Compugraphic 7700 typesetter, circa 1980, John Tranter at the keyboard
This 11-page downloadable PDF file is available now on the website of JASAL at the Australian National Library. JASAL = the Journal for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
Abstract
Australian poet John Tranter trained in all aspects of publishing, from hand-lettering to editing, from litho platemaking to screen printing, and developed an early familiarity with computers. The development of the Internet in the 1990s found him armed with a formidable array of skills. He published the first issue of the free international Internet-only magazine «Jacket» single-handed in 1997. «Jacket» quickly grew to become the most widely read and highly respected literary magazine ever published from Australia.
It’s good to see Jacket2 continuing to focus on the poetry of Barbara Guest, a forceful writer of uncompromisingly modern tastes. I am pleased to say that at a reading for Carl Rakosi in San Francisco some years ago (where Carl read his short poem “The Laboratory Rat”) I was able to meet Barbara Guest. I mentioned that Allen Ginsberg once lived on the same street as she did, in Berkeley, at the time he wrote “A Supermarket in California”. “Well, it’s a very long avenue,” she replied sweetly. “I think Allen lived somewhere on the downtown end.”
Jacket 14 carries an article by Brian Kim Stefans on the British poet Veronica Forrest-Thomson. (You can read it here.)
I had been excited by her first critical book, and had been waiting for decades to find someone as smart as Brian to introduce her to a wider public. His piece begins:
One of the misfortunes of the lack of attention being paid to English poetry of this century is the obscurity of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, a poet who died in 1975 at the age of 27. Forrest-Thomson is the author of Poetic Artifice, a book that outlined a theory of poetry from a critical perspective — i.e. a tool to determine the success or failure of a poem rather then merely a vocabulary for describing the phenomenon of a “poem” — but one which, rather than confirming or resisting a “tradition,” concentrated on those elements of the poem that resist quick interpretation or, in her terms, “naturalization” by the reader or critic.
Poet Elaine Equi and her friend poet David Trinidad, with my wife Lyn at left, in New York City, back in 1992.
A few years back New York poet and friend Elaine Equi suggested she compile a collection of poems like Holiday Cards, by various hands. I once almost applied for a job writing verse for Hallmark Cards in Sydney, back in the 1960s, so I said yes, please do!
Dozens of poets wrote in to Elaine with their poems, and many were supplied with Collages by Kevin Riordan. They’re all in Jacket 32, here, a feast of quirky, light-hearted calendar verse. Take a look!
Above is a photo of Elaine and her friend poet David Trinidad, with my wife Lyn at left, in New York City, back in 1992. Cigarettes… ah, they were the days. Tell me it wasn’t twenty years ago! Photo by John Tranter.
Photo of John Ashbery wearing a jacket: by John Tranter (R77-8)
I first came across John Ashbery’s work in the late 1960s. It had a great influence on my own poetry. As I say in my 2009 doctoral thesis, “the three poets who have most influenced [my] work [are] Arthur Rimbaud, the Australian hoax poet ‘Ern Malley’, and the contemporary US poet John Ashbery.”
The connections are interesting. As a young man, Ashbery lived in France for a decade, and he has recently translated Rimbaud’s “Illuminations”. Ern Malley: back in 2002 John wrote a few poems in the “voice” of “Ern Malley”, whose writing inspired him as a young man at Harvard. Jacket number 17 publishes two of these poems, “Potsdam” and “Aenobarbus”, here.
Under the horizon