John Tranter
Electrical Disturbance: A Dramatic Interlude

Two voices:
      A: a literary scholar.
      B: a company director taking on the guise of a naïve young man.

A: A poem, titled ‘Oxymorons’.

Outsourcing ruins the parties concerned with language.
They are employing level parking. You are one
who pretended to go at it this year.
You listen to other opponents, said the committee,
it wants to be yours and cannot be on the supporting level —
is there — are there other things for us?
To throw them into play, play — well actually, years —
but I considered playing hookey in Perot’s third innings
when he was trying to read a recent edition of Greek poems.
That is one of the stains — without parole, open-ended.
And before you know it, it has lots of the things that are typewriters.
And he played it once more, I think… but only for two years.
Going into a new level — a different attitude —
it means roughly — it guarantees that you are his — you...

We feel as if we truly believe the required stuff,
suggesting that it will offer a train,
it comes during the reading of the jury list
with a box on its tracks, now they eliminate the table
and encourage the water pilot and his destiny,
supporting charities — such noise
that it was warm and fuzzy
(if you’re in your hair) and
they’re risking a relative amount.

Playing ring-a-rosy and once again
they have said their share, a lasting example
of the world history of humans.
They are not a singular authority,
and the worker lives in poverty and reflects.

Units are an old man in a blue shirt,
selling paint cans for a living. So
in the evening everything should show
that you can find a way to use it.

B: A poem, titled ‘What Works’.

One — I want to use what was wrong
and why I did the work of the house
where you first turned up for a day of work
on actual papers, was for reasons of summer.

Two — So far so good as New Delhi,
and we think there has been, in the lives of people
who are very common, a way or a growth of 21,
or maybe many more below the jury,
which will bring the way he rose from one end
of the worst case of each of the notes and stripes,
strange days indeed.

Three — he returns. Our lives seem more thorough
and lower, as a woman might seem.
Blazing blocks from the literature maven,
on his way into our Senior Center this evening,
and a list of rules for the future of the home
where his current visit is to our children:
what was wrong is in line with his words,
and he’s here. What is a story of a growing boy:
what are you guys? Do you know what has changed
his or her choice, and released documents?
And only the light of what works, works. It works.

A: A poem, titled ‘Some Trees’.

How to use these — are you
holding a joint letter?

As those things were still,
he performs, arranging a chance

to win his party’s
morning and world instantly.

I recently met with these guys to try to
close down what we had barely been doing...

something that can be hard for exploring.
We did not live in an instant, as we’re surrounded

by the silence, or a few hours silence a day,
and I was looking for his chorus of smiles.

Please have only one thing: parties, restaurants
and hotels of their own.

The Interview. Part One.

B: The Interview, part one. Can you
tell me about the ‘scrimmage’?

A: In reading that the publisher is 28, and
expects to be a woman, he got ready a new
line of scrimmage that had been used
for the annual series of younger poets.
The first ones were in hand with the new cars.
That’s all.

B: Now, to press the church of Saint Louis Blues:
one of the new rules for the event was
that one of the press would warn everybody
when he returned. Why?

A: The error rate was higher, and the defendants
were protesting that the U.S. is the worst of all.
The code breaker of the jury is this year’s fever.

B: But the East River — sorry, the year’s fever —
that has been over for a year.

A: The firm was very large, as well as
the shame when it had to lose. That was large too.

B: What a year.

A: Well, the Server is a painting where I live in the mirror.
They have been the source for the bears and the lender,
who owns the line from the original range.

B: He is one of the U.N. and NATO people. Right?

A: I don’t have any idea.

B: Okay. Would you like to meet some new friends?

A: Well, no. For those who are very easy,
who have a certain sense of publication,
I already have friends.

B: This is the feedback to the heart of everything.
Now, what about this ‘error’?

A: I’m looking for violence, that is the error.
And a lot of parents are large and very annoying.

B: What about those so-called ‘French Fires’?

A: After the old days of riots, all of the fires were over.

B: Not Fires, Fries. And who — where —

A: Four teenage girls. One of the stores was in Paris.

B: Paris?

A: His home in the water — we were stationed there.

B (looking behind him, voice muffled): The Seine?
The report... Maybe there is no such report.

A: You have a right to finish a long way off.
This is the year two women who are used
for the current issue, who are to review the data,
are eventually to write the report together.

B: I should have mentioned that there’s a curfew
on the free-threaded analytic use of terms
which only satisfy a few people.

A: Do you mean a kind of censorship?
But the anger over yours truly...
it says in the book, and CVS violence...
(looking around): Why am I here?

B: You are available, you are the only person
along the lines of the overview of the animal,
and more powerful than ever... Now,
who was uncertain about two counts of rape?

A: The French conversation last month
was given an aggressive expansion. When
the infected meet with a long-term convalescence...

B: Really, before anything else, you should
address yourself to that end —

A: Okay, okay. A poem, ‘Thoughts of a young girl’.

The second half of their hard work
came, live, to the shores of their violence;
that was the scope of the year, and

running back to the world in which you could hardly,
an hour ago, sign the bills. Are you
still waiting for the show’s conclusion?

Most of the early lead roles are taken.
A dollar buys (or reserves) your livelihood.
We wait for your presence to show the way.

B: A poem, titled ‘Last month’.

No change of support, only stasis.
Glad the great hero is alive and well.

Things have their own way in record time.
Black people used to resolve large receipts slowly,

and I am sure something is opening its doors
and willing to sell its earnings and dollars.

H. Lawrence Powell and I would open the doors
when we visited, he has one of the properties,

it has its own level. It is your own house in the year
of the solar wind, and this is the power of the book.


More of the Interview:

A: Preheat the oven, and the garden grove is ours.

B (mid-sentence): ... the interview, more of it.
If the market share falls away
from July onwards, at least
the paper has a review — The San Francisco —

A (butting in): There are some of my own flaws —

B: Claws? Flaws? The road runner?

A: Steady on. The higher the level of the opening,
the more you hurry, and the life of leisure users —
say about the past four years — it’s a long
line of human sexuality. One, the first error,
then a power failure for what’s left of the year.

B: Hmmm... Flaws become ‘errors’. Three years,
filling out the history of the human heart.

A: History?

B: The one you’re with has a history, you didn’t know that?

A (calmly): Yes. (confused): Uh, no. Most of the time
I want to encourage a million hits.
The error you would have is a file on the arts,
corrupt —

B: It is where you have the power.
You must serve part of the first year.

A: Corrupt data, I mean. The report. Fine.
The more heard, the less gathered.

B (looking for a piece of paper): There is one more line...
about a college graduate you are trying to teach —
William eventually took up a lot of time, right? —
... reading the letter of your life... uh... forget it.
(laughs) Boy, the way you guys
were able to use these discoveries!

A: Well, however long the road, anyone can walk it.
The Berkeley Renaissance was really very much
a large American way of anger.

B: Berkeley? Really?

A (annoyed): Mortgages were foreclosed on a million homes!
The heavy use of work in the nation, Bertha
had some ideas about that —

B: You and Bertha, are you starting —

A (interrupting): We’re not really starting anything.
The Federal forms of their injuries
have originally been worth 800 dollars per person.

B: There was no other way of reading it?

A: Whose side are you on? The proliferation
of the green arms of interaction
has various uses: the ones you used
for being a mother, and the one you used
to get your free meals.

B: A mother? Hmmm, I think you’re right —

A: Sure... about fifty per cent of the road.

_________________________________________
Note: This text is based on parts of a radio program in which John Ashbery read some of his poems and spoke with John Tranter. The program was produced by John Tranter and broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Radio Helicon’ program in 1988. Nearly two decades later, an audio recording of the radio program was audited and translated by Microsoft Word’s speech-to-text function (as best it could, given that it had been trained to recognise an Australian, not an American, accent) and extensively rewritten by John Tranter in 2005 and 2006. The speaking parts ‘A’ and ‘B’ do not have a one-to-one connection with the original vocal texts; the speech divisions occur more or less at random. More or less. The title comes from an early line of Mr Ashbery’s: ‘My child, I love any vast electrical disturbance.’ (from ‘A Boy’, Some Trees, 1956)