Tranter Redux

Posted on | September 14, 2007 | 2 Comments

My con­ver­sa­tion with John Tran­ter at the Mel­bourne Writ­ers Fes­ti­val was a sur­pris­ingly pleas­ant and inter­est­ing affair. I say sur­pris­ingly because I was ner­vous as all get-up before­hand — due mostly to the fact that for me, John Tran­ter has always been a some­what larger-than-life fig­ure. I stud­ied his work in the early 1990s, at a time when his first Selected Poems had been around for about ten years, and he’d just released Under Berlin and The Floor of Heaven. Some might say this was the peak of his career and yet he’s gone on to write a ton of new stuff, cul­mi­nat­ing in last year’s Urban Myths: 210 poems, which won a swag of prizes and accolades.

So, you might say I was slightly ner­vous about inter­view­ing John at the MWF, given that he’s such an impor­tant (if not impos­ing) fig­ure in OzLit and, well, I’m a min­now. How­ever our brief con­ver­sa­tion in the Green Room (God I love the Green Room) before the inter­view left me feel­ing slightly more opti­mistic. I found him to be charm­ing, friendly and will­ing to talk about most things I wanted to talk about, includ­ing John Forbes, drugs and the Inter­net. I mean, what else is there to talk about? So, we headed upstairs to the Tower Room in which prob­a­bly about thirty peo­ple had gath­ered to lis­ten to the inter­view and we just got on with it. Not, how­ever, before a fes­ti­val staff mem­ber came up to me and asked: “Are you John Tranter?”

As it turned out I would be asked this ques­tion a sec­ond time later in the after­noon, appar­ently because I was wear­ing a fes­ti­val guest lan­yard. To top it off, two weeks later at the QPF in Bris­bane, I was asked if I was Paul Dur­can, a sixty-something Irish poet of great renown. Was there some­thing more sig­nif­i­cant in these two cases of what Delta Goodrem might call Mis­taken Iden­tity? Had I unwit­tingly joined the van­guard of mod­ern poetry by agree­ing to act as ring­leader in the inter­view with Tran­ter? Or did I really look as if I was in my six­ties myself, weighed down (or lib­er­ated) by sev­eral decades of writ­ing poetry? Who knows.

In any case, look­ing back on the ques­tions I wrote down for the inter­view, I can see that while they were all scripted, we actu­ally danced back and forth across a num­ber of top­ics, with each of John’s responses trig­ger­ing or prompt­ing a diver­sion from the orig­i­nal order, so that the con­ver­sa­tion weaved in and out of many issues includ­ing the ques­tion of urban­ity, what kind of bird John Tran­ter might be (no defin­i­tive answer there), the ques­tion of per­for­mance, the impor­tance of New York City to his life and art, how many poems the main­te­nance of Jacket has robbed him of writ­ing (cur­rent tally: 53) and, of course, John Forbes and drugs.

This issue was espe­cially inter­est­ing for me as Forbes wrote a poem called “Tran­teresque” in which he pic­tured an idyl­lic island get­away fea­tur­ing loads and loads of qual­ity cocaine, babes and var­i­ous kinds of alco­hol. I read Forbes’ poem out as part of the inter­view (Tran­ter him­self declined to read it) and then asked him what kind of rhetor­i­cal role drugs played in his writ­ing. His response dealt with the drug cul­ture of the 1960s and the dif­fer­ence between poetry writ­ten on drugs (hello Michael Drans­field) and poetry about drugs (hello, ehm … ). He then admit­ted that he had taken Man­drax (methaqualone) at one time and had had some kind of hal­lu­ci­na­tory epiphany in writ­ing. The next morn­ing this turned out to be words to the effect of “Round and round we go …”, a line from a pop­u­lar children’s story of the time.

So much for Tran­ter the drug-addled opium-eater then.

What struck me most about the inter­view was the way in which he was able to antic­i­pate the flow of the con­ver­sa­tion, so that it all eppared seam­less and nat­ural. At first I thought this was due to my own efforts in try­ing to steer the con­ver­sa­tion in spe­cific direc­tions. Later I realised how­ever that these con­ver­sa­tions are like a well-played hand of 500. The smooth­ness of the flow of tricks depends upon both part­ners play­ing to each oth­ers’ strengths and weak­nesses: I’ll play a low trump here so that you can use your bower; you’ll lead a low trump back at me so that I can exe­cute my joker; here’s a throw-away five of spades just to play with our oppo­nents’ minds; and so on. Pos­i­tively, the Q&A was over long before I wanted it to end; John then read some poems includ­ing his poem for Forbes, “God On a Bicy­cle’, and after a cou­ple of ques­tions from the audi­ence it was all over.

As we were head­ing out, another fes­ti­val staff mem­ber came up to me and asked: “Are you John Tran­ter?” Though I replied in the neg­a­tive, I now won­der to what prac­ti­cal use I could have put this case of mis­taken iden­tity. A few auto­graphs at the book stall per­haps? Or maybe a cou­ple of Mandies, washed down with a gin and tonic, just to take the edge off things.

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