"A book might go out of print, the paper will decay, the remaining copies may be lost. Books are frail things... But the Internet is sturdy, and it can only grow..." -- John Tranter Poetry by John Tranter on Riding the Meridian. Examples of Mr. Tranter's Poetry, previously published online.

Australian poet and editor John Tranter _____Interviewed by CK Tower John Tranter is the leading Australian poet of his generation. He was born in Cooma, NSW, in 1943. He grew up on a farm, attended country schools, and took his BA in 1970 after attending university sporadically. He has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production. He has lived in London (1966-67) and Singapore (1971-73), and now lives in Sydney. He is married, with two adult children. Tranter has presented his poetry at readings in more than forty venues in the USA, England and/or Europe in 1985, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997 and 1998. He has published widely in British and US literary magazines including: the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Grand Street, New American Writing, Conjunctions, Boulevard, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, PMC (Post-Modern Culture, on the Internet), Verse, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Poetry Review (UK). The Literature Board of the Australia Council (a body similar to the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States), has awarded him several senior fellowships and other grants. Thirteen collections of his verse have been published. The Floor of Heaven, a book-length sequence of four verse narratives, appeared from HarperCollins Australia in 1992, Gasoline Kisses (Equipage, Cambridge) in 1997, Late Night Radio (Polygon, Edinburgh) in 1998, and Different Hands (Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press), a collection of seven experimental prose pieces, also in 1998. Northern House in the UK plan to publish a further collection of poems, Ultra, in late 1999. His work also appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. In 1992 he edited (with Philip Mead) the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, a 470-page anthology, published in Britain and the USA as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. Tranter's free literary quarterly Jacket, published only on the Internet, is one of the most respected independent, international literary magazines the net has to offer. It's a pleasure to welcome him to Riding the Meridian. CK Tower: In an interview you did with Australian poet and editor John Kinsella, you said, "It took me about five years to work out what poetry was really about." What was it you figured out and does it hold up for you to this day? John Tranter: What I figured out then doesn't hold up. When I was young, my view of poetry was very much conditioned by the culture around me. If you think of someone like Rimbaud, Jack Kerouac, John Berryman, that was what I thought poets were about: living life intensely, plunging into the cauldron of experience to bring back vivid fragments of language that have a magical ability to open the doors of perception, getting drunk - that kind of thing. I grew up in the 1950s, and you had popular culture heroes like John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Kerouac; and movies like - well, from The Maltese Falcon and Shane on the one hand, through American film noir, across to the European avant garde cinema on the other: Fellini, Goddard's Breathless, Polanski's Knife in the Water. A friend and fellow-poet, the late John Forbes, helped to give my romanticism a more adult perspective, by insisting on the importance of poets like Frank O'Hara (John did a thesis on O'Hara) and Ted Berrigan. At first I couldn't see what was "poetic" about O'Hara: it just seemed like talk, smart gossip, with no epiphanies. I preferred Ashbery, whose early lyricism I could identify with. I gradually realised what poets like O'Hara were undercutting - phony lyricism, mainly, and puffed-up poetic egotism - and what they were replacing it with: a graceful, highly skilled poetry of the everyday that blended the demotic with high art, and that had much more depth than it pretended to have, and was better because of it. Now that I've been writing poetry for forty years (I wrote my first poem in 1959) I know that I don't know very much at all. That's a start. CK Tower: Was that first poem published? John Tranter: Yes, in a high school magazine. It won a prize. It was a rather dreamy landscape poem, in free verse. CK Tower: Where did you go on to publish? John Tranter: I published in lots of magazines through the decade of the 1960s. (I didn't win any more prizes for thirty years, so that initial blast of fame was somewhat misleading.) I had a lot of rejections - Australia was a fairly dull place back then, and most of the magazines weren't interested in quote experimental unquote poetry. My strike rate was about one in ten. I'd send three or four poems out to a magazine, and when they came back, I'd send them on to another magazine, and so on. I had an index card system to keep track: one card for each poem, and where it had been sent, and one card for each magazine, and which poems I'd sent there. When my first book came out I added up how many poems I had written - about 300 - and how many I'd had published. I remember I calculated I'd had seventy poems published by 1970, though that figure sounds unrealistically optimistic to me now. So three quarters of what I'd written was never published, and to be frank, it was basically unpublishable. The work I was doing then, that whole decade of writing, it was apprentice work. I don't enjoy re-reading much of my output from that first decade, and not much from the second either. It seems very gauche. My first book was published as an issue of Poetry Australia magazine in 1970. Then I had a book out every two or three years from then on, with one or two gaps. CK Tower: Over those forty years you must have read a lot of other poets. I notice you mention American poets in your reviews and interviews. You've said that the twenty five years of poetry from the early forties to the late sixties seemed to you a period of "extraordinary energy in English writing..." How would you characterize poetry coming out of the U.S. from the seventies through the end of the nineties? John Tranter: Maybe because I'm too close to it, I can't see any clear patterns, I just hear a mix of different voices. Obviously Language poetry has been important in shaking things up and moving the scene along; whatever you think of Language poetry, you wouldn't want to be stuck in 1970 forever, would you? And now there's a younger generation making themselves heard, for example in the Talisman anthology - the Anthology of New (American) Poets. That's just one collection; there are thousands of other poets doing different things too. There don't seem to be "schools" or "movements" now, like the five pigeonholes Donald Allen sorted writers of the 1950s into in his ground-breaking anthology The New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960); and of course he left out a whole school - the "establishment" poets like Berryman, Lowell, Nemerov, Hecht and Wilbur. Then there's the problem of the writing schools, which muddies the water. Over the last decade, some fifty thousand Americans have been writing poetry as part of the schoolwork they have to do to earn a diploma, people who would never have bothered with the unrewarding struggle of trying to be a poet, in an earlier age. Their reward for being a good student poet - for the lucky few - is a paying job, believe it or not. Now is this bizarre and thoroughly artificial reward system - I almost called it "artificial insemination" - that must be my farm background talking - is this really a "problem"? I don't know. My ideal writing school would overload and torment the students so badly that only one or two out of every hundred would put up with it for the ten years it takes to learn to be a poet. They would end up with their degree, but they would have to take an oath inscribed and signed in their own blood never to teach creative writing. CK Tower: But writers have to learn to write somehow, don't they? What was your curriculum? John Tranter: Mainly reading other poets and trying to work out what they were aiming for, and how they went about doing it. Trying to imitate their effects. As T.S.Eliot says, it's a matter of influence, and what you can learn from that. CK Tower: Of your own work it has been said that the way you implement juxtaposition is reminiscent of Rimbaud, whose life and work you acknowledge as an early influence. What was it about Rimbaud that offered you a starting point to build outward? John Tranter: Oh, Rimbaud . . . well, for a start I read him when I was in my teens. Rimbaud is an intoxicating role model for a rebellious teenager. Second, he took poetry with absolute seriousness. For Rimbaud, it wasn't a hobby or an idle academic pursuit; it was the essence of his life. When it failed him, he abandoned it forever. That seemed impressive to me then. Now I have doubts. Third, he was intellectually brilliant. There's his remarkable academic record as a schoolboy, and then there's his precocious grasp of literary criticism: as a sixteen-year-old he pointed out exactly what was wrong with the poetry of his time, and invented and went on to enact the remedy it required. He said (at nineteen, in a throwaway remark) that what was wrong with Baudelaire was that he lived in "too artistic a milieu". You'd expect a cruelly sharp insight like that from a sixty-year-old scholar who'd devoted his life to the period, not from a callow youth. Fourth - and without this the rest would be irrelevant - he wrote the most dazzling and gifted poetry of his period, perhaps of his century, and this before he was twenty. And in doing so he managed to combine revolutionary modernist methods ("Poet, let the telegraph pole be your iron-voiced lyre", and this fifty years before Auden) with an intense lyricism ("Dream flowers flash, tinkle, flare"). There's also the pressure of a dark political and personal cynicism. There's enough there to build on for a while. Though to follow Rimbaud, you need to reject Rimbaud, in the end. He would have done so. In fact he did so, at the age of twenty! CK Tower: You mention the pressure of Rimbaud's dark cynicism . . . in the intro. of your section in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (W.W. Norton & Co. 1988), it states that you insist "poems can scarcely contain, much less console us for, the sadness and violence of the contemporary world." Your poems are rich and dense though not in the least languid or gushing. On the contrary your language is very sharp the images tight and enthralling, yet there is often an underlying feeling of pressure. Could you comment on how you see you work relating to your comment? John Tranter: There is a dark side to my vision of the world. I had known a lot of people die by the time I was twenty - a grand-uncle, a man who worked on our farm, an uncle I was really fond of, three of my schoolmates (one was shot, one drowned, one drove his motor bike head first into a truck), and then my father died when I was nineteen. And the public horrors of the twentieth century are indescribable. All this stuff is in my head, and I guess it lends my poetry a dark tone, at times. I don't particularly want it to be there. I'd rather it wasn't. It's just part of who I am: I have gone through periods of severe anxiety, and occasionally depression. I always was an anxious child, my mother used to say. On the other hand, I think writers can't help but write what they do. It's like your handwriting. I'm always wishing I had better handwriting; but it always stays the same. You say my work is not gushing. I hope not. Gush is a pet hate of mine. The public lap it up; it's often just the thrill they're looking for in a piece of writing. And there are all kinds of gush: simple gush like you find in doctors-and-nurses romance novellas, historical-emotional gush that you find in Merchant Ivory films, the lifestyle consumer gush of those books written by American women living in Tuscany, and in poetry you can find a dozen varieties: from the pastel decorator gush of a Mark Doty to the occasional Galway Kinnell poem about killing animals, which seems to embody a dark anti-gush, but which really embodies a subtle gush of its own. Gush - I'm sure there's a thesis in it somewhere. CK Tower: Would you agree, poetic inspiration is something that can't be forced, but instead must be waited on? If so, are there helpful ways for a writer to get through "down times" while keeping up on her/his writing skills? John Tranter: Oh, you can force it. You just sit down and start writing. Sometimes it doesn't come, sometimes it does. On the other hand, a dry period can be useful, a way of getting your focus off your own ego for a while and out into the real world, whatever that is. And a year off is a good way of getting out of a stylistic rut. I've had occasional periods when I haven't written a word of poetry for a year or more. It hasn't brought the Australian economy to its knees, as far as I've noticed, and it seems to have refreshed my work. People shouldn't be so serious about their role as a poet. I mean, it's a serious matter, sure, a deep commitment and all that, but let's not get carried away by the role. CK Tower: Could you talk about your writing habits as well as how the revision process plays a part in your work? John Tranter: I used to write a lot - most days of the week - and I suppose I needed to, when I was younger, to learn all that stuff and develop as a writer. Personally, I don't think you can call yourself a poet until you've written a few hundred poems at least. They don't have to be great poems - they won't be - but you'll learn from them. A doctor or an architect or an orchestra conductor isn't taken seriously until they've put in a decade or so of training and practice. Now I don't seem to get the time to write regularly. These days I go for months without writing anything, then I get fixed on a particular project and work at it a few hours at a time every third day or so for a few months till it's finished, then I have a break for a few months. Sometimes I write longhand and later transfer what I've written to a word processor. Dickens wrote five million words with a steel-nibbed pen dipped in an ink well. He must have had terrible wrist problems. Sometime I compose on the keyboard. I revise a lot. I always have. I never seem to get things right first time. And besides, I don't know where a poem wants to go until it's mostly written, then I have to go back and rewrite it so it can get there. I do at least three or four drafts, sometimes ten or twenty. I can't write like John Ashbery: he told me once that he doesn't do much redrafting, if any. He can tell if a poem is going to need a lot of reworking before he starts on it, and if so, he doesn't start on it, he writes some other poem that is going to come out right first time. I wish I could do that. CK Tower: You mentioned that a year's break from writing refreshed your work. Are there less drastic ways to keep from becoming stagnant as a writer? How do you continue to challenge yourself to develop? John Tranter: Mainly, I read a variety of different things. I try to keep open to new ways of thinking about poetry. I was reading Callimachus and Sappho at one stage (in translation) and ended up writing a three-page poem in Sapphics; accentual-syllabic Sapphics, that is. It was really difficult, but fun. Language poetry in its various incarnations can help you think outside the square, too. I love to come across a really exciting poet whose work I haven't known before. I'm always on the lookout for new ways of starting a poem, too. That is, getting a first draft that I couldn't normally have written, and working from there. I once had a practice of going through well known poems and changing every noun and verb by looking up alternatives in a thesaurus. Wordsworth's poem "Daffodils" gave me the line "a poet could not but be gay"; the thesaurus gave me the much more piquant line "a troubadour could not but be bisexual", which has a more interesting rhythm, for one thing. With computers, there's a computer program called "Brekdown" that can mash words up in an invigorating way; my book of stories "Different Hands" was written partly with the help of that. I've also taken a tip from John Ashbery. In a reading he gave here in Sydney in 1993 he let slip that his double sestina in Flow Chart uses the end words of a double sestina by Swinburne. I've stolen lots of poets' end words since I heard that; Matthew Arnold for one, Kathleen Fraser for another. Is this illegal? I don't know. It's fun. Right now I'm working my way through Shakespeare's The Tempest and deleting most of the words, leaving behind a string of words that make up something interesting. I'll maybe attach a piece of that project to this interview. I heard just the other day (on a poetry subscriber list on the Internet) that Ted Berrigan did something like that, whiting out most of the words of some novel, and publishing the result as a book called Whiteout. Thanks, Ted. I may call mine Blackout. CK Tower: What impact, if any, has the advent of the electronic era had on you as a writer? John Tranter: It's saved me from tenosynovitis. I used to write on a manual typewriter, and I got pains in the arms and shoulders from banging the keys. Then my wife Lyn bought me a lovely second-hand 1957 Smith-Corona portable electric as a present. That made things easier, because you don't have to hit the keys so hard, but because I go through so many drafts, I was still killing myself typing and typing and typing. Now I use a word processor, and the computer remembers each version of my poems; I only have to type the corrections, then press "Control P" to print the thing out. It's a godsend. No writer who has used a word processor for more than a week will ever willingly submit her/himself to the torture of the typewriter again. Talking of typewriters, even Henry James used one. He bought a typing machine, but he found he couldn't type very well himself, so he hired a "typewriter" - in those days the word meant a person who typed for you, a "typist" - a young Scotsman, in this case - and Mr James dictated the drafts of his novels to him, pacing up and down the room. Each night Mr James would correct the typed draft in ink, and the "typewriter" fellow would type the pages out again cleanly the next morning. That's better than a word processor. They say the later novels of Henry James are more prolix than the earlier ones; now we know why. CK Tower: What are some of the advantages you see for yourself, as a poet, through accessing electronic mediums? John Tranter: I see two main benefits. First, the Internet provides durable and universally available archival storage for literature. A book might go out of print, the paper will decay, the remaining copies may be lost. Books are frail things. We only have Catullus because someone found a manuscript copy of his poems wedged under a wine barrel in an Italian village wineshop a thousand years ago. Sappho's manuscripts are all lost. But the Internet is sturdy, and it can only grow, and material stored on it - providing it's stored safely, in a number of sites - can last as long as the Internet lasts, and anyone can access it freely from any place on earth where there's a phone line. The other thing is the ease and speed of communication the Internet and email makes possible. I can discover a new poet whose work I like on some Internet site in Scotland, say, one Monday morning, email her or him that day and ask for a contribution to my Internet magazine, Jacket, receive a reply containing a few poems that afternoon, and publish them for all the world to read that evening. And when I mail out a notice advertising a new issue of Jacket using email - and the mailing is virtually free - three hundred people scattered around the world know about it and can read the issue, all within five minutes. CK Tower: Tell us some more about Jacket magazine. John Tranter: I started Jacket in a moment of madness in mid 1997, and the first issue appeared in October that year. Because it's free, I can't pay contributors, though (to my continuing surprise) my contributors don't seem to mind. The focus is mainly on poetry and related writing, with lots of poems, interviews, photos of the authors, and a few reviews, though there are some articles on design and typography too. As it has turned out, most of the contributors and I guess most of the readers are from the USA and the UK. Oh - another advantage of the Internet is that all the issues of Jacket are permanently available. There are six issues up now. I'm looking to provide a rudimentary search engine some day, so you can find particular authors and their work without needing to scan through the catalog page, which list everything issue by issue. CK Tower: Of course with the Internet, you can have full color pages, and all kinds of movement and animation and other effects that a print magazine can't hope to emulate. John Tranter: Well, that's true, but it can be a trap. I've learned to keep Jacket's design simple and clean, foregrounding the writing rather than the appearance of the thing. I design with fast and easy downloading in mind, and I design most of the pages so that the first thing to arrive is half a screen or so of text, and text downloads quickly. Any images then download in the background while you're occupied reading the text. This is such a basic and obvious courtesy to the reader that you have to wonder why so many Internet sites do the opposite: they put large graphic images at the top of each page that choke the download and leave you staring at a blank screen for five minutes or so. Jacket has no advertising, no frames, no Java, and almost no animation: they slow things down, and who wants to sit there looking at rotating three-dimensional buttons that flash on and off, when you could be reading a poem instead? CK Tower: No advertising? John Tranter: That's right. Don't you hate those ads, on the Net? It's the thing people dislike most about the Internet - the advertising banners that you find at the top of almost every page you visit. They're intrusive, and you are forced to wait and watch them download before you can read anything else on the page, because nothing else appears until the ads are fully downloaded. I hate that. CK Tower: But if Jacket is free, and you don't have advertising, how you do you finance it? John Tranter: My wife and I own and manage a literary agency, Australian Literary Management. The agency sponsors the magazine, in return for a discreet mention on the contents pages of each issue, down near the foot of the page. The magazine is very cheap to run. To publish and distribute it around the world as a full color print quarterly would cost about fifty thousand American dollars a year. On the Internet, it costs about one thousand dollars a year. I donate my time. CK Tower: What about content? Do you have an editorial line? John Tranter: I'm interested in innovation and experiment, so you'll find plenty of that in the magazine, though I'm a traditionalist at heart, and I suppose that shows too. Formal qualities, after all, are what separates poetry from prose. How do I judge what to include? I really don't know. If I like something, it goes in; if I don't, it doesn't. CK Tower: You don't follow any particular theoretical line? John Tranter: I think theory usually follows practice; that is, new concepts and processes arise in the work that's being done by poets and other creative artists, and then other people notice and talk about it. Picasso didn't need museum curators to tell him how to paint. On the other hand, Jackson Pollock argued with other painters, with writers, museum curators and art critics (and bartenders, apparently), and all of that went into his thinking and eventually into his art. I'm happy to have theory in Jacket, as long as it's interesting. I like variety, and I enjoy dialogue. I think there are virtues in pluralism. CK Tower: What about the future? Where do you hope to take Jacket, and where do you hope it takes literature? John Tranter: I intend to keep it more or less the same size and I hope to keep up regular quarterly issues, though the latest, number seven, is now two months late, but then I've been busy with other work. (I do have another life, managing the bookkeeping and computer systems development for Australian Literary Management.) Finding the time to do Jacket is the main problem, and I do everything: writing letters, typing, typesetting, editing, design, scanning, processing photos, building the code that underlies the pages, transferring the files to the Internet server here in Sydney. Each issue is about the size of an average printed literary quarterly: between one and two hundred printed pages. So it's a lot of work. (Eager writers, please note: I really do not have time to read unsolicited submissions, much as I'd like to.) And it won't get easier: Jacket's growing all the time. I think the Internet works by word of mouth. After its first year the magazine had received about six thousand visits; six months later the counter had clocked up fifty thousand visits; three months after that, it was eighty thousand. I think the Internet is the medium of the future, especially for poetry, because it solves the most intractable problem that poetry magazines have always faced: distribution. With the Internet you get world-wide distribution, and you get it almost for free. I hope Jacket helps to cross-fertilise our notoriously fragmented writing communities. English poets can read what their American cousins are up to: traditionalists can read experimentalists, cowboys poets can read computer-generated sonnets, New Zealanders and Canadians can mingle in its pages, and Australians and Alaskans can share the discovery of a new poem by a French writer, for example. And all for free. CK Tower: Finally, what things are coming up for you in your writing life? John Tranter: Well, I have a book coming out later this year from Northern House in England, titled Ultra; I hope that finds a few readers. I'm enjoying this raid on Shakespeare's The Tempest, but I have no idea where it's heading. Lyn and I are off to New York in October to catch up with a few friends and find some more poems for Jacket. CK Tower: Thanks for talking to Riding the Meridian, John. John Tranter: Thanks for having me, CK. It's been a pleasure. Bibliography Poetry Collections 1. Parallax, South Head Press, Sydney, 1970 (published as Poetry Australia magazine, number 34, June 1970 - incorrectly shown on the half-title page as the June 1968 number), paperback, section-sewn, 62 pages. ISBN 0 901760 05 6 2. Red Movie and other poems, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972, casebound, wrapper, 47 pages. ISBN 0 207 12502 3 3. The Blast Area (Gargoyle Poets number 12, a series published by Makar Magazine, care of the English Department, The University of Queensland, St Lucia Queensland 4067), Makar Press, St Lucia, 1974, saddle-stitched, 36 pages ISBN 0 909354 00 6 4. The Alphabet Murders (notes from a work in progress), Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1976, saddle-stitched, 24 pp (as part of the series 'Poets of the Month'). ISBN 0 207 13298 4 5. Crying in Early Infancy -100 Sonnets, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1977, section sewn, hardback and paperback, 64 pages total. ISBN 0 909 354 19 7 (paper); ISBN 0 909 354 21 9 (hardbound) 6. Dazed in the Ladies Lounge [ note - no apostrophe ], Island Press, Sydney, 1979, section sewn, paperback, 64 pages. ISBN 0 909 771 40 5 (paper); ISBN 0 909 771 42 1 (hardbound) 7. Selected Poems, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, section sewn, 176 pages. ISBN 0 86806 629 1 (paper); ISBN 0 86806 028 3 (hardbound) (it includes 10 previously uncollected poems) 8. Under Berlin, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988, paperback, three printings by 1993 with different back jacket and half-title-page information, with author's notes, 119 pages. ISBN 0 7022 137 6 9. The Floor of Heaven, HarperCollins/Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992, paperback, 138 pages, (four long interlinked narrative poems): ISBN 0 207 17699 X (reprinted 1996) 10. At The Florida, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1993, perfect bound, paperback, with author's notes, 99 pages. ISBN 0 7022 2553 3 11. Gasoline Kisses, Equipage, Jesus College, Cambridge UK, 1997, paper, 40 pages. ISBN 0 900968 25 8 12. Different Hands, (a book of seven experimental prose stories), Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998, paperback. 77 pages. ISBN 1-86368-241-4 13. Late Night Radio, Polygon, Edinburgh, 1998, perfect bound, paperback, 92 pages. ISBN 0 7486 6238 3 14. Ultra, Northern House, Leeds, 1999, perfect bound, paperback, 64 (?) pages. (yet to be published) Pamphlet - Gloria (signed limited edition pamphlet of 276 copies) (an early version of the first poem in The Floor of Heaven), privately published by Nicholas Pounder, bookseller, King's Cross, December 1986, A4 sheets wire stapled near the spine, hand-coloured wrapper, 11 pages. ISBN 1 86252 757 1 Editor: Martin Johnston - Selected Poems and Prose, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1993, paperback, 290 + xxvi pages, with 20 photographs, ISBN 0 7022 2521 5 Anthologies, Editor The New Australian Poetry, Makar Press, St Lucia, 1979, reprinted with corrections 1980, section sewn, casebound and paperback, 330 pages. ISBN 0 909354 32 4 The Tin Wash Dish - Poems from Today's Australians, (selected by John Tranter from entries in the poetry section of the ABC/ABA Literary Awards competition held in 1988), ABC Enterprises, Crow's Nest, 1989, perfect bound, 146 pages. ISBN 0 642 13000 0 The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry (co-edited with Philip Mead), Penguin Australia, Ringwood, 1992, paperback, 474 pages.; ISBN 0 14 058649 0 (second printing Dec 1995 also published as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry in the UK and the USA, ISBN 1 85224 315 5) Magazines, Editor Transit New Poetry, number 1, September 1968, Paddington NSW, saddle-stitched, 36 pages. [no ISSN] Transit New Poetry, number 2, January 1969, Camperdown NSW, saddle-stitched, 32 pages. [no ISSN] Poetry Australia, Number 32, 'Preface to the Seventies' issue, Compiler, February 1970, paperback, perfect bound, 80 pages. South Head Press, Five Dock NSW. ISBN 901760 02 1 Jacket magazine, a quarterly magazine featuring poetry, book reviews, interviews with writers and publishers, photographs and articles on typography and design, free and published only on the Internet at http://www.jacket.zip.com.au (from October 1997) ISSN 1440-4737 Back to the Dialogue