This is John Tranter’s homepage at:   johntranter.com

John Tranter, Sydney, 2009
photo by Anders Hallengren

“John Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet.”

 — US Publishers’ Weekly, 2007      

Including reviews, interviews, photos, and poems, this site offers more than a thousand printed pages of free reading matter, and has been visited more than thirty thousand times. Enjoy!

Note: Please refresh your browser’s stored view of this page, to see the latest changes: usually Control + R

Having more or less avoided the wheels of the juggernaut of Academia since my 1971 B.A., I stumbled in 2005 and woke to find myself enrolled in a course at the University of Wollongong. The thesis dissertation consists of 113 poems and a 30,000-word exegesis. The Doctor of Creative Arts degree, highly commended, was conferred in 2009.

NEW: John Tranter interviewed by Brian Henry, 2010: “…the audience has more than a painting to consider: they have a whole history lesson, an artistic argument and an Oedipal struggle as well.”

NEW: The Salt Companion to John Tranter
The blurb says: “The essays published here focus on key works in Tranter’s career to date, emphasising the importance of his work as editor as well as poet, both in an Australian and in an international context. They include close readings of poems that illustrate the formal range of his work, assess the reception of his books in the context of his perceived role as symbolic representative of an urban, cosmopolitan, tradition in Australian culture, and provide fresh interpretations of his relationships with English, French and American literature.”
Read the Preface here.     Attend the Sydney launch: all welcome: details here (PDF).

NEW: Starlight: 150 Poems (UQP, September 2010)
From Andrew Wilkins, in Bookseller + Publisher, Sept. 2010: “The publication of Starlight marks John Tranter’s 50 years as a writer, and follows the highly successful Urban Myths (2006), which won just about every literary award going, including the overall prize in the South Australian Premier’s Award for Literature. Tranter is one of a handful of Australian poets whose books sell well and, following the sad death of Peter Porter earlier this year, he and Les Murray are arguably our most senior and important poets. Starlight gives us all the more reason to celebrate this most energetic and literate of voices.
    Reading the 150 poems in this collection is to spend time in the company of a writer steeped (well-versed?) in the work of other poets, and able to assume different narrative voices at will. There are poems inspired by the French poet Baudelaire, American John Ashbery and T S Eliot. Infiltrating his work is a dry, laconic wit and a rich understanding of culture and history. […] A particular pleasure was the lively sequence ‘At the Movies’, which ruminates on films of the past, and Tranter’s updated response to Baudelaire’s celebrated Fleurs du Mal, which is every bit as wicked and visceral as the original.”
   You can read poems from this book here, here, and here.
    Attend the Sydney launch of Starlight: all welcome: details here (PDF).

Lazybones, sleepin’ in the sun… Some time ago I was invited to become a visiting Fellow at the Civitella Ranieri, a castle in Umbria, Italy, to work on a sequence of new poems. You can see a slideshow sequence of some thirty photos I have taken of the Civitella and its surrounds on this site. Here are some photos of cloudscapes. Here’s the informative website of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. And yes, in between taking photographs I did write some poems: fifty-six loose adaptations of poems from the 1861 edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, which found a home in my next book, above.

Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected (UQP, 2006, 322 pages) has been awarded:

 — The 2006 Victorian state award for poetry

 — The 2007 New South Wales state award for poetry

 — The 2008 South Australian state award for poetry, 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).

No other book of poetry has ever been so popular with the judges of so many different Australian awards. You can read the judges’ [»] readers’ reports here. You can download a PDF file of the first half of the book here: [»] Urban Myths: 523 pages. You can also read 100 pages of notes to the book [»»] here on this site, and you can order the (beautifully) printed version of the book direct from [»] the publisher.

Would you like to know the secret of John Tranter’s success? He always keeps this advice in mind, from [»] Screenwriting, a book by Richard Walter: When asked to offer his single most important piece of advice for writers, writer Tommy Thompson responded after a long, thoughtful pause: Every day, no matter what else you do, get dressed.

Note from John Tranter: This site began in 1998. It is not a weblog, updated every day. Instead, it grows gradually, and is designed to be a long-term useful resource for people wanting to know about my life and my work. It is already over a thousand pages long.

Here you can read my [»] poems, and read about my life (here’s a biographical [»] note) and what has formed my writing practice. There are [»] interviews with me and [»] reviews of my books (not all the reviews are favourable!) and [»] photos taken at various stages of my life.

Who am I? I sometimes wonder… My father wanted me to be a farmer, and I wanted to be a fighter pilot or a buddhist monk. What lonely occupations! Fortunately we were both wrong. I have been writing poetry for forty years; twenty books of poetry (here is a [»] list) and a book of experimental fiction, [»] Different Hands. I also edited four anthologies including co-editing the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (1991), published in Britain and the US as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. In 1997 I founded the free Internet literary magazine [»] Jacket. In 2010 I arranged to give the magazine, with its eight thousand or so pages of back issues, to the University of Pennsylvania. They will take over the joy and the burden of Jacket in 2011, and will give it a good home, ensuring its long-term growth and its archival future.

APRIL

In 2004 I started a project to put thousands of Australian poems on the Internet. It has grown into the Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library (APRIL: what a nice acronym!) and has been funded with a half-million-dollar Linkage Grant from the Australian Research Council, starting in mid-2006. Professor Elizabeth Webby and Creagh Cole, from the University of Sydney, in association with [»] CAL (the Copyright Agency Limited), will head a team of researchers to built a permanent and wide-ranging library of resources on the University of Sydney Library Internet server. You can see how the work is progressing here: http://april.edu.au/

If you notice any typos or errors on this site, please let me know:
[»] Send an email to John Tranter

Reprinted!
The Floor of Heaven, a collection of four long loosely-linked narrative poems, reprinted by Jacket Press and distributed by the University of Queensland Press in June 2007.


‘A rattling good read!’
 — John Ashbery, launching the book in 1992

‘The Floor of Heaven is a tour de force, a devious and profoundly subversive conjuring trick by a poet writing at the peak of his powers… the book pulses with a curious resonance… reminded me irresistibly of the best moments in Twin Peaks… a strange lyricism.’
 — Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald

‘The Floor of Heaven is a hypnotic read; it will stay with you when you come out of your trance…’
 — Carmel Bird, Australian Book Review

‘… a crudity of feeling that gives many of his early poems the glazed, dated air of 70s airport lounges.… The Floor of Heaven is very dull reading and gets duller as the trash novel impetus of the narrative wears away… a literature of defeat.’
 — Alison Croggon, ABC Books and Writing

More free downloads! A free PDF file of [»] The Floor of Heaven. Like the Urban Myths file, this PDF file is free to download and read in its entirety, but it cannot be printed. Printed copies of this book can be purchased from [»] the publisher’s website or from the University of Queensland Bookshop mail order department: phone (617+) 3346 9434, fax (617+) 3365 1988 and email at
<benc[ât]uqp.uq.edu.au>

But wait! There’s more!
You can also download these two books in read-only Adobe Acrobat PDF format:
[»] The Blast Area: 38 pages
[»] Crying in Early Infancy: 55 pages.
These files require a PDF reader like Foxit, Mac OS X Preview, or others.