Strictly speaking, none of the poem’s words are Tranter’s. His note at the end explains that he’s taken three existing pieces of writing, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, an article by Joan Didion, and a chapter from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and then combined them by a series of interleavings and cancellations. Literally (in every sense) the point or place at which a word or phrase occurs in each of the texts has been allowed to overlay a similar set of co-ordinates in both of the others. Tranter doesn’t say what other combinatory systems he has applied to each of the pieces, but the feel of what results – a twenty-one-page poem – is certainly that of a process of endless and minute substitutions and erasures. The three texts, reduced topographically in this way, inevitably produce a stormy overload of meanings.

Reading Blackout is like reading a series of incomplete, overlapping ‘circuits’ of voices and thoughts. It’s more or less the literary equivalent of holding a handful of wires, all of which lead somewhere but in the tangle you’re not too sure where.

Shakespeare’s, however, is undoubtedly the most resonant of the systems, as for example in a passage like this:

They’re not prisoners. What tune
hid my trunk? My mind
all popular, my false revenue,
my memory, indeed, would cure deafness.

To have no needs …
dry annual stooping. 

Here (as throughout) you’re conscious of the echoes, shadows, and blurs of Shakespeare’s poetry. Samples in a re-mix, Shakespeare’s phrases crop up everywhere in the poem: yellow sands, eat berries, fire, swear, kiss the book, be my God and so on. Structurally, and more deeply, it’s Shakespeare too who provides the verse form for Blackout which, contrary to any obvious idea of the innovative, is composed as an accomplished variation on late Shakespearean blank verse. Though Tranter’s poem soliloquises in a manner that is intentionally wayward and inconsequential, the writing is often dramatic and excited:

This light is very shallow – be my God.
When God’s asleep he’ll kiss; come on down,
and laugh. Death in my heart, in drink that I serve
Lead the way, again.

On second thoughts, though, to decide whether such writing is in fact more or less wayward than a Shakespearean character in full vocal flight is, I think, part of the poem’s point.

Ultimately, my sense is that Blackout must be read as Tranter’s homage to The Tempest, a contemporary response to the poem no less interesting than, say, Auden’s lyric poems based on The Tempest were in their time. Auden, however, co-opted each of the play’s characters in a set of lyric personae, whereas if there is an overall meaning figured in Blackout then the title and its final lines are key. The title is about going to black on stage or losing power or fainting whilst the semi-conclusion of the poem breaks off with the words: ‘My project was to please. Now I want to enchant; / and despair frees all faults. Set me free.’

It is as if some empty space within the poem’s dereferencing system – a space otherwise called self or psyche – only speaks up as the magus Prospero (using words from the play’s epilogue) when the poem is about to stop. This ending is (as it is in the play) a moment of sublimation, a moment of escape; like the play, too, it is also a moment where the machine (of reading, of theatre) is simply switched off or closed down. Most important of all, however, whatever is spoken in the poem is not spoken in the poet’s customary lyric voice, i.e., a murmuring, singing voice in the back of the mind; nor is it even the staged voice-over of, say, Peter Greenaway’s movie version of The Tempest. What is switched off is quite straightforwardly the sub-vocal quasi-voice of a reader reading. It is that voice which is always about-to-be-a-voice, a back of the mind type of silence and randomness.

Some years ago, American critic Gregory Ulmer described such writing as typically part of hypertext and multimedia systems. These are systems where writing works in a manner which is, in Ulmer’ s phrase, the other side of representation. There is no beginning or end to such writerly events in these new interfaces. Though produced as part of a poetics, such writing does not lead to poetry in the sense that traditionally poems are a kind of completed ‘object’. Nor do such texts map a single mind, or a psychologically individual world. From the time of early experimental work such as his poem Red Movie written some twenty-five years ago, John Tranter’s work has always been informed by a sense that poetic language is a medium which is temporal, electronic and mediatised.

By downloading this recent text into the most refined of publication formats, a limited edition, Tranter manages to establish enough space around an isolated fragment of abstract poetry – a spar, or wreckage – for a reader to be able to focus on it. As a result, Blackout does not fade to black in the sea of published words. Does the poetry of the digital era need to be as machinic, transient and de-personalised as Blackout makes it?

It could be argued, for instance, that individuated, humanly voiced experience vanishes in the computer screen glare of global informatics only if you make use of the system in ways which allow that. But this piece, nonetheless, succeeds in creating its own version of a storm and a boat foundering in it within the interface of a contemporary imaginative space.