John Tranter: Heart Starter, reviewed by Martin Duwell in Australian Poetry Review, October 2015
The first fifty-six of the one hundred and one poems in John Tranter’s new book, Heart Starter, are “terminals”, poems which take another writer’s poem and, by retaining the words that end each of the lines, allow the poet to construct a new poem. It’s a form, as far as I know, developed by Tranter alone though it has its origins in a poem of John Ashbery’s which was based on the words ending the lines of Swinburne’s double sestina, “The Complaint of Lisa”. It is, as Brian Henry notes in an essay in The Salt Companion to John Tranter, a poetic form which is “vastly open to possibility”. Far from being a matter of proposing new patterns of rhyme or new stanza shapes or variations in syllabic requirements it can be as varied as the immense number of poems which it can take as a base. It is closest, if anything, to the sestina where an initial choice (which words will appear at the ends of the lines of the first stanza) generates a set of requirements for the final words of the rest of the poem. It thus oddly combines almost infinite freedom with what can be a mind-bendingly difficult formal requirement. Tranter’s Studio Moon had a number of examples but fifty-six poems is a more substantial sample when it comes to investigating the possibilities and implications.
Usually, in Tranter’s comments about his generative practices, there is a strong sense that the chosen method provides not a poem but a draft that might be made into a poem. You feel that the author here wants to take final responsibility – he must be satisfied that the poem “works” and the original poem for a terminal is thus merely a starting point. But the poems of Heart Starter re-establish the importance of the relationship between the original work – the source – and the terminally-derived new poem. You can see this foreshadowed in the two early terminals which were based on Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, a poem which seems to invite reworkings, perhaps because it is an almost canonical example of a certain kind of defeated response to the growing horrors of the modern world balanced by the precarious faith that to be true to one’s loved-one remains a value that an individual can espouse. As such, this poem remains as relevant and almost as often quoted as Yeats’s “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (who says that the poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries doesn’t speak to our present twenty-first century condition?) Arnold is certainly a figure with whom Tranter has a complex (and generally hostile) relationship: “The Great Artist Reconsiders the Homeric Simile” from the 1979 volume, Dazed in the Ladies Lounge, makes fun of Arnold’s pastiche mini-epic “Sohrab and Rustum”. And the two terminals based on “Dover Beach” – “See Rover Reach” and “Grover Leach” – gain much of their interest by the way in which they assault the homogenous, even-toned, despairingly calm, language of the original. “Grover Leach” seems like a mad, slightly disjointed version of a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson or Edgar Lee Masters, and the opening lines of “See Rover Reach” proclaim sudden shifts in subject and register:
Something’s bothering the dog tonight –
the neighbour’s pig, maybe – it’s not fair
the way they feed that thing. Your hair, under the porch light,
it reminds me of Jenny, my long-ago one-night stand –
at least we thought it was a one-night stand – at Baffin Bay,
drinking vodka and pissing on the ice in the night air!
And then there was the time on the “Ocean Spray” –
some affair! – stranded miles from land . . .
Poems like these seem to suggest one of the strengths of the terminal. You take a canonical poem, scoop out most of the content and rewrite it in such a way as to bring it screaming into the disjointed world of modern fragmented and multi-layered discourse.
But, we can now see, there is much more potential in the terminal than this…
Read the rest of this review on the Australian Poetry Review website