A tribute to the Australian poet John Tranter, by Mark Butler*
THE reaper has been busy snuffing out our great modern poets of late, taking Robert Adamson a few months back and John Tranter a couple of weeks ago. Adamson’s death was expected, as he had announced that he had terminal liver cancer and had but a few months to live, which meant that he was able to feel the love and grief from his many admirers before he died.
Tranter’s death came out of the blue and, to the ABC’s undying shame, was not noted by its gutted and gutless news service, more concerned to breathlessly report reactions to the death of that ancient and cruel clown Barry Humphries, who died at about the same time.
As far as our trivialised national broadcaster was concerned, Tranter (who had worked for the ABC) wasn’t a celebrity, so his death didn’t matter. I know this because I searched the ABC News app for a week after his death and came up with zero mentions of his name.
I am sure this neglect would come as no surprise to Tranter, whose poetry reveals a mind with few illusions, especially about human desires and aspirations. He was Apollo to Adamson’s Dionysus, Apollo the cool and calculating technician, Dionysus the nature-worshipping free spirit. They form a unique pair in our literary history, reminiscent of the pairing of opposites Du Fu and Li Bai (formerly known as Tu Fu and Li Po, respectively) two of China’s greatest poets, who were contemporaries in the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty, the so-called golden age of Chinese poetry.
I believe that the lives of Adamson and Tranter, doyens of the 68 generation, span a similar age in our literature
For me, a minor and long-forgotten fellow poet and contemporary of theirs, there was a eerie, almost creepy element to their departures, for eight months ago I had unearthed a letter in my archive, and I use that word advisedly, from one Arthur Ashworth, handwritten on fine bond paper, bearing this letterhead: “The English Association, Sydney Branch (Patron: His Excellency the Governor of New South Wales)”, dated April 13, 1966.
He wrote:
Dear Mr Butler,
The English Association is proposing to hold a poets’ evening for its June meeting – Wednesday 1st June. We do this from time to time, but this year we wanted to make it New Poets, to give our members a chance of meeting some of the younger and newer people writing poetry. It’s fairly informal – sherry to begin with, then the guests are introduced and they read some of their poems (and talk about them if they wish). Some well established poets who are members will be there and you may be pleased to meet them. It’s generally quite pleasant.
I’d like, on behalf of the Association, to invite you to be one of the guests at this meeting, to meet our members and to read them some of your work. Would you let me know if you can come, and I’ll send you details of our meeting place and so on.
Yours sincerely, etc.
I had turned 17 two months earlier, so this letter was like a message from another planet. Everything about it, from the mention of the governor, the quality of the paper, the penmanship and the civilised, polite tone, suggested an unseen, unheard-of world; I mean the letterhead did not have an address for the association, Ashworth had put his home address on it. It was as if it were a secret society. If so, I wanted in (and the sherry to begin with).
I was a self-obsessed and lonely virgin living in a housing commission house in Narraweena on Sydney’s northern beaches with my mother, the classic deserted wife of the 1950s, who had brought up three children by herself after our father had abandoned us when I was four. Our sad little family had been banished there in 1963 to make way for the Warringah Expressway, which gobbled up our previous home in Crows Nest.
I had no idea why I had been invited, but I soon settled on a likely pathway. Rodney Hall had published a couple of poems of mine in The Australian in 1965, which had been noticed and liked by someone. And I had begun attending meetings of the Poetry Society, publisher of Poetry magazine, which had accepted several poems of mine during the previous 18 months. This in turn led to me being “taken up”, as they said then, by society stalwarts Roland Robinson and his great love Joan Mas, both of them established poets.
Robinson, a transplanted Irishman, a greenkeeper by trade, who was also a well-regarded ballet dancer, had the bigger reputation. He was famous for his long-haired bardic demeanour and as a mover and shaker in the Jindyworobak movement in the 1940s, which rejected foreign influences in our poetry and attempted to merge European and indigenous forms. A loud, generous and wide-open man.
Mas was an extraordinary woman, and poet, much better than bardic Roland in my opinion. I was drawn to her zen-like minimalism and her fearlessly female perspective, which floated on a sea of sadness, if not depression. They later parted and the third volume of his autobiography, A Letter to Joan, written about her after her death, which was a suspected suicide, was the best thing he wrote; in fact, I am surprised that their love story has not attracted the attention of a diligent Phd student or a screenwriter looking for a new angle. It has everything, including a wolf-like white dog.
Given all this, I concluded they must have engineered my invitation. My poetry came from books, mainly, and was formal and derivative (Shakespeare, Blake, Donne, Keats, Eliot, Yeats and Auden were huge influences, and I was well versed in Baudelaire), though with an overlay of haiku-like minimalism that barely contained my alienation. It was the alienation that drew their attention, I suspect. I also had an ear for the music of words, and Lowell’s irregular rhyming in Life Studies, not to mention the subject matter (“my mind’s not right”) had had a transformative impact on my writing.
Whatever my attraction, I went along to the meeting at the Feminist Club Rooms, 7th Floor, 77 King Street, where I discovered that there were two other new poets present, Robert Adamson and John Tranter. They were six years older than me, and boy, did it show.
To my astonishment, they wrote from personal experience, Tranter natty in his beige corduroy coat over what I suspect was a Brooks Brothers shirt, for he said he had just returned from the US, exuding calm self-possession, Adamson in a crumpled white shirt and jeans, both of them reading poems about things I had no experience of except in my fervid imagination.
I don’t recall the content in detail, but I do recall the ferocious energy Adamson radiated (and his bad teeth, a stark contrast to Tranter’s perfect set) as he read about his stint in juvie, or was it jail?, his body twisting and contorting as he read out his torrent of words. (I suspect he may have been speeding.) Tranter, of course, ever the patrician, read poems about his sojourn in the US, poems that had the smooth, effortless flow of milk. (I doubt that he was speeding.) Adamson’s were more like hand grenades, clearly influenced by Dylan and Rimbaud, but potent.
As I said, I felt totally out of place, and have no memory of what I read or the reaction to it, so it was probably a traumatic experience. I had already met Michael Dransfield via a school gathering a year before at the Sydney Town Hall, my first encounter with someone my age who lived and breathed being a poet. The black cape and broad-brimmed black hat he was wearing at the time helped create the impression, but once I read his poems I knew he was the real deal. We kept in touch until his death; indeed, I have long accepted that I will always be a footnote to his poetry, as one of the many people he dedicated poems to (Sub-Judice).
Seeing Adamson and Tranter in action reinforced the feeling in me that I was an imposter, a feeling I never shook. (Michael, to his credit, always considered me to be a fellow poet, and I loved him for that.)
Finding that letter spurred me to go back through my years of scribbling and compile a collection, which I sent to Adamson, recalling our 1966 meeting and asking for his opinion on whether I should seek publication or bin it.
His response was, “I’ll do my best. Onwards!” Three months later he was dead. I didn’t think they were that bad, but what would I know?