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John Tranter: a selection of poems
Christopher Brennan (1870–1932)
By Blue Ontario’s Shore
Eight poems from Late Night Radio
Off-site: John Tranter’s homepage offers over a hundred pages of poems, including all of the 1972 volume Red Movie and other poems
Christopher Brennan (1870–1932)
He spoke German,
fluently, and French.
One he got by study,
the other from an inclination to drink
absinthe, like the poets who were always writing
among the cafés and the bottles and the crowds of women.
How do they do it? He liked women,
though they seemed a little too German,
at times, invading the domain of writing
and buggering up his whispered amatory French
the way that a few too many drinks
would ginger up but addle the study
of his volumes of foreign verse. In the study
he worked at a huge monument to women
for an hour or two, then had a drink.
Phew! Like a good German
he had a method for everything, and like the French
he wasted it on writing
poems about feeling like writing
all through the night. His study
lamp glowed out across the Quad. Famous French
poets wrote to him, once or twice. Women
from one end of Europe to the other admired his German
manners. Ah, Heidelberg! Must be time for a drink.
Back to the heatstruck colonies. God, a drink
would go down well, eh? Those oafs writing
gibberish and hoping for a pass in German
Romantic literature, look at them, as though study
were enough! What about inspiration? The women
of Sydney are not really suited to modern French
poetry. And Mallarmé’s obscurities — too French,
if that were possible. One last drink.
In a sheep-farming province, young women
who wish to develop the discipline of writing
well, should take up the study
of German. . .
He yearned to dream in French, but all he heard was German.
He inclined to drink, and trudged through a torrent of study
and when he reached for women, they became his writing.
This poem is in the form of a sestina.
A page on this site explains the form.
Christopher Brennan is perhaps Australia’s first modern poet, though in many ways his vocabulary, his idea of the role of the poet and his understanding of what poetry could do all avoid the challenges of the twentieth century. He studied classics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, travelled to Berlin and back, corresponded with the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, worked at the Public Library in Sydney and after striving to obtain an appointment for many years became a lecturer at the University where he had studied. He life was damaged by alcohol; he led a bohemian existence, was fired from his position of associate professor of German in 1925, and died in poverty seven years later. His enthusiasm for symbolist ideas was ahead of its time in Sydney, where the Bulletin advanced the hearty ideals of the bush ballad school, but his fondness for grandiose themes and cloudy images delivered in a largely artificial poetic vocabulary prevented him from responding to the developments in poetry after 1890.
You can read Brennan’s Poems 1913 on the University of Sydney SETIS site.
By Blue Ontario’s Shore
I listened to the Phantom by Ontario’s shore,
I heard the voice arising demanding bards [...]
Rhymes and rhymers pass away, poems distill’d from poems pass away,
The swarms of reflectors and the polite pass, and leave ashes [...]
The proof of a poet shall be sternly deferr’d ...
— Walt Whitman, ‘By Blue Ontario’s Shore’ (from Leaves of Grass)
Marion owned a Van from which
the Sunset View was portable and thus
perennial; his pal Homer had a Mobile Home
in whose polished sides a swarming universe
wavered and slipped from future to past tense
along a wobbling strip of two-lane blacktop.
Could they, twain, yet be one, in the hamlet
of Sodus? Homer and his buddy Marion
came to a Huddle by the Owls’ Nest;
the Mud Mills turned Yellow in the sunset
and a noble thought struck them both
near the Noble Corner, though their motives
were muddled. Marion was a Morrison
and had a twin brother, name of Clyde,
who had brought down a fog of shame
on the elder branch of the clan. When
the torpid fifties leered over the horizon,
Clyde, like many an anxious Communist
before him, had fled to torrid Mexico
and wallowed there in a mess of memories,
then hove north to the city of the Angels
in search of Joy and a Fair Haven. There he rose
like a Phoenix from Furnaceville, ashes
in the fume and updraft of the sixties, lost
like the snapshot of a girl he had been dating,
name of Little Egypt, Gypsy Queen, and
in a name-change (to Wayne) found
his soul’s Center and his future waiting.
Notes:
— Names in italics are the names of towns in upstate New York by the shore of Lake Ontario. John Ashbery grew up on a fruit farm in that region, near the town of Sodus; his nickname when young was ‘Ashes’.
— John Wayne claimed that his real name was Marion Morrison. This poem suggests that his identity was ambiguous.
Eight poems from Late Night Radio
from Late Night Radio, Polygon, Edinburgh, 1998
Late Night Radio cover
A Jackeroo in Kensington
With a fistful of dollars in a knapsack
and a brutal turn of phrase, colonials
are crashing the party. Cette parade sauvage:
on the skyline you can see Rupert Murdoch
crawling over Fleet Street, a pigmy King Kong —
did they shrug off an empire for this?
Too right boss, that’s what I want to hear,
the glib, slangy lingo of the tango dancers
steaming through the Heads in a sepia haze —
it’s the bottom of the world
say the blond sophisticates. Hang on:
wasn’t ’King Kong’ invented in America?
The eyes that look into Australia
are European eyes, Peter Porter said, but
my friends’ kids holidayed in Hollywood,
and live in San Francisco. I’m
middle-aged, and England made me, cobber,
reading Maugham in the shower recess — though
what about Malraux? and Lao Tzu?
I’m going to be a Chinaman
next time around, speaking perfect English
or Creole, who can choose between
the torrid charms of the one and the
cool, pragmatic bite of the other?
Can you say You fuckwit! in Italian?
No way, but if you play Wagner
loud enough you’ll get rich quick
in the Bloomsbury sense of the word —
a humus of culture, a knack for sleeping in,
these things adorn you like a froth
and the National Gallery opens its doors
for you, and you alone, at last.
The Creature From the Black Lagoon
Sunbathing on deck’s the done thing,
but it makes the Brylcreem run
and stain the collar of your poplin
beach shirt. Palm trees drift by
as though your sins had turned vegetable
and semaphore. Sins of the laboratory, I mean,
not the confessional . . . yes, the engine room
looks suitable, and through the porthole
a wise old man waiting patiently
in the wavering water — that’s no priest!
Captain! But the Captain’s a gutless
foreigner, drinks gin, and never shaves.
You pity the girl in the bathing suit —
she may be a palæontologist, but
sure as eggs she’s going to get
a terrible fright. And the ethnic extras,
they have to die on our journey
towards the knowledge that shimmers behind
the South American façade. The priest
turns his scaly back: that creature,
rising like a new disease from the gene pool,
why should we pity him? Deracinated,
maybe, but what a guy! No, it’s wrong,
don’t kiss him! I can feel it,
soaking through the blood-brain barrier . . .
he’s never known the touch of a woman’s . . . whoops!
Here’s the nut with the speargun on a hunting
spree — Duck, Tabby! Duck and cover! Here comes
the bolt from the blue, to shut up sorrow,
to stop up the barrel of fun like a dead
king.
And what colour’s the blood, Doctor? Red?
Can you explain that? And what of the offspring?
The Un-American Women
One, they’re spooking, two, they’re opening letters,
three, there’s a body at the bottom of the pool
labelled ‘Comrade X’, and you’ve been asked to
speak up truthfully or not at all. It’s like Einstein
lolling on the lawn — somebody gave him the telescope,
he wouldn’t ‘buy’ one — and our investigator has him
trapped in the viewfinder. Albert! Tell us everything!
We won’t blame you for the Atom Bomb! After all,
you’re dead! Four, cancel the code and burn the cipher.
It’s no laughing matter when the shit hits the fan —
why are you grinning like that? Are you now
or have you ever been a woman? That’s a tricky one,
I know you’d like a stiff rum and coke and ten minutes
alone on the patio to think it over, but
the G-Men in the back room are getting anxious;
the Mickey Finn’s invented, the hand that
feeds you’s quicker than the eye, and in a wink
the powder’s in the drink! Our Leader’s dozing
in a tank, and in his memory we labour mightily.
Are you a German Jew? We sympathise; do you?
The Memory Bank is sad tonight, it’s asking
for your friends, they have a future there.
Let’s share a pentothal and take a ride;
the garden’s full of Government Employees
but I’ll hold your hand. You make a movie,
I’ll write the dialogue: One, we’re laughing,
two, we’re breaking rules — I’m finished, you’re
dead, and as the cipher smoulders on the lawn
a cold glow rises from the bottom of the tank:
our Leader starts to speak, and so will you.
Stratocruiser
This is a dream I had each night in Korea,
where I was very busy killing in a plane:
I boarded an ocean liner as my destiny
ordered, and sailed away. The sun came up
over the scented tropics, day after day.
Then the underbelly of Europe appeared:
its black ice, its suffocating manners.
And then I was nodding off in the bar
downstairs in the Stratocruiser —
endless thunder over the Sea of Japan,
droning home through a mile-high wall of rain —
you wake up just as you think ‘touchdown’,
and the fat tyres kiss the wet tarmac, bump,
shriek, and touch again.
The flak jacket
waiting to be invented, your shabby suit
hanging at the cleaners with another name
carefully printed on the tag — your roles
were there all along, shifting slightly
in the shadows of a doorway somewhere in
South-east Asia, but still yours, and you
slip back into the last half of the century,
unannounced, unmarked, without a second look.
Poolside
The host climbs out, soaked and spitting oaths,
and a teenage girl leaves the barbecue.
Two of those drinks your wife mixed,
bright pink and cheerful, and I’m
seeing double: breasts, twin headaches
exactly the same size await me
frowning from each temple, and a diptych
concusses the chatter: a car salesman
hitting his better half. A pygmy politics emerges
wherever two or more of you are gathered,
shopping together. All right, stop biting,
I’d much rather sleep with you than with
that other poltergeist. You’re greedy,
aren’t you? O Painted Laugh, why is your
belly convulsing? Can ‘a man’ become a sign
for ‘a muscular spasm’? Horoscope,
betray yourself, take me back to a feast,
if this is a feast, these glib flirtations,
the whole gang badly knocked out
by the mundane speech the flame attempts,
each sleep a cancelled cheque, as I
watch myself thinking of you, deracinated
Sweetheart, boarding a Grayhound.
Sonnet : Lullaby
I’m not jealous of your pet executives —
their coma therapy, their new guitars.
The latest boyfriend’s hardly seventeen,
isn’t that what the tabloids say?
In the cheap hotel, the heaps of magazines —
You Can’t Go Back to Woop Woop, sobs
the big print. And the speed jerking
up the spinal column to its spasm above.
Now the sea heaps itself on the pillow
with its wacky promises, and you’re floating
through the ceiling again. Tell sex to go
back to the playpen where it came from. Your
future’s waiting: suburbia loud with radios,
telling you to wake up now, and do the shopping!
Backyard
The God of Smoke listens idly in the heat
to the barbecue sausages
speaking the language of rain deceitfully
as their fat dances.
Azure, hazed, the huge drifting sky shelters
its threatening weather.
A screen door slams, and the kids come tumbling
out of their arguments,
and the barrage of shouting begins, concerning
young Sandra and Scott
and the broken badminton racquet and net
and the burning meat.
Is that a fifties home movie, or the real
thing? Heavens, how
a child and a beach ball in natural colour
can break your heart.
And the brown dog worries the khaki grass
to stop it from growing
in place of his worship, the burying bone.
The bone that stinks.
Turn now to the God of this tattered arena
watching over the rites of passage —
marriage, separation; adolescence
and troubled maturity:
having served under that bright sky you may look up
but don’t ask too much:
some cold beer, a few old friends in the afternoon,
a Southerly Buster at dusk.
The Popular Mysteries
A fact is as real as
you make it, and your complex
dreaming is a gift factory
as silly as a lucky dip, as
basic as a traffic accident.
And after a quick lunch on the harbour,
a drink picks you up and you
drift off the surface of the planet
daft, adolescent and deeply wise:
a fine glow lights up
your lazy limbs and the nerves
drop away. Behind the blue horizon
a boat disappears, popular mysteries
begin. Your lips fade. You’re
asleep, and thoroughly happy.
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