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With the sestina as a model, John Tranter has created the terminal — a new form similar to, but far more flexible than, the sestina in its emphasis on end-words. Taking only the line endings from previously published poems, the terminal can be any length, and the number of terminals possible in the English language is limited only by the number of poems in the English language. The form has infinite potential. Unrestricted to 39 lines as in the sestina,[2] not limited to 14 or 19 rhyming lines as with the sonnet and the villanelle, not expected to repeat itself like the pantoum and the villanelle, and not tethered to any rhyme scheme or syllable count like the ballad, terza rima, heroic couplet, alexandrine, sapphics, or ottava rima, the terminal as a poetic form is vastly open to possibility. But because the existence of a terminal depends on a prior poem, it has the ultimate limit: the single poem. Thus, the terminal raises various issues about poetic form, conservation, usurpation, influence, and composition that no other form can raise.

Because Tranter overwrites — and in the process simultaneously effaces and preserves — his source poem while retaining the anchoring points of the source poem, his terminals are both conservative and destructive. By using and acknowledging the original (he never tries to conceal his sources), Tranter performs an act of poetic conservation, calling contemporary readers’ attention to a poem he considers worth reading while also encouraging comparative readings.[3] But by replacing almost every word in the original — with the exception of the last word of each line — with his own, he destroys the original poem, jettisoning its meaning, diction, emotional effects, historical context, and atmosphere, even if he tries to pay homage to the original by following or updating it.[4] No poetic forms contain such potential, and because Tranter now has published ten terminals — eight of them in his 2003 volume Studio Moon — it has emerged as a viable form that deserves further examination.

Australian critic Martin Duwell has argued that Tranter’s generative forms — which include, but are not limited to, the terminal — are meant as stays against confusion: “it is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a connection between this poetry’s obsession with its own processes of generation and its entropic setting.”[5] This kind of statement is commonly made about contemporary poems in traditional form when the poet is not considered a traditionalist. In an attempt to reconcile postmodernism with poetic tradition, critics frequently view poets who engage with traditional forms — especially poets otherwise considered innovative or experimental — as responding to the chaos of twentieth-century life. Such thinking neglects to account for why traditionally minded poets — i.e., those who detest, distrust, or ignore the technical advances of modernism and postmodernism — write in form. It also contradicts the common critical view of postmodern prose writers who have exploded rather than refined the novel form, apparently for the same reason postmodern poets work with traditional forms: to establish bulwarks against chaos. This view is as limited and reductive as it is pervasive, and is seldom advanced by poets themselves. While Duwell perpetuates this kind of thinking, he can hardly be blamed for doing so, considering that this observation, which has become a critical truism, occurs in a brief book review — not exactly the forum for an in-depth investigation of a postmodern poet’s use of traditional forms like the sestina.[6]

The American poet James Cummins offers a more satisfying explanation of postmodern formalism in his essay “Calliope Music: Notes on the Sestina,” which confronts the uneasy situation of the sestina today.[7] Cummins, one of the most capable sestina writers in the United States — his first book, The Whole Truth (1986), is a verse novel composed of 24 sestinas and was recently brought back into print by Carnegie Mellon University Press in its Classic Contemporaries series — initially echoes Duwell but also ventures elsewhere: “Besides the desire for permanence — which is itself, of course, another way of stating the fear of impermanence — formalists want sport, play ... an abstract field with clearly delineated rules, wherein the cleanly played game, the artifice, stands clear of the messiness of life, and comments on it.”[8] Though he adds another consideration to the topic — that of “play” — Cummins, like Duwell and many others, feels obliged to reach beyond the challenges and pleasures of form to “the messiness of life,” as if formal play required any outside justification to be worthwhile or meaningful. Many experimental poets, especially those associated with OULIPO and Language writing, have foregrounded process, or artifice, in their work, using chance operations, mathematical or scientific structures, or other non-traditional forms to frame their writing. Given their long-term commitments to these processes, these poets either are chronically unable to cope with the chaos of life or are deeply interested in the formal and generative qualities of the processes themselves.

Cummins also points out that “corollary to this is the idea of the received form, brought to perfection by masters of an earlier time — Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare — against whom one can be measured, with whom one can take one’s place. One can master a form and ... it can grant permanence.”[9] But with nonce forms — like Tranter’s terminal, or those used by Lyn Hejinian in My Life or Christian Bök in Eunoia, for example — there are no masters against whom to measure oneself or stand beside. The creator of a new form, in effect, becomes the master against whom later poets will measure themselves, if the form lasts. Such poets do not seek to follow the paths of the “masters of an earlier time,” but to establish another, parallel path of which they become the origin.

Cummins’s comment about masters resonates with Duwell’s admission that he used to interpret Tranter’s use of others’s poems as “competitive,” stemming from “the common desire among poets to excel, to outdo all others,” but he now wonders “whether it is not a response to the challenge to revivify the poems, to prevent them from becoming mere historical art-objects.”[10] One has to wonder how using a poet’s end-words could be considered competitive, since the “common desire among poets to ... outdo all others” rarely entails revisiting the site of the original and walking a pre-determined path. Only one of the authors of Tranter’s sources is Australian — the nineteenth-century balladeer Banjo Paterson, who is hardly competition for the urbane Tranter writing in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If the terminal arose from competitiveness, Tranter would seek to “outdo” elder figures like A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, and Gwen Harwood, or poets like John Forbes, Martin Johnston, Alan Wearne, Laurie Duggan, Ken Bolton, and Pam Brown, who share many of his aesthetic beliefs, or Les Murray, Robert Gray, Kevin Hart, Peter Porter, and Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who do not. Although Tranter could be avoiding competition with fellow Australian poets, competing instead with the British and American poets who provide the sources for most of his terminals, his choices of poems do not support that line of reasoning. If he truly wanted to “outdo all others,” he would not turn to the work of poets of the New York School or peripheral figures in Beat and Language writing, many of whom still write outside the mainstream and go unacknowledged by most poetry readers. To write American poetry off the map, Tranter would have to tackle poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. Or if he wanted to compete with American poets of his own generation, poets like Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, and James Tate would be far likelier sources than those he has chosen.

Clearly, as Duwell later realized, something else compels Tranter to write over other poets’s poems. His more recent hypothesis — “to revivify the poems, to prevent them from becoming mere historical art-objects” — seems closer to Tranter’s intentions, but also seems inadequate because of the sources of Tranter’s terminals. Of the nine sources he uses for his terminals, only four — John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” Banjo Paterson’s “The Man From Snowy River,” Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” — could be considered “mere historical art-objects.” O’Hara’s poetry will never need revivifying; and because relatively few people have read them and because they are recent, the poems by Kathleen Fraser, Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, and James Schuyler do not require such rescuing.

Though Duwell’s consideration of Tranter’s generative forms is most welcome in a critical climate that does its best to ignore the formal and material qualities of poetry, I would argue that Tranter created the terminal not to mimic or hold off chaos, compete with other poets, or rejuvenate dying poems, but to present himself with new challenges in style and conception while interacting with other poems and, thus, their authors. Poets who work in traditional forms — particularly poets, like John Ashbery and Paul Muldoon, who reinvigorate or reinvent traditional forms instead of plodding through them — often see the restraints of form as liberating or catalytic. For such poets, the pre-established strictures of the form — such as the number of lines, rhyme scheme, end-words, or metrical pattern — paradoxically assist, rather than hinder, poetic creation. Muldoon and Ashbery seem apt points of reference for Tranter’s terminals because both poets are prolific and innovative in their approaches to form, which would seem to contradict the cliché that form stifles creativity.

The sonnet is Muldoon’s traditional vehicle of choice, but few of his sonnets are immediately recognizable as such.[11] Their line lengths vary significantly, and the rhymes are often so far apart or so faint that they serve more of a structural role than an oral/aural one. Perhaps as a result of his extended residence in the United States, Muldoon’s poems have recently begun to gravitate from the sonnet to other forms: the sestina (“Cauliflowers” in Madoc [1990], “Green Gown” in The Annals of Chile [1994], “Wire” in Hay [1998], and “The Misfits” and “The Turn” in Moy Sand and Gravel [2002]), terza rima (“Cows” in The Annals of Chile, “Blissom” in Hay, and “Unapproved Road” in Moy Sand and Gravel), the rhyming pantoum (“A Journey to Cracow” in Hay), the ghazal (“The Little Black Book” in Hay), and the extended villanelle (“Milkweed and Monarch” in The Annals of Chile and “Longbones” in Hay). And there are numerous poems in rhyming couplets and quatrains in those books. Still, Muldoon’s persistence in traditional forms — especially the sonnet — over 35 years of writing seems to signal an indelible desire to participate in a tradition — specifically, a lineage of poets working in forms, from Keats to W.B. Yeats to Frost to Seamus Heaney, all of whom have done some of their best work in the sonnet form.

Although Ashbery’s poetry has less formal intensity than Muldoon’s does, he has a similarly adventuresome attitude toward traditional forms.[12] The relatively disciplined formal poems in his first book, Some Trees (1956) — “Pantoum,” “Canzone,” some sonnets, and the sestinas “Poem,” “A Pastoral,” and “The Painter” — were followed by the more innovative sestinas “Faust” in The Tennis-Court Oath (1962) and “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” in The Double Dream of Spring (1970). This experimentation with the sestina culminated in the double sestina in Flow Chart (1991).[13] More recently, Ashbery has written pantoums (“Hotel Lautréamont” and “Seasonal” in Hotel Lautréamont [1992]), a cento (“The Dong With the Luminous Nose” in Wakefulness [1998]), and a near-villanelle (“Real Time” in Chinese Whispers [2002]). Despite these occasional forays into various forms, the sestina is the form he has returned to most frequently over the past five decades.

But Ashbery has written far more free verse than Muldoon has, and the sonnet represents a much smaller part of his oeuvre than it does for Muldoon. Thus, in this context, Ashbery’s poems that use traditional forms are more extra-ordinary than Muldoon’s. Given his reputation as an innovator, we would expect Ashbery’s formal verse to experiment with, disrupt, or even defy the forms at hand. His double sestina in Flow Chart — one of the few in the language — uses the end-words of another double sestina, that of Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa” (1870). Since Swinburne’s poem rhymes “breath” with “death,” “bed” with “dead,” and “thee” with “me,” it presents formidable challenges to an American poet writing in the last decade of the twentieth century. Rhyming and repeating “breath” and “death” seven times in one poem would be a challenge to any poet, which is perhaps in part why Ashbery pursued it. Despite the rhymes and the restrictions of the form, Ashbery avoids stilted diction by varying line lengths and using a colloquial style. And by placing the double sestina toward, but not at, the end of a 216-page-long poem, he downplays its significance in relation to the rest of his work. Ashbery’s double sestina also serves as a prototype for Tranter’s terminals, taking as it does the end-words from a previously published poem. Where Ashbery’s terminal is also, and most obviously, an embellished traditional poetic form, the forms of Tranter’s terminals range from the Keatsian ode to ballad quatrains to the irregularly rhyming, sonnet-oriented “Dover Beach” to free verse, naturally because the sources of the poems also vary in their forms.

II. Tranter’s Terminals

Tranter’s Terminal   —  Source Poem

“Grover Leach”
       — Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
“See Rover Reach”
       — Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
“In Praise of Sandstone”
       — W.H. Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”
“Paid Meridian”
       — Diane di Prima, “On Sitting Down to Write,
       I Decide Instead to Go to Fred Herko’s Concert”
“Trastevere”
       — Kathleen Fraser, “Re: searches [fragments,
       after Anakreon, for Emily Dickinson]”
“The Twilight Guest”
       — Barbara Guest, “Twilight Polka Dots”
“Thanks, Joe”
       — John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
“Three Poems About Kenneth Koch”
       — Frank O’Hara, “3 Poems About Kenneth Koch”
“Snowy”
       — A.B. Paterson, “The Man From Snowy River”
“Elegy, after James Schuyler” [now (2008) titled ‘Radium’]
       — James Schuyler, “Buried at Springs”

Rather than attempt to hide their sources, Tranter’s terminals frequently acknowledge them in their titles, which anagrammatize the poet’s name (“Paid Meridian,” “Thanks, Joe”), pun on or edit the original poem’s name (“Grover Leach,” “See Rover Reach,” “The Twilight Guest,” “Snowy,” “In Praise of Sandstone”), or otherwise refer to the original poem (“Three Poems About Kenneth Koch,” “Elegy, after James Schuyler”). The sources of his terminals are canonical poems by canonical poets — John Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Banjo Paterson’s ballad “The Man From Snowy River,” W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” — or poems by first- and second-generation New York School, Beat, or Language poets — Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, Diane di Prima. With the classic poems, Tranter updates, deflates, or transplants[14] the ideas and ideals of the originals; with the more recent poems, Tranter’s choices of poets point to his own aesthetic affinities and can be seen as attempts to build connections between him and poets he admires through their poems.[15] In both cases, Tranter uses the original poems as sites of engagement.

One of Tranter’s more memorable terminals, “Thanks, Joe,” takes Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” as its source. Divided into three numbered parts, “Ode on Melancholy” uses the same stanzaic structure and rhyme scheme as “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode on Indolence.” Each ten-line stanza combines the rhyming quatrain of the Shakespearean sonnet — ABAB — with the final sestet of the Petrarchan sonnet — CDECDE — to create a hybrid form. But as Keats’s sonnets frequently veer from their models, the third section of “Ode on Melancholy” deviates from this template, with the final sestet rhyming CDEDCE instead of CDECDE. This change also occurs in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which begins by deviating from the expected rhyme scheme — CDEDCE and CDECED — in its first two sections and in its final section (CDEDCE), and in “Ode on Indolence,” which changes the rhyme scheme to CDEDCE in the third section and to CDECED in the sixth and final section of the poem. (“Ode to a Nightingale” alone remains consistent to the form.) Such formal lapses should be attributed not to a lack of rigor but to a desire to employ variation within fixed forms. Although he worked mainly in traditional forms — especially the rhyming couplet and the sonnet — Keats rejuvenated those forms through technical variations, enjambing his rhyming couplets and thus rejecting the rigidity of the heroic couplet of Alexander Pope and other neo-classicists and altering the rhyme schemes of his sonnets to deviate from his Shakespearean, Spenserian, and Petrarchan models.[16]

“Ode on Melancholy” is dominated by the proper nouns Lethe, Proser-pine,[17] and Psyche and by the personified Beauty, Joy, Pleasure, Poison, and Melancholy. The poem begins with a negative injunction that establishes a series of negative commands:

No, no, go not to Lethe,[18] neither twist
   Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead be kiss’d
   By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
   Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
      Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries

“Ode on Melancholy” delivers nine negatives in its first eight lines, establishing an atmosphere of non-permission. The act for which the poem does not offer permission — succumbing to melancholy — takes its most extreme form in suicide (signaled by the poisons wolfbane and nightshade). The poem exhorts its reader not to seek forgetfulness (via Lethe, the river of forgetfulness) or to indulge sorrow or morbidity, “for shade to shade will come too drowsily, / And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.” Instead, Keats urges the reader to “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, / Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave, / Or on the wealth of globed peonies” — in other words, on beauty (or Beauty). This advice about what to do “when the melancholy fit shall fall” indicates that Keats considers melancholy a potentially aesthetic experience. And to ensure that it is an aesthetic experience, beauty must be admitted into it; pleasure and pain must coexist.

Though connected to the Romantic exaltation of suffering as a source of poetic power, this view stems in part from Keats’s chronic fear of inaction and the melancholy that often arises from stasis. In an 1817 letter to his publishers Taylor and Hessey, he describes his current mental state: “lowness of Spirits — anxiety to go on without the Power to do so.”[19] And in an 1818 letter to his brothers George and Tom, he writes, “I cannot bear to be uninterested or unemployed, I, who for so long a time, have been addicted to passiveness.”[20] In his poem “To My Brother George,” he admits to a melancholic nature that the ebullience of his verse usually disguises: “Full many a dreary hour have I past, / My brain bewilder’d, and my mind o’ercast / With heaviness.” But as “Ode on Melancholy” makes clear, Keats believes it is crucial to learn from “the wakeful anguish of the soul” in order to produce poetry, for only the poet sees Melancholy in “her sovran shrine,” and the figure of the poet — “him whose strenuous tongue / Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” — possesses the soul that will “taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.” The poem manifests an awareness that “Beauty must die,” “Joy[‘s] hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu,” and “aching Pleasure [is] / Turning to Poison” “in the very temple of delight.” Keats’s belief in the bond between truth and beauty makes room for the awareness that suffering is an integral part of reality and cannot be ignored or transcended through art.

Tranter’s terminal based on “Ode on Melancholy,” “Thanks, Joe” presents as extreme a twist on Keats’s poem as one could expect. In “Thanks, Joe,” melancholy emerges as an alcoholic’s despair over sleeping with a transvestite, who represents (false) beauty in the poem. Because he retains Keats’s end-words, Tranter maintains the rhyme scheme of “Ode on Melancholy,” but he drops the numbers for the three sections and changes the stanza lengths to ten, nine, and eleven lines, respectively. The elevated diction of Keats’s poem has degenerated here to the contemporary colloquial; thus, “rosary of yew-berries” becomes “at Wagga picking boysenberries,” “let her rave” becomes “she’d been on some rave,” and “among her cloudy trophies hung” becomes “Damn, she was well hung.” Tranter’s poem seems intent on amplifying Keats’s belief, expressed in a letter to his publisher John Taylor on 27 February, 1818, that “Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity — it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.”[21] Tranter’s “Thanks, Joe” certainly surprises through excess, but one would be hard-pressed to refer to that excess as “fine”; and though the poem is presented as a memory — a “Remembrance” — via a dramatic monologue, the setting and subject of the poem militate against viewing the poem as “highest thoughts” put into words.

Instead, the poem’s style aligns it more with the “first thought best thought” model of poetic composition, as the first seven lines demonstrate:

Thanks, Joe, I’ll have a martini with a twist.
I can drink spirits, but I can’t take wine.
I lost my taste for it, the first time I was kissed.
I met this woman, down from Proserpine,
she’d been out at Wagga picking boysenberries,
came up to Sydney, wanted to be
a model. She liked sherry. She had this owl ...

The speaker’s self-pity has produced self-absorption, evident by the use of “I” six times in the first four lines of the poem, until he introduces the woman, at which point he shifts to “she” and then, after observing that “Life’s full of mysteries,” to “we.” The speaker’s statement about life’s mysteries comically recalls Keats’s notion of negative capability, which is made possible “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”[22] Of course, Tranter’s speaker cannot live with doubt, as the poem reveals:  

We drank — what a night. I woke drowsily
the next day, and looked at her naked body. My soul
shrivelled, my blood froze, I thought I’d fall
flat on my face, it was like a cloud
had hidden the sun. What she’d told me, that was
bullshit. She was a bloke! The sheet was a shroud,
the bed a grave for my self-respect.

The absurd epiphany — the woman is a “bloke” — is couched in terms that recall, but parody, Keats’s own: the “soul” has “shrivelled,” “a cloud” (of melancholy) was blocking the sun, the bed sheets became “a shroud” and “the bed a grave” for his “self-respect.” More striking than the knowledge that the woman “down from Proserpine” is really a man is the speaker’s hyperbolic reaction to this discovery. Later in the poem, he claims, “I wanted to die. / I remembered her filthy kisses, her lying lips.” By reacting so negatively and with such vitriol, he foregoes any opportunity to become a sympathetic figure. The frame of the poem — the man is speaking to a bartender about the experience — sets the events of the poem in the past, and the speaker’s continued absorption with the experience — he cannot drink wine because of it, and he feels compelled to relate the story, unsolicited — demonstrate that he has not recovered from it. What could be a humorous or self-deprecating anecdote becomes a disturbing one despite the speaker’s witty flourish at the end of the poem:   

Do you know the Latin tongue?
They have a motto: ‘Love’s like a river — clear
one day, dirty the next.’ You know, I might
have another. Damn, she was well hung.

The speaker’s inability to forget or rise above this melancholy dramatizes two lines from another of Keats’s poems, Endymion: “Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain / Clings cruelly to us.”

The conventions of the Romantic lyric also establish an occasion for an illuminating contrast between Barbara Guest’s “Twilight Polka Dots” (1989) and Tranter’s “The Twilight Guest.” Both poems share a setting — a lake — but that setting has dramatically different roles in the poems. The lake in Guest’s poem features more prominently — as “a conscious body” — than the human couple in the poem — “two / figures who in the fixity of their shared glance were / admired by the lake.” “Wishing to set a tone of solitude edged with poetry,” the lake despises the fish that swim in it because they interfere with what it considers its “duty”: to “provide a scenic atmosphere / of content, a solicitude for the brooding emotions.” Thus, the lake “dwelt on boning and deboning”; it has murderous intent — consciousness but no agency. The two people — ostensibly lovers — choose the lake as the setting for their romantic evening because it “offered a picture appealing both to young and / mature romance.”[23] In “The Twilight Guest,” the lake recedes into the background and serves merely as setting. Only one person — a poet — is present in the poem; Guest’s lake has been replaced by Tranter’s poet as the poetic consciousness of the poem.

The most significant shift between Guest’s poem and Tranter’s, however, is the reduction in the number of figures in the poems, from the lake, couple, and fish in “Twilight Polka Dots” to a single individual in “The Twilight Guest.” The “theatre” and “evening performance” of Guest’s poem yield Tranter’s solitary poet in a Romantic quest for a poem in her lakeside cottage. Tranter transforms the fish of “Twilight Polka Dots” into the activity of fishing — not literally, but figuratively; the poet in “The Twilight Guest” fishes for poems at her cottage, using emotions as bait. So when a poem is finally caught, it is caught because “the image of the moon” is reflected on the lake. Tranter presents the scene convincingly, even as he employs common tropes in the process:

Taking a turn
at twilight around the shore of the lake
she watched the sky darken, and turning to
a sound on the surface of the water

she noticed the image of the moon tossed
on the ripples, backward and forward,
seeming to be made up of flake on flake
of phosphorescent light. There, the
poem — its back browned,
its belly silver, tossed and shied in
to shore and — there — it was caught.[24]

Tranter’s achievement here is less the poem itself, which presents a romanticized view of the poet as Poet, than what he has done with his source poem. The ultimate effect seems one of regression, as Guest’s ambivalent lyric becomes more pure, or idealized, with Tranter. Although less than a decade separates the two poems,[25] the poetics of the earlier poem seems more unconventional than that of the terminal based on it.

Tranter’s more radical rewritings occur mainly with older poems. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” provides not one but two terminals — “Grover Leach” and “See Rover Reach.” Arnold’s poem begins with a description of a seacoast and what it invokes for the poet:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; — on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

This sonnet-length first stanza introduces a scene that appears only in the distance in Tranter’s “Grover Leach.” By diminishing the setting — and thus the grandeur — of the original and by transforming Arnold’s meditation into a scene of courtship at the State Fair, “Grover Leach” begins like a parody of the Arnold poem:

It’s Saturday, meet me tonight,
Grover said to a young lady at the State Fair —
meet me under the electric light
that burns in the sky over the hot dog stand
under the Ferris Wheel by the edge of the bay.
Let the farm slumber in the night-air,
let the corn nod under the spray
as the waves beat against the land.
Meet me where the mob’s roar
drowns our laughter, and our mad fling
will magnetically excite each strand
of feeling in the crowd, and the Wheel will begin
to spin and spark like a dynamo, and bring
the wonderful twentieth century rolling in![26]

Tranter transplants the setting of the poem from the coast of England to the farmlands of Anywhere. Grover’s falling in love compels him to neglect his farm, embrace “the mob’s roar,” and, with the help of the Ferris Wheel, welcome “the wonderful twentieth century” and, thus, modernity. The tone of Tranter’s poem, until this point, seems lighter than Arnold’s, which uses the sound of waves on rocks as the accompaniment to “the eternal note of sadness” and the sea’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”

But “Grover Leach” shifts dramatically in part two, connecting the speaker’s memory of the ocean bringing “to the bay an ancient tidal flow” to Grover’s suicide by drowning:

For Grover, life on the farm had grown drear
and he learned to despise the modern world.
His wife left him, though his heart was true,
the farm failed, and that’s why, it seems
old Grover waded in, and drowned his dreams.[27]

How different this trajectory is from Arnold’s. Where “Dover Beach” begins with “the eternal note of sadness” and “the turbid ebb and flow / of human misery” and (almost) ends with the admonition “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!,” “Grover Leach” begins in courtship and ends with divorce, economic ruin, and suicide. Even Arnold’s reason for his admonition — “for the world, which seems / To lie before us like a land of dreams, / So various, so beautiful, so new, / Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night” — seems less grim, because it is less particular, than the fate to which Tranter consigns Grover. Grover’s death, though solitary and self-inflicted, alludes to the night battle at Epipolae — when the Athenian army attacked itself as well as its enemy because no one could see — to which the last two lines of “Dover Beach” refer. And the foreboding Dover Beach resembles the farm after Grover’s death:

And so the farm sleeps, waiting for a new
owner, and Rover waits too in that yellow light
that seems to paint the wet sand with pain
so it resembles a watery plain
where screaming seabirds dash their reflected flight
over the glitter of the State Fair, Saturday night.[28]

Although both poems offer little consolation, Tranter’s “Grover Leach” offers none. This rewrite of Arnold’s poem might begin in parody, but it ends in stark confirmation of the negative catalogue that Arnold attaches to the world: Grover’s world has “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.”

Other terminals work with newer texts as their sources and forego revision and parody as they seek to use the terminal form to establish connections to the authors of the original poems. Divided into three separate poems — “Que Viva Mexico!,” “Gallop Along! or Hurry Back,” and “The Inca Mystery” — Frank O’Hara’s “3 Poems About Kenneth Koch” pays light-hearted tribute to his friend. In Tranter’s version, the titles for individual poems have been dropped and numbers are used instead to distinguish the three poems from each other; and the individual poems are not the same length as O’Hara’s. The first O’Hara poem, “Que Viva Mexico!,” reads:

May I tell you how much I love your poems?
It’s as if a great pipeline had been illicitly tapped
along which all personal characteristics
are making a hasty departure. Tuba? gin?
“qu’importe où?” O Kenneth Koch![29]

Tranter’s first poem, designated only by a “1,” is more than twice as long as O’Hara’s:

He never writes poems about writing poems,
this dog-eared wunderkind who’s tapped
the unconscious of the race. His main characteristics:
in the fall he develops a fatal liking for stiff gin
martinis. He’s not a disguised Mayor Ed Koch —
the hair’s different — and don’t let anybody tell you
he is. He kisses wives under the mistletoe,
given half a chance, and he’s a sink of indiscretion,
so look out, gossip-wise. A knot of contradictions, he is
a simpering tough guy, and a brutal sook — mercy me,
here he comes! Violently athirst![30]

Although Tranter has kept O’Hara’s end-words, his approach in the poem differs markedly from O’Hara’s. He has kept the subject indicated by the poem’s title — Kenneth Koch — but that subject has changed significantly in Tranter’s poem. The Koch in O’Hara’s “3 Poems” is a close friend, and O’Hara addresses him directly, in the second person, in the poem; the Koch in Tranter’s “Three Poems” is an invention[31] and is appropriately referred to in the third person. For O’Hara, Koch is the addressee and the subject of the poem; for Tranter, Koch is the subject. This shift in focus and the change to the original poem’s structure allow Tranter to rewrite O’Hara’s “3 Poems About Kenneth Koch” without pretending to the knowledge of Koch that O’Hara possessed. His handling of the terminal conveys respect both for the original poem (even as he rewrites it) and for Koch (even as he intentionally miswrites him). At the same time, Tranter enters this community, however vicariously, making clear his admiration for both poets.

In the second part of the second poem in “3 Poems About Kenneth Koch,” O’Hara offers lavish praise: “Under the careful care of our admiration his greatness / appears like the French for ‘gratuitous act’ and we’re proud / of our Hermes, the fastest literary figure of his time.”[32] The overlapping lines in Tranter’s terminal, however, continue the anti-portraiture of the first poem: “He thinks constantly on the greatness / of Edna St. Vincent Millay. He’s quietly proud / of his conversational Greek, and one time / he gobbled a whole bag of bagels in Dinky’s Delicatessen.”[33] In the third poem of each poet, both O’Hara and Tranter consider the whereabouts of Koch, who is apparently in Mexico. Missing his friend, O’Hara tells Koch to “hurry,” and when the telephone rings at the end of the poem, he answers, “Hello. Kenneth?,” insinuating that Koch has made contact with him.[34] Tranter begins by “pondering the Orientations of Kenneth” then claims that he “leaves for Mexico, and once there, decides to vanish — / a pop, a flash, and a small, perfectly-formed miasma / has entirely replaced him.”[35] The rest of the poem describes the aftermath of his supposed disappearance, and, unlike O’Hara, Tranter ends not with the hope of contact, but with “the loss of the illuminations of Kenneth.”[36] For Tranter, the loss is less a personal loss than a literary loss, as the poem demonstrates that his relationship to Koch is primarily literary, not personal; and while he can adopt O’Hara’s end-words for his “Three Poems About Kenneth Koch,” he cannot attain — for reasons of geography and time — the same kind of relationship that O’Hara had with Koch. Thus, Tranter’s gesture toward community must remain a literary gesture.[37]

As “Three Poems About Kenneth Koch” shows, Tranter’s terminals can allude closely — in details and/or conception — to their sources yet deviate from them at crucial points. “Paid Meridian” both follows and departs from its source, Diane di Prima’s “On Sitting Down to Write, I Decide Instead to Go to Fred Herko’s Concert.” (The poem’s title is an anagram of di Prima’s name.) Di Prima’s poem relies on fragmentation, quick shifts, and occasional rhyme for its rhythmic effects, which range from purposely clumsy doggerel (“the long cry of goose / or some such bird / I never heard / your orange tie / a sock in the eye”)[38] to the colloquial (“smelly movies & crabs I’ll never get”) to the high lyrical (“O the dark caves of obligations,” “O all that wind”), which is then undercut by the self-conscious statements “(alack)” and “Even Lord & Taylor don’t quite keep it out.”[39] These effects contribute to the overall sense of movement in the poem, which never settles into anything but the constancy of motion. This constant movement, of course, is suggested in the title: as she sits down (to write), she gets up (to go).

Tranter’s “Paid Meridian,” however, dwells. Although the poem contains movement, the movement is limited to the physical, when the narrator leaves his apartment for a party and later returns to his apartment. In “Paid Meridian,” someone named Joan telephones the narrator, who had just started to work on a drawing. Suddenly the narrator is at a party at Joan’s apartment, then on a bus on his way home because “parties make me anxious.”[40] Conceived as a dramatic monologue, “Paid Meridian” remains in a single mode — the colloquial.[41] Whereas the voice in di Prima’s poem jumps, Tranter’s stays consistent. The result is that “Paid Meridian” seems more distant than “On Sitting Down to Write”; the dramatic monologue has removed the author from the poem and is presented as a clearly literary work with a literary tradition. Di Prima’s poem is all di Prima even as it refuses to identify with any single poetic mode. At the end of her poem, di Prima affirms her presence: “I came here / after all.”[42] But in “Paid Meridian,” Tranter further effaces his (and his narrator’s) presence: “there’s nobody here, / really, nobody at all.”[43]

By simultaneously acknowledging and effacing the sources of his terminals, Tranter simultaneously acknowledges and effaces his own role in writing them. Although all forms, whether traditional or invented, raise issues of conservation and innovation, originality and influence, Tranter’s terminals are unique because they combine the conservative, influence-embracing aspect of traditional forms with the innovative aims of new forms. They depend on the existence of other poems even as they replace almost all the words of those poems. The terminal is further enriched by the opportunities it provides for responding to others’s poetry, whether through parody, homage, or revision. Although it is too soon to know if the terminal will become an influential form, Tranter has laid a robust foundation for other poets seeking the challenges and pleasures of form, the pull of tradition and the openness of experimentation.

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Notes

[1] Monash University is grateful for permission to reprint this article in a brochure handed out at the “Poetry and the Trace” conference, sponsored by Monash University, held at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Australia, 13 to 16 July 2008.

[2] Or 65 lines like the canzone, the more restrictive cousin of the sestina. The canzone is also far less common than the sestina.

[3] Indeed, the terminal invites comparative readings more than any other poetic form does. While Tranter’s terminals are notable as individual, distinct poems, their reliance on and use of other poems creates a new potential for reading. Although one could read a terminal without knowing or reading the original poem, knowing the original allows a reader to see another—in fact, a central—dimension of the terminal: what it is built (and builds) on. That the terminal can respond to, contradict, imitate, parody, or do its best to ignore the source poem is another indication of its flexibility as a form.

[4] While this aspect of the form might seem to support the view of language as infinitely unstable—each word replaceable by another word—and undermine the notion of singularity as it pertains to the Poem, Tranter’s retention of the end-words for his terminals indicates an essential aspect of the original that is ineradicable, no matter how far his uses of the end-words stray from the original. The terminal could be viewed as a palimpsest that covers most but, importantly, not all of the original.

[5] Martin Duwell, review of Studio Moon, Australian Book Review, November 2003, pp. 54—55.

[6] And few critics would even notice, much less address, Tranter’s use of generative forms.

[7] Cummins defends the sestina against detractors who link the form’s popularity to the ease with which beginning poets can write (fake) sestinas by foregoing metrical regularity to focus on their end-words. The primary challenge of the sestina is keeping repetition from becoming merely repetitive, or redundant.

[8] James Cummins, “Calliope Music: Notes on the Sestina,”
(www.maryadams.net/classpages/309_609/poetry_downloads/sestina_essay.pdf), 2.

[9] Cummins, 4.

[10] Duwell, 55.

[11] Although only one poem (“Kate Whiskey”) in Muldoon’s first book, New Weather (1973), is a sonnet, eleven of the 34 poems in his second book, Mules (1977), are sonnets. “Kate Whiskey” is one of Muldoon’s more conventional sonnets, but sonnets in Mules often embrace hybridity (as the book’s title would indicate) by recombining Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet genes. Among subsequent books, Why Brownlee Left (1980) continues this emphasis on the sonnet, with nine of the book’s 28 poems being sonnets. The Prince of the Quotidian (1994) is essentially a sonnet sequence composed as a journal of a month. And Muldoon’s verse plays, such as Six Honest Serving Men (1995), revolve around the sonnet.

[12] Ashbery and Muldoon also share a propensity to end their books with long poems. This tendency is especially pronounced in Muldoon. At four pages, the last poem in New Weather, “The Year of the Sloes, for Ishi,” is technically not a “long poem”; but it is the longest poem in the book. Similarly, the seven-part sonnet sequence “Armageddon, Armageddon” in Mules is the longest, and last, poem in that volume. With the 300-line “Immram” at the end of Why Brownlee Left, Muldoon starts to move into genuine long poem territory, and he has maintained the practice of ending each of his books with a long poem: the 49 linked sonnets of “The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants” at the end of Quoof (1983), “7, Middagh Street” at the end of Meeting the British (1987), the 233-part title poem of Madoc, “Yarrow” at the end of The Annals of Chile, the 30-part sonnet sequence “The Bangle (Slight Return)” at the end of Hay, and “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999” at the end of Moy Sand and Gravel. Among Ashbery’s books, Rivers and Mountains (1967) ends with “The Skaters,” The Double Dream of Spring (1970) ends with “Fragment,” Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) ends with the title poem, Houseboat Days (1977) ends with “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid,’” A Wave (1984) ends with the title poem, and And the Stars Were Shining (1994) ends with the title poem—all long poems.

[13] Here are the first two stanzas:

We’re interested in the language, that you call breath,

if breath is what we are to become, and we think it is, the southpaw said.

Throwing her a bone sometimes, sometimes expressing, sometimes expressing something like mild concern, the way

has been so hollowed out by travelers it has become cavernous. It leads to death.

We know that, yet for a limited time only we wish to pluck the sunflower,

transport it from where it stood, proud, erect, under a bungalow-blue sky, grasping at the sun,

and bring it inside, as all others sick into the common mold. The day

had begun inauspiciously, yet improved as it went along, until at bed-

time it was seen that we had prospered, I and thee.

Our early frustrated attempts at communicating were in any event long since dead.

Yet I had prayed for some civility from the air before setting out, as indeed my ancestors had done

and it hadn’t hurt them any. And I purposely refrained from consulting me,

the culte du moi being a dead thing, a shambles. That’s what led to me.

Early in the morning, rushing to see what has changed during the night, one stops to catch one’s breath.

The older the presence, we now see, the more it has turned into thee

with a candle at thy side. Were I to proceed as my ancestors had done

we all might be looking around now for a place to escape from death,

for he has grown older and wiser. But if it please God to let me live until my name-day

I shall place bangles at the forehead of her who becomes my poetry, showing her

teeth as she smiles, like sun-stabs through raindrops. Drawing with a finger in my bed,

she explains how it was all necessary, how it was good I didn’t break down on my way

to the showers, and afterwards when many were dead

who were thought to be living, the sun

came out for just a little while, and patted the sunflower

— John Ashbery, Flow Chart
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 186—187.

[14] “In Praise of Sandstone,” which Tranter calls an ode, transplants Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” from Italy, where “this land is not the sweet home that it looks,” to Sydney. “Think how stone has defined this region,” Tranter writes, leaving “the present for a while [to] dig down / through the past, to more brutal times”—i.e., Australia’s convict history and the destruction of aboriginal culture (Studio Moon, 73). Like Auden, Tranter juxtaposes geological and human history, with human avarice marking progress: “citizens are caught / in the processes, fed, recycled, until they resemble / their own parents tangled in the fight for food and water / and a protected place in the sun” (75). And like Auden, Tranter recognizes the infinitesimal span of human life—especially when compared to the age of the land—and the invisible yet enormous presence of the dead.

[15] The geographic—and, in the case of O’Hara, chronological—distances involved here make Tranter’s gestures toward poetic community seem more urgent—because they are less likely to succeed—than they would if he were living and writing in the United States.

[16] Keats wrote 66 sonnets, more than two-thirds of them Petrarchan. “On the Sonnet,” written toward the end of his life, deviates from all traditional sonnet forms. Keats invents his own rhyme scheme for the poem, masterfully wedding style and content since the poem is an attempt to find “sandals more interwoven and complete / To fit the naked foot of Poesy.”

[17] Also known as Persephone, reluctant queen of the underworld.

[18] This phrase speaks to the first quatrain of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, / Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”

[19] The Letters of John Keats, ed. Hyder E. Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), I.146.

[20] Ibid., 214.

[21] Ibid., 238. Keats’s quote also conjures the impossibility of “Singularity” in language, an impossibility that Tranter’s terminals—by depending upon other poems for their existence and by demonstrating the vulnerability of those poems to revision, even by another poet—seems to illuminate, however inadvertently.

[22] Ibid., 193.

[23] Paul Hoover, ed. Postmodern American Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 67—68.

[24] Tranter, 63—64.

[25] Tranter wrote “The Twilight Guest” in the mid-1990s. The poem was first published in 1996, in Verse magazine.

[26] John Tranter, Studio Moon (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003), 24.

[27] Ibid., 24—25.

[28] Ibid., 25.

[29] The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by Donald Allen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 151.

[30] Tranter, 86.

[31] In his note for the poem, Tranter writes, “Only a lunatic would take any particular statement in the poem to be necessarily true” (114).

[32] O’Hara, 152.

[33] Tranter, 86.

[34] O’Hara, 152.

[35] Tranter, 87.

[36] Ibid.

[37] A more oblique triangulation appears in Tranter’s “Elegy, after James Schuyler” (originally published as “Respirating Buds,” which is an anagram of its source, Schuyler’s “Buried at Springs”). Although indirect, Schuyler’s poem mentions O’Hara (“it’s eleven years since / Frank sat at this desk and / saw and heard it all”) and mourns the passing of time without him (“even the boulder quite / literally is not the same”). Tranter’s elegy mentions neither O’Hara nor Schuyler, but could refer to them through certain details—“a beach house,” “a diary,” “a talent,” “the snapshot”—that seem like potential clues and make the question “How much have I suppressed?” an invitation to sleuthing. In both elegies, the poems exude feelings of loss without resorting to sentimentality.

[38] Though, given di Prima’s association with the Beat poets, perhaps the effect is intended to be more performative than comic.

[39] Hoover, 273—274.

[40] Tranter, 65.

[41] Di Prima’s jarring rhymes have been softened by Tranter through longer lines and homonyms (e.g., “Thai” for “tie”), resulting in a more “natural” diction.

[42] Hoover, 274.

[43] Tranter, 66.

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