults to a kindergarten full of silly children. Seeing lots of movies is as important as reading lots of great novels, and far more useful. I have always read lots of materials about computers, and psychology, and bookbinding, and typography, and how to tie useful knots. When you grow up on a farm, as I did, you develop an interest in how to solve practical problems.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
John Tranter: I’ll always be an Australian, heir to the comic grotesques Bazza Mackenzie and Sir Les Patterson as much as to our greatest poet, Francis Webb, whether I want to be or not. It comes with the accent. Australians have a laconic way of viewing the world and, it seems to me, a basic sense of tolerance, decency and proportion, that I value. As for the writing, the same applies.
MB: Don Anderson once described Australian poetry as Australia’s only “blood sport”. More recently critics have seen Australian poetry in terms of a “new lyricism” (David McCooey) and “networked language” (Philip Mead). What is the current state of play in Australian poetry? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
John Tranter: I think Don Anderson was remembering a piece in the Bulletin in the mid 1970s by Robert Drewe about a colourful poetry reading in a Paddington art gallery, featuring visiting US poet Mark Strand and local poet Robert Adamson, who pronounced a curse on writer Michael Wilding, who pronounced a curse on Robert Adamson, a nervous David Malouf, nervous because of a woman in the audience who interrupted his reading with dreadful howls of anguish, and who was taken away in an ambulance, and other misdeeds. There was a lot of drinking, I remember, and a party afterwards, a long day’s party into night. But that all happened in the Good Old Days. These days I don’t know much about the current scene: it’s too large and diverse, which is a good thing, and widespread and energetic. I haven’t seen any aggression. Young poets seem widely read and inquisitive.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
John Tranter: I think it has always been relevant, whatever the period or the society, though it’s hard to say how, except on a personal level. Like prostitution, it has always been with us, right from the campfire in the neolithic cave to the mention of Frank O’Hara’s poetry in the current US television series Mad Men. But I don’t feel that a culture can assure its value by endorsing or authorising it. Poetry is usually a personal artistic practice, and it doesn’t take well to official support. Official support is provided by institutional bureaucrats, and that brings in careerism and opportunism, Key Performance Indicators and Return on Investment Valuations, and the kind of thirty-page application form that makes a Selection Committee and its clerical assistants happy. It helps poetry to thrive, but only the kind of poetry that pleases the kind of public that bureaucrats imagine. We’re better off without it.
John Tranter: I wrote my first poems in 1960 at the suggestion of my history teacher, John Darcy, while a boarder at Hurlstone Agricultural High School, on the outskirts of Sydney. One of the two poems I wrote, a drippy landscape piece, was published in the school annual magazine and won a five pounds first prize, about a week’s wages then. John Darcy was a remarkably sensitive man with a lovely sense of humour. He drank a lot, to placate his demons I suspect, and died the following year in a car crash.
MB: Who are the writers who first inspired you to write and who are the writers you read now? What’s changed?
John Tranter: John Darcy recognised my literary potential and gave me three books of poetry to read (as well as The Catcher in the Rye, a smart thought for 1960): poetry by D.H. Lawrence, a Penguin paperback of Chinese poetry translated by a Professor Davis, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. What a clever selection: beautiful and deeply felt poetry, but not a rhyme anywhere. Naturally I thought “Maybe I could write something like that!”
Later I was attracted to Rimbaud, twentieth-century French poets, Enzensberger, Sir Thomas Malory, the Beats, just about any US American poet from 1940 to 1970. Notice the general lack of rhyme, again, except for the more academic Americans.
What writers do I read now? I hardly have time to read much, and I feel I’ve read far too much anyway. I like Proust, in translation, to my surprise. I watch a little television, usually old movies, say from 1940 to 1970. That’s the period of my youth, of course. And quite a few contemporary poets, some of whose work I discovered editing Jacket magazine: Maxine Chernoff, Elaine Equi, Rachel Loden, Gig Ryan, Ron Koertge, J.H. Prynne. And I think the novels and stories of Robert Bolaño are wonderful.
What’s changed? “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” That’s what old men usually say. I’m less interested in rebellious gestures, and more interested in writing really well. What stays the same? The worst sin is to bore your reader.
MB: How important is ‘everyday life’ to your work?
John Tranter: Well, ‘everyday life’ is everything, really. A novel you might read, an inspiring conversation, a cup of coffee, failing a job interview, four million people killed in the Korean War, an incomprehensible dream that bothers you all day, all these things happen in the everyday. It seems odd to grade experiences as ‘more important’ or ‘less important’ to my writing.
MB: What is the role or place of subjectivity in your poetry?
John Tranter: The Buddha said (in the Diamond Sutra, I think) that what we are is the result of all we have thought. I feel that subjectivity and objectivity are perhaps mistaken ways of looking at the same thing.
MB: Do you see your work in terms of literary traditions and/or broader cultural or political movements?
John Tranter: Literary traditions, of course. We only know what literature is by knowing what it has been, from age to age. What is a poem? One of those things (pointing to an epigram by Callimachus), or one of those (pointing to a strange poem by John Ashbery). And of course any literary movement is the product of its age, that is, the political and cultural movements that allow it to happen in just that way. The creation of Romanticism (and its best brand, ‘organic form’) was conditioned by the French Revolution, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and of course they all conditioned each other. If you examine enough labels on bottles of Scotch whisky you’ll note that nearly all the great distilleries were created between 1790 and 1820, when Romanticism was invented, as part of the same forces that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. The same with tartan pattern cloth: Wikipedia tells us that “By the 19th century the Highland romantic revival inspired by James Macpherson’s Ossian poems and the writings of Walter Scott led to wider interest [in the tartan] . . . The pageantry invented for the 1822 visit of King George IV to Scotland brought a sudden demand for tartan cloth and made it the national dress of the whole of Scotland rather than just the highlands and islands, with the invention of many new clan-specific tartans to suit.” A smart person casts a cold eye on the concept of authenticity as a discursive effect.
MB: What aspect of writing poetry and working as a poet is the most challenging?
John Tranter: The struggle to make my writing live up to the richness and variety and sheer skill of the best writing of the past and the present. But of course a man would say something like that.
MB: What reading, other than poetry, is important to your work as a poet and why?
John Tranter: When I studied for a degree in the 1960s I felt that my three-year course in Psychology was as important as my studies in English Literature. It took in the mathematical background to statistical analysis, experimental design, Gestalt psychology, developmental psychology, Freudian theory, behaviour modification theory and practice, the psychology of perception, and lots more. To come from a class in the responsibility of good experimental design to a seminar titled ‘In what does Blake’s greatness lie?’ is to step from the a room full of thoughtful adults to a kindergarten full of silly children. Seeing lots of movies is as important as reading lots of great novels, and far more useful. I have always read lots of materials about computers, and psychology, and bookbinding, and typography, and how to tie useful knots. When you grow up on a farm, as I did, you develop an interest in how to solve practical problems.
MB: What is ‘Australian poetry’? Do you see yourself as an ‘Australian’ poet?
John Tranter: I’ll always be an Australian, heir to the comic grotesques Bazza Mackenzie and Sir Les Patterson as much as to our greatest poet, Francis Webb, whether I want to be or not. It comes with the accent. Australians have a laconic way of viewing the world and, it seems to me, a basic sense of tolerance, decency and proportion, that I value. As for the writing, the same applies.
MB: Don Anderson once described Australian poetry as Australia’s only “blood sport”. More recently critics have seen Australian poetry in terms of a “new lyricism” (David McCooey) and “networked language” (Philip Mead). What is the current state of play in Australian poetry? How do you think Australian poetry and discussions about Australian poetry might best develop in the next ten years?
John Tranter: I think Don Anderson was remembering a piece in the Bulletin in the mid 1970s by Robert Drewe about a colourful poetry reading in a Paddington art gallery, featuring visiting US poet Mark Strand and local poet Robert Adamson, who pronounced a curse on writer Michael Wilding, who pronounced a curse on Robert Adamson, a nervous David Malouf, nervous because of a woman in the audience who interrupted his reading with dreadful howls of anguish, and who was taken away in an ambulance, and other misdeeds. There was a lot of drinking, I remember, and a party afterwards, a long day’s party into night. But that all happened in the Good Old Days. These days I don’t know much about the current scene: it’s too large and diverse, which is a good thing, and widespread and energetic. I haven’t seen any aggression. Young poets seem widely read and inquisitive.
MB: How is poetry relevant or valuable to contemporary society and culture in Australia or at an international level?
John Tranter: I think it has always been relevant, whatever the period or the society, though it’s hard to say how, except on a personal level. Like prostitution, it has always been with us, right from the campfire in the neolithic cave to the mention of Frank O’Hara’s poetry in the current US television series Mad Men. But I don’t feel that a culture can assure its value by endorsing or authorising it. Poetry is usually a personal artistic practice, and it doesn’t take well to official support. Official support is provided by institutional bureaucrats, and that brings in careerism and opportunism, Key Performance Indicators and Return on Investment Valuations, and the kind of thirty-page application form that makes a Selection Committee and its clerical assistants happy. It helps poetry to thrive, but only the kind of poetry that pleases the kind of public that bureaucrats imagine. We’re better off without it.
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