Jacket founder John Tranter in 2011. Photo by Sean Hartnett.
We here at Jacket2 are mourning the loss of John Tranter, founder, publisher, and editor of Jacket magazine. In 1997, John Tranter began publishing Jacket, one of the earliest all-online journals of poetry and poetics. Launched in what was still a field saturated with print, the original quarterly Jacket offered something different. Free, open-access, and impervious to the constraints of page count or paper bindings or subscription income, Jacket taught its readers how to engage with what was then a relatively new medium. As Tranter wrote on the site in its early days, “You can’t actually subscribe to the magazine — just drop by every few weeks. All the past issues will always be there, and the current number will be posted piece by piece until it’s full. You can also read future issues as they are posted piece by piece.” The journal’s first issue, in October 1997, included Philip Mead’s interview with Black Australian surrealist poet Lionel Fogarty, Susan M. Schultz’s essay on the Buffalo poetics program, and Kurt Brereton’s feature on “CyberPoetics of Typography,” which declared, “The page is no longer a flat surface but a virtual field unfolding in time. Words, sounds, images and graphics are now all part of the poetics of the web.”
We here at Jacket2 are mourning the loss of John Tranter, founder, publisher, and editor of Jacket magazine.
Note: As a result of the horrific and unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, there is a lot of resistance to “Russian” literature, music, art, everything right now. This is justified in the case of some writers and cultural figures. Yet there is also an increasing urgency to understand this war not in terms of nationalities in conflict, but in terms of empire, which always complicates ascriptions of nationality. There are Russian speakers on both sides of the conflict — inside and outside of Ukraine, and inside and outside of Russia.
Members of the Tinang 83 raise their fists in defiance at the police compound. Donna Miranda (left, wearing bandana and glasses) and Angelo Suárez (center, wearing striped bucket hat) are pictured amongst the arrestees. Photo by Mark Saludes.
We at Jacket2 are in solidarity with the artist/writer and activist Angelo V. Suárez and his partner, the choreographer/artist and activist Donna Miranda. Angelo and Donna are part of the group now called the Tinang 83, a group of eighty-three artists, writers, and activists from the Philippines who are advocating for agrarian and environmental justice, working on behalf of farmers in the region. In an early June incident of police and state brutality against farmers and their supporters in Tinang — a town in Concepcion, Tarlac, in the Philippines — eighty-three activists were accosted in the one of the biggest mass arrests in recent memory. Among those arrested with Angelo and Donna is the Biennale multimedia artist Cian Dayrit. Days before his arrest, ArtNet News identified Dayrit as one of brightest stars of the Bienniale circuit, along with established artists like Cecilia Vicuña, Superflex, and Forensic Architecture.
We at Jacket2 are in solidarity with the artist/writer and activist Angelo V. Suárez and his partner, the choreographer/artist and activist Donna Miranda.
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2022. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:
Jacket2 welcomes unsolicited queries during the month of January 2022. We are especially (though not exclusively) interested in queries of the following kinds:
— Reviews of recent books or anthologies of poetics criticism and theory
— Reviews and articles devoted to poets and poetries outside the US
— Reviews, articles, or essays that put texts, authors, or movements in conversation
