John Tranter and the ecstasy of flight
Closing the loop on espionage, Chris de Burgh and the terminal.
On the morning of Friday 20 October 2023 I boarded an Aer Lingus flight at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and flew to Shannon airport just outside Limerick in the Republic of Ireland. Almost exactly one year later, I received an email stating that a poem I wrote about that flight and its aftermath, entitled "Terminal 1: Aer Lingus", had been selected to appear in the just-published Best of Australian Poems 2024 (Puncher and Wattmann/Australian Poetry), edited by Kate Lilley and Shastra Deo.
To say that I was thrilled with this turn of events would be an understatement. Not only would it be the first new poem of mine to be published in over 10 years; it was also a poem whose subject matter and inspiration are very close to my heart. Because "Terminal 1: Aer Lingus" is both a poem about an actual Aer Lingus flight, and an homage to an earlier, much better poem by John Tranter, entitled "Lufthansa".
Tranter passed away in April 2023, but his poetic style and verve live on in his many published books and in Jacket magazine, the Internet poetry journal he founded in 1997. My poem 'Cars' (for Bruce Beaver) appeared in issue 8 of the magazine in 1998, and was one of my first 'serious' poems to be published anywhere. In 2005, I interviewed John via email for a special issue of Cordite Poetry Review devoted to editors, and in 2007 interviewed him in person at the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2011 he selected my poem 'Cute' for inclusion in Black Inc.'s Best Australian Poems anthology.
All of which is to say that, at key moments in my own life, Tranter actively encouraged me to write and publish. There were also moments where he was honestly critical of my publishing choices, and while that criticism stung, I believe now that it was well-guided (if not always diplomatically put LOL).
Anyway, I wrote "Terminal 1: Aer Lingus" shortly after arriving in Ireland, determined to document my experiences in poetry, as I had on previous journeys abroad. I was sitting in a little cottage just outside the village of Corofin in County Clare, and I pulled up "Lufthansa" on the Internet and wrote down, by hand, the first and last words of the poem. Then I just filled the spaces in between them with my own, recounting the flight from Paris, and my journey by hire car to Corofin.
Interestingly, in a 2004 interview, Tranter revealed the manner in which he wrote "Lufthansa", also while travelling:
I don't often write poems as I travel, though sometimes I do . . . I once wrote a poem about being on a plane, which I wrote (the first draft of) on a small plane flying through the alps between Venice and Munich in 1984. But I usually find travel distracting.
John Tranter, interviewed by Pradeep Trikha, Antipodes (2004)
"Lufthansa", which appears in what is probably Tranter’s best collection of poems, Under Berlin (1988), is possibly also one of Tranter's best-known poems, and certainly one of my personal favourites. I first read it as an undergraduate student at the University of Sydney, probably as part of Noel Rowe's classes on contemporary Australian poetry.
Rowe's lectures usually involved close readings of poems using an overhead projector. I remember being struck by the physicality (I can't think of a better word) of Tranter's work: the concrete, casual and conversational solidity of it; the poems' absolute modernity; the defiantly print-age serif font of the and the title’s dignified small caps. Even then, it seems, style mattered to me.
“Lufthansa”, then, describes (or “reconstructs”, as Tranter puts it in his notes on the poem in Under Berlin) a flight in a turbo-prop aircraft (possibly a de Havilland Canada Dash 7) from Venice to Munich through the Italian and Swiss Alps, “where the rock/rushes past like a broken diorama”. The poem is written in free verse; enjambement is used to great effect, which is perhaps fitting for a journey that’s all “flex”, “tilt” and “slanting”; but the comedy is unexpected: “her white knuckles as the plane drops/a hundred feet”.
Dürer has a cameo, and there’s a drinks trolley and ice cubes in glasses and lemonade. Both the airplane fueslage and the landscape viewed through the porthole are peopled: inside, there’s a crew, a hostess and captain; while down below lie “model villages”. Meanwhile the mysterious “Katharina/sleeping somewhere” is also “sleeping elsewhere”, reinforcing the duality of experience and observation.
Tranter’s notes also allude to the northern hemisphere phenomenon whereby “a shadow-print of unmelted snow” remains on the north-facing sides of “buildings and hedges” in spring; “a sight best appreciated from above”. The narrator of “Lufthansa” is simultaneously above, inside and moving through this three-dimensional space defined by a radar that is “speaking metaphysics”.
As it turned out, despite my best intentions, "Terminal 1: Aer Lingus" was one of only four poems I wrote during those 10 days in Ireland, although the trip ended up being very productive for other reasons. But "Terminal 1: Aer Lingus" is also significant because it references the idea of a 'terminal' in both its title and its method of construction, being my first attempt at what Tranter himself described as a 'terminal' poem.
Briefly, the terminal form involves repurposing another poem by, for example, using the last word of every line and replacing every other word with new text. The last words therefore act as 'terminals' to which the new lines are, as it were, 'docked'. Actually, Brian Henry describes it much better in his article on Tranter's terminal form:
With the sestina as a model, John Tranter has created a new form similar to the sestina but far more flexible in its emphasis on end-words: the terminal. 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 . . .
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. 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. No poetic forms contain such potential ...Brian Henry, "John Tranter's New Form(alism): The Terminal", Antipodes (2004)
"Terminal 1: Aer Lingus" slightly adjusts this working method, taking both the first and last words from each line of Tranter's poem "Lufthansa" and creating a new poem in between these two 'terminals'. So, for example, Tranter's poem begins as follows:
Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock
rushes past like a broken diorama
I’m struck by an acute feeling of precision –Whereas, "Terminal 1: Aer Lingus" begins like this:
Flying over violet-crumble seas, eyes bulging as the rock
rushes by (a sense of stained-glass futures, a fatal diorama
I’m descending through time with an airman’s precision—When I wrote the poem, I wasn't actually aware of Tranter's use of 'end-words' alone: I thought I was 'doing it right' by using the first and last words of each line in 'Lufthansa'. This working method presented problems: my lines ended up being much longer, and I tied myself in knots trying to maintain some kind of narrative flow.
But as Henry points out, the terminal form opens up all sorts of possibilities in terms of rewriting and reinventing. It's also very fun to see a whole new world appear in the space the original poem previously occupied. As a mapping exercise, the experience also offered me new ways to read other poets' works. I've since gone on to attempt a couple more terminals, using poems by Charles Baudelaire and John Ashbery as starting points. But those terminals remain, for the moment, closed.
And as for "the ecstasy of flight"? Well, it's the title of a song by Chris de Burgh on his bombastic 1984 Man On the Line album. But it's also a neat little segue into an experience I had seeing John Tranter read his work in Sydney in 2006 as part of the Red Room's Poetry Picture Show project. That night featured a superb lineup of poets. We'd been commissioned to write poems about movies; I chose the 1986 film Can You Feel Me Dancing? starring Justine Bateman (watch it online!). My poem, "Karin Revisited", was another homage to John's way of writing (if also a hat-tip to Sonic Youth), and it was an absolute honour to perform it in his presence.
It was also a rare treat to have both of my parents in the audience that night. Afterwards, my dad (who is a big Chris de Burgh fan) commented that he really enjoyed hearing John's poem, "Paris Blues". It struck me then that, of the Australian poets of my parents’ vintage, Tranter is probably the most accessible. It also struck me that, for the longest time, I had been trying to write poems my father would like. Maybe in some strange way Tranter was a bit like a 1980s-era troubadour, inventing poetic worlds in which readers could happily lose themselves for a few moments (in the case of single poems such as “Lufthansa”), or else an afternoon (take for example the four verse novels in miniature of The Floor of Heaven).
My father's comment also, in a funny way, closed a loop in my own poetic development: my first published poem, "Mother Russia", which I wrote way back in 1991, was a blatant Tranter rip-off, and actually featured a line from Chris de Burgh's song "Moonlight and Vodka" (which, coincidentally enough, also appears on Man On the Line):
"moonlight and vodka takes me away"
croons the one-time concert performer
to an incomprehending audience of short
time miners & oil riggers thawing in the bar
what else is there to do the alcohol slides like
penguins from glaciers down throats &
karloff's tears flow in buckets while the men
sway from side to side now and then grunting
as they discover the faces behind the frozen beards
they worked with on that damned oil pipelineI'm not quite sure how many more terminals I have left in me, but I take some comfort from the fact that my father's love of pop songs about espionage and Norman-invasion-era ballads lit a kind of creative fire in my brain that persists to this day. Likewise, Tranter's work has had a fundamental effect on my own writing. While it is, of course, impossible to know what was going through his mind as he took that Lufthansa flight from Venice to Munich back in 1984, the poem he wrote during that flight demonstrates the dynamism of the creative process.
The ecstasy of flight, then, is an intensely private experience which, when set to music or put down in verse, carries with it the potential to be transported form the mundanity of everyday existence to a world where literally anything can be written or sung into being. By writing a 'terminal' poem based on "Lufthansa", I was attempting a similar feat. If the poems succeeds in transporting a single reader to the skies above Shannon airport, or the sodden green landscapes of County Clare, then perhaps that reader, too, will be able to move on to their own next flight, regardless of its destination.
As a postscript, I just wanted to note the fact that, despite Tranter being an early champion of the Internet as a medium for poetry and poetics, almost everything he produced online has now either disappeared or been moved elsewhere. Jacket, of course, survives as Jacket2 with all issues available in their original format. But Tranter’s own website, and the ambitious Australian Poetry Library (which featured a nifty HTML to PDF converter enabling a reader to construct their own anthology), have vanished. Of course, there’s always the Wayback Machine. But Tranter’s Wikipedia page is definitely in need of an update. Where to even start?
One of my favorite Tranter poems also. Great Essay.