Poet, editor, publisher, anthologist: John Tranter's influential life in literature
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Wednesday, April 26, 2023
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Perhaps more than any Australian poet of the 20th Century, John Tranter, who died last Friday at the age of 79, was guided by a relentless desire to experiment.
Key Points:
- Perhaps more than any Australian poet of the 20th Century, John Tranter, who died last Friday at the age of 79, was guided by a relentless desire to experiment.
- His earliest admiration was for the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, and he soon discovered John Ashbery, who ultimately became his most important influence.
Early work
- The work baffled those readers and critics attuned to more conventional models.
- Crying in Early Infancy: 100 Sonnets (1977) was written concurrently with these collections.
- The sonnet form brought a greater sense of coherence, as it foregrounded the wit and an urbanity that was sometimes muted in Tranter’s earlier work.
- Two of his early books were published by Angus & Robertson, a mainstream publisher that had a validating role in Australia akin to Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom.
- Tranter’s most celebrated work is Under Berlin (1988), which was published almost a decade after his previous single volume.
Late experimentation
- Some of the poems in At the Florida (1992) continue with this perfected style, but Tranter’s desire for formal experimentation remained.
- The book ends with a series of haibun: 20 lines of poetry, followed by a stanza break and a prose paragraph.
- Tranter’s last two major publications, Starlight: 150 Poems (2010) and Heart Starter (2015), show a poet in late career drawing on the resources of language and technology, restlessly wrestling against any settled style.
- Also prominent among his late work is the “terminal”, a form Tranter may have invented, in which the poet borrows the end-words of a previous poem to write a wholly new text.
Influence
- Tranter’s influence can be seen in the work of later Australian poets, but his role as an editor, anthologist and publisher, from the early 1970s until well into the 21st century had a more immediate effect on Australian poetry.
- For better or worse, the term “Generation of ’68” was defined by the publication of Tranter’s anthology The New Australian Poetry (1979).
- The book undoubtedly aided the careers of some poets, but came in for harsh criticism.
- The selection favoured writers from Sydney and Melbourne, and included a mere two women among its 24 contributors.