John Tranter

Interview with The Reader magazine, 2004

This interview was conducted by Jane Nethercote and published in The Reader, 1/2 Walmer Street, Abbotsford, Melbourne VIC 3067, on Friday 3 September 2004, No 62.
This piece is about two printed pages long.

Is there such a thing as the craft of poetry writing? Do you have to master haiku and the sonnet before exploring your own forms?

Yes. It takes around ten years of training to be a doctor, a typographer, or a jazz musician. Poetry’s the same.

Is rhymed poetry harder to write than free verse?

It used to be easy, because traditionally you could use syntactical inversions: He kissed the child & by the hand led / And to his mother brought, / Who in sorrow pale, thro’ the lonely dale, / Her little boy weeping sought. That’s Blake’s ‘The Little Boy Found’, with rhyming verbs at the ends of sentences placed. Today no poet would dare to do that, because after a century of free verse, it looks silly. To write unobtrusive rhyme is a subtle and difficult matter.

Do women poets write very differently from male poets?

Well, they lack that testosterone-driven need to show off and defeat rivals, so that would make a welcome difference. But I don’t think I could pick a ‘girly’ poem from a ‘blokey’ poem. Poets are usually a bit of both.

Is writing a poem, its structures and word play etc, a transferable skill? Do poets make good novelists and journalists?

The skills are alike, but not the attitudes. Novelists are patient, hard-working people, droning away at a mountain of writing for years at a time. And journalists are workaholics, ready to sacrifice anything to get a story written to length, and to a deadline. Poets are more the spoilt grasshopper than the ambitious ant: lazy, and sensitive.

Why is Australian poetry so obsessively elegiac?

I think most poetry is a little elegaic because every poem is really a celebration of and a lament for a moment — or a feeling, or a love affair — that has just passed into history as you write it, and thus into the shadow of the valley of death. As well, poets feel that poetry itself is a dying art.

Why has satire largely been ignored in Australian poetry?

We used to be good at it — poems like The Sentimental Bloke by C.J. Dennis, and some of the humorous bush ballads, are often satirical. People don’t ‘recite’ any more, like they used to, around the pianola. Television does that stuff better, and — as the song says — video killed the radio star.

Why has Australian vernacular largely been ignored by modern Australian poets?

Vernacular is casual and spoken, coarse and familiar, and poetry is usually formal and finely written, aiming for an elevated tone. It’s no accident that poetry is called for at funerals, when some serious, deep and painful issues need to be faced. Again, television is good at vernacular.

Is bucolic poetry dying out in Australia?

Australia has been a predominantly urban nation since about 1915. I grew up on a farm. Farmers don’t have much interest in literature. I can tell you from experience that farm life is generally very boring. I couldn’t wait to get to the big city, where life is more various and more interesting. Most bucolic poetry is artificial, and has been so since a group of sophisticated intellectuals working at a research institute in the busy sea-port city of Alexandria invented the bucolic form, for their amusement, around 300 B.C.

Does the best poetry belong on the page rather than for reciting?

For a poem to work when recited it has to give up all its meaning as you hear it. Printed poetry can pack more complexity in, because the reader can go back over it several times to unpack the different layers of meaning. A good poem works well both ways, if you’re lucky.

How competitive is the poetry scene? Do other poets resent Les Murray’s prominence?

I don’t feel it’s all that competitive, really. And I don’t think it’s Les Murray’s prominence that is resented; it’s more his general tone and attitude. To accept the Queen’s Medal for Poetry — as Les did — is fine, if you’re a paid-up Monarchist. But for a so-called Australian republican, well... I think a lot of people felt betrayed, to see that coarse ambition bluntly displayed. There’s a rhyme for you.