Tranter’s poems make the case that not only our speech but our inner lives may be a collection of quotations. (Perhaps a hangover from his brief foray into architecture at university, Tranter often employs verbs from the building trade to talk about poetry: a poem is not composed but ‘jerry-built’, it has ‘scaffolding’, and rather than analysing a poem’s structure he ‘reverse engineers’ it.)īut it’s not just poems that are constructed from words. He’s also a notorious imitator of other people’s speech: inanities and interjections, snatches of narrative, expletives, and overheard confessions are frequently built into his poems. Tranter, though no intellectual slouch, delights in watching the theoretical crumble when he king hits it with the colloquial. The texture of a Tranter poem is fabricated through the clash of seemingly disparate vocabularies: technical language abuts tête-à-tête, doctrine against dirt, Latin fights baby talk. Is it it the speaker’s or someone else’s? What’s it matter: ‘Mix more drinks’, the gambler says, ‘and mix them stronger’. But the thought of life’s brevity transports Tranter’s speaker to a bramble-covered gravesite on a lonely hill in the bush. To put up with a career as pointless as this, He is not exactly enamoured with his chosen profession, as his poem ‘Rotten Luck’, selected by Amy Gerstler for The Best American Poetry 2010, attests. Unlike Yeats, Tranter doesn’t dream that the poet hosts any rarified communion with truth. The poet may be an ‘idea’, but it is an incomplete one. But for Tranter, near a century later, the poet has become precisely that: a bundle of accident. Yeats once wrote that the poet is ‘never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete’. When Tranter uses an ‘I’ in his poems it is merely a pronoun of convenience, a basket-case housing an individual’s constituents: a jumble of thought, borrowed behaviours, second-hand experience, and ripped-off speech. But his project is the same: ‘the self’, the poems corroborate, is a whole lot more contingent than we would like to believe. In fact they’re often comical and sometimes rather stylish. The personas in John Tranter’s poems, his own included, may not be as hellish as Bacon’s. And in the world of poetry, this distorted borderland is Tranter territory. ‘Up to what degree of distortion’, Kundera asks, ‘does an individual still remain himself?’ Or more crucially: ‘where is the border beyond which a self ceases to be a self?’ These are fascinating, if troubling, questions. In his latest collection of essays, Milan Kundera describes the savage portraiture of Francis Bacon as interrogations into the limits of the self.
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