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JOHN
TRANTER
John Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales, in 1943. He attended country schools, and took his BA in 1970. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has travelled widely. He has lived in London, Singapore, Brisbane, and San Francisco, and now lives in Sydney. He is married, with two adult children.
John Tranter has published a number of anthologies and more than twenty volumes of verse, including Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (University of Queensland Press, Australia, and Salt Publishing, Cambridge UK, 2006), which won the Victorian state award for poetry in 2006, the New South Wales state award for poetry in 2007, the South Australian state award for poetry in 2008, and the 2008 South Australian Premier’s Prize for the best book overall (fiction, non-fiction, poetry and others for the years 2006 and 2007). His next book will be Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, 2010).
In 2010 Salt Publishing UK will publish a volume of essays on the poetry of John Tranter by a dozen critics in Britain, Australia and the United States, edited by Rod Mengham, of Jesus College, Cambridge, England.
He is the founding publisher of
the free Internet literary magazine Jacket, founded in October 1997.
The US Publishers’ Weekly called it “the first (and best) large-scale
Internet poetry journal.” He is also the founder of Australian Poetry
Resources Internet Library (APRIL), a team project to place poetry and
background for over a thousand poets on the Internet. His
homepage can be found here.
King of the Hill
If marginal calls are made, the stock market
won’t be able to handle it. It’s less trouble
for them to pay someone to fix it, than
for them to fix it. You can tell the top brass:
they have a flower in the buttonhole.
A lovely pale blue check shirt, flax, linen.
And a kiss for the informer on your lap,
and for the boss, a stiff drink or two.
We are paying to stay for a while in your place –
is that okay? We’ll get a cleaner.
She smoked heavily: one lung less for her,
and she’s lucky to survive the operation.
King of the hill, for what that’s worth. This
was mine, and I let it slip through my fingers.
Melting Moments
If you and that creep come in late for class
don’t apologise, please. There’s no point.
There never is. Staying up late, drinking
with the head teacher, watching him fall asleep,
you think you’re immortal. For more years,
it seemed, than an omnivore has had
hot dinners, we sat watching the cute
New Zealander, one hand on her stomach
and the other holding a carving knife, although
that too is something that must be analysed,
together with the rest of the ugly drama.
On Friday at dawn Mêler will be there, full of
love for her and her song, and the envelope
full of powder, the reason for her lover’s ennui.
No Parole
With that lot of tough-guy senior citizens it was
the Town of the Land Rovers. Men have a mystique
of their own, like women, but more mystical.
All the great religious madmen were mad men.
You call this a holiday? On the one hand,
the Romanian police, but then the local Mafia
are more gruesome. Is Pakistan any better?
If that Maori song disco dance planner, she said,
is on the train to Lahore, then I’m outta here.
She had been the script girl on a movie that won
all this year’s awards. We strolled out of the movie
into the glare and noise of the street and she
started arguing about some Sondheim musical,
this event rounding the corner.
The Coloured Future
Left to their own devices they’re has-been nobodies,
but when they’re called, they’re special. So they think.
Too bad they didn’t ask my advice. It turns bitter
when the shit hits the fan and they’re no longer news.
Heaven has no rage like children who are born
too late to a couple of homeless people, they
can kiss the idea of promotion good-bye. What causes
moonlight? Ask the top executive, Mister Shankar,
laughing alone in the top floor penthouse
high above the corporate maelstrom, who orders
all the rituals Colonel Bach instituted to be struck out
and replaced by one woman who wears a dress too tight
on all fours on the grass of the Executive Putting Green
while her children at home review their budding careers.
copyright © John Tranter
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