Australian poet Bruce Beaver 1928-2004, at the fun fair in Manly in Sydney, 1984, photo John Tranter. You can read my obituary article here:
http://johntranter.com/prose/beaver-obit.shtml

Poet Thom Gunn, San Francisco, 1980s. Photo by John Tranter. Although AIDS was a focus of much of his later work, he remained HIV-negative himself. In 2004, he died of acute polysubstance abuse, including methamphetamine, at his home in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.

1981, Courthouse Hotel, Newtown, Sydney, Peter Hutchings, Bill Maidment, Kate Lilley.

Note for photograph nuts: the high contrast, extreme fine grain and the strange color effects on skin (lips and noses often appear too white) are due to the film being used: monochrome 35mm Technical Pan, in a tiny Olympus XA camera. [I swear it's about the size and weight of a pack of cards. JT] Photo: courtesy Wikipedia Commons open access.

Correction: the date was probably Saturday 12 March, 1983.

More from the «Surfers Paradise» magazine #3 launch party, Courthouse Hotel beer garden, Newtown, Sydney, 1981. (Correction: the date was probably Saturday 12 March, 1983.) Eve Jennings, the Sydney Mark O’Connor, not the Canberra Mark O’Connor. This one published a brief book of poems under the pseudonym “John Nash”, I believe. In a recent poem in his Tapa Notebook, poet Laurie Duggan writes

“Mark O’Connor (the one we used to call ‘the real’
a.k.a. John Nash, author
of ‘Ode to Iggy Pop’)
once said: ‘who could feel bad in a hotel.’

More from the «Surfers Paradise» magazine #3 launch party, Courthouse Hotel beer garden, Newtown, Sydney, 1981. (Correction: the date was probably Saturday 12 March, 1983.) Left to right: poets Nigel Roberts, Pam Brown, Dîpti Saravanamuttu. Photos copyright   John Tranter, 1981.

At the «Surfers Paradise» magazine #3 launch party, Courthouse Hotel beer garden, Newtown, Sydney, 1981. (Correction: the date was probably Saturday 12 March, 1983.) Facing camera, Kathy Davidson.

Excuse me if I post twice, but… on my Main Site here you can read “The Anaglyph”, the opening long poem from «Starlight: 150 Poems», published in 2010 by the University of Queensland Press. Extensive notes to all the poems in that book are available on this site as well.

“The Anaglyph” initially resulted from a commission from the Toronto magazine «The Modern Review» to write a piece of any type on John Ashbery’s 1967 long poem “Clepsydra”. In response I took the first word or two and also the last word or two of each line from John Ashbery’s poem, and wrote material of my own to fill each line out.

A clepsydra is a water-driven clock, invented in Ancient Greece. An anaglyph is a drawn or photographic image, usually printed in red and bluish-green ink, that, when viewed through spectacles containing one bluish-green lens and one red lens, presents a three-dimensional image; that is, an image consisting of two superimposed and differently-coloured views of the same scene.

The poem was extensively reworked and became part of my 2009 Doctor of Creative Arts thesis dissertation for the University of Wollongong, along with 112 other poems and a thirty-thousand-word exegesis.

This piece is about seven printed pages long.

Just in: [»] Martin Duwell reviews John Tranter: Starlight: 150 Poems (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2010), 214pp.
“There can be little doubt that “The Anaglyph” is the dominant poem of this collection and one of Tranter’s great achievements…”

Revealing Interview! Everything you wanted to know! In fact, MORE than you wanted to know!

Last year I did an interview about my poetry and my life, with Toby Fitch. It ended up being around sixty pages long.

Some six months have gone by since it first appeared in «Mascara Magazine». I have placed a copy of it (with some additional images) on my Main Site today, which happens to be US poet Rod McKuen’s birthday:

http://johntranter.com/interviewed/2012-fitch.shtml

Take a look!

(Photo of Toby Fitch, New Zealand, by John Tranter, 2011.)

Poet and playwright the late Dorothy Hewett at the Exiles reading mentioned below, 6 December 1980, Taylor Square, Sydney. R.F. Brissenden was one of the featured readers. Photo copyright © John Tranter 2013. [Later interpolation: The poetry reading was at 2 pm on Saturday 6 December 1980; Les Murray said he'd come, then didn't, as usual. Ah, the ego!] Other readers: John Forbes, John Tranter, Martin Johnston, Dorothy Hewett, Phil Sheppard, Bob Brissenden.