"When Person and Public are Hard to Square: Transnational Singularity in Martin Johnston's 'In Transit'"

Abstract

While a large amount of Martin Johnston’s poetry, reviews, and interviews were gathered and edited by John Tranter in a 1993 publication, there has only been a handful of critical work engaging with his poetry. During his lifetime (1947-1990), Johnston published three collections of poetry, a novel, and a collection of Greek translations. He appeared in The New Australian Poetry (1979) and is often viewed as a key member of the “generation of 68”. Brian Kim Stefans suggests that the anthologisation of Johnston’s poetry has tended towards the least difficult and that Johnston himself juggled the desire for a public with a sense of solipsism. Stefans identifies “In Transit: A Sonnet Square” as a key point in Johnston’s poetic trajectory, where “he is pretty much within both worlds—that of dense linguistic play and that addressing a sort of ‘public’ which he knows but doesn’t really know.” In this essay, I argue that the fourteen sonnet square demonstrates Johnston’s transnationalism as a constant movement across two cultures while being outside of or ex-centric to both.  Through a close reading of “In Transit”, I consider how Johnston enacts a longing to square life and text, person and public, while demonstrating how the poem remains aesthetically and culturally on the fly.