Welcome! | Jacket2

J2 index

Jacket2 offers commentary on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. We publish articles, reviews, interviews, discussions and collaborative responses, archival documents, podcasts, and descriptions of poetry symposia and projects. Not unlike a daily news forum, we will publish content as it is ready. Visit our index for an ongoing and comprehensive list of all J2 content.

Reviews

Contradictory equivalents

A review of Vincent Broqua’s ‘Recovery’

Jan Baetens

CohabitUS: Toward covival

A review of/reflection on ‘Help’ by Claudia Rankine

Kyoo Lee

My preferred pedagogy is ‘Pathetic Literature’

Katherine Franco

‘Here at the midpoint of my life’

A review of Kerri Webster’s ‘Lapis’ and Jana Prikryl's ‘Midwood’

Hannah LeClair

Proximate cosmologies

A review of Ada Smailbegović’s ‘Poetics of Liveliness’

Kaitlin Moore

Errant readings

A review of psalmbook by Laura Walker

Sarah Rosenthal

Podcasts

Sarah Riggs

Sounding Translation episode 2

Sounding Translation

Kathleen Fraser

Sounding Translation episode 1

Sounding Translation

Gail Scott and Christy Davids

PennSound Podcast #74

PennSound podcasts

I will wear the mask

PennSound podcast #73: Emily Abendroth and Jeff T. Johnson

PennSound podcasts

Davy Knittle with Jill Magi

PennSound podcast #72

PennSound podcasts

Empathy under late capitalism

PennSound podcast #71

PennSound podcasts

Interviews

‘So I continued, issue by issue’

Seth Perlow interviews ‘Jacket’ founder John Tranter

Seth Perlow, John Tranter

Vomiting gold in Arcadia

A conversation between Marty Cain and Joe Hall

Marty Cain, Joe Hall

Sarah Riggs and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Sounding Translation episode 2

Teresa Villa-Ignacio, Sarah Riggs

Kathleen Fraser and Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Sounding Translation episode 1

Kathleen Fraser, Teresa Villa-Ignacio

Someone’s got to keep this generation honest

Corso editors Raymond Foye and George Scrivani, with William Lessard

William Lessard, Raymond Foye, George Scrivani

‘And whoever picks it up grabs the magic’

Will Alexander on Close Listening, October 19, 2016

Charles Bernstein, Will Alexander

Articles

Difficult bliss

Structures and histories of the shape of ‘Drafts’

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

The date, Diogenes, and the dog

On Susan Schultz

James Berger

Voices of my desert

An introduction to the Vox Audio collection at PennSound

Bruce Holsapple

All the meaning life provides

Excerpts from Cid Corman’s notebooks

Gregory Dunne, Fred Jeremy Seligson

Prosody and pain in ‘Scherzos Benjyosos’

Phil Baber

The poetics of the ostrakon

N. H. Pritchard’s ‘Mundus’ at the Whitney Museum

Claudio Sansone

these are my eyes: Michele Leggott’s poetry

With ‘A Vida Portugeusa,’ a new poem by Michele Leggott

John Geraets, Michele Leggott

Features

The subterranean baroque of Roger Santiváñez

Judah Rubin

Non-object art

From representation to action

Zane Koss

Les chemins

An introduction to contemporary Ivorian poetry

Todd Fredson

'the voice of a cricket in a museum of city sanitation'

An introduction to the work of Afrizal Malna

Daniel Owen

A short history of Tom Weatherly

David Grundy

Extreme texts

Divya Victor

FOIA request #SC 15–102-S

The detainee library

Jordan Scott
Stephen Voyce

Commentaries

Digital Poetics 3

Adventures in Self-Surveillance

William Lessard

Visualizing the future tense

Orchid Tierney

Capsule reviews

Basil King’s Tablets

Al Filreis

Digital Poetics 2

Not your father’s confessionalism

William Lessard

In Memoriam: Jerome Rothenberg (1931–2024)

Jacket2 Editors

Jerome Rothenberg: December 11, 1931 – April 21, 2024

A reflection from Amish Trivedi

Jerome Rothenberg

Digital Poetics 1

The self does not exist

William Lessard

Reissues

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, 1997–2010 (ed. Mark Nowak)

O Books, 1988–2009 (ed. Leslie Scalapino et al.)

Aufgabe, 2001–2014 (ed. E. Tracy Grinnell et al.)

Infolio, 1986–91 (ed. Tom Raworth)

New Wilderness Letter, 1977–84 (ed. Jerome Rothenberg)

M/E/A/N/I/N/G, 1986–1996 (ed. Susan Bee and Mira Schor)

Roof, 1976–79 (ed. James Sherry)

Commentaries

In Memoriam: Alice Notley (1945–2025)

Jacket2 and Pennsound editor Michael Hennessey wrote the following reflection for PennSound Daily, remembering Alice Notley.

Read more about In Memoriam: Alice Notley (1945–2025)

Linda Mence’s Personification Allegories

Linda Mence, translated by Kevin M. F. Platt and Sintija Ozoliņa

Mence’s poems are ambiguously allegorical in the schematism and suggestiveness of their settings and situations: a house under attack by unclear or mystical forces; a garden falling into decay; a train ride that both connects people and separates them. For her final project in the MFA program at the Art Academy of Latvia, the poet and visual artist Linda Mence created illustrations of the seventeen virtues who figure in the twelfth-century morality play Ordo Virtutum, by the Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. While working on this project, Mence realized that she found the human figure “uninteresting,” as she recently remarked in a casual conversation, and turned instead to abstract geometric patterns in order to represent the virtues.

Read more about Linda Mence’s Personification Allegories

Time is a flat circle

Ray Coyne

Philadelphia-based writer and organizer Ray Coyne reviews three poetry collections: So Tough by Jared Stanley, Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, and Upstage by Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers.

Read more about Time is a flat circle

“Deep alongsideness”: translating the city in parentheses, quotation, and book objects

A review of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene (Eulalia Books, 2024)

Cover of Claudina Domingo’s ‘Transit’ translated by Ryan Greene

Claudina Domingo began the poems in Transit by walking 24 routes through Mexico City and registering the accretions of those experiences. First published by the Mexico City-based editorial Tierra Adentro in 2011, Ryan Greene's 2024 translation with Eulalia Books puts the book in conversation with poetic texts in English interested in spatial practices in the situationist lineage. Domingo’s routes chart, as Greene describes, “a path past ‘half-chewed’ churches, through churning markets, and under rain-drenched awnings” as the poems trace onto the page an accumulated streetscape of Mexico City’s pasts and presents.

Read more about “Deep alongsideness”: translating the city in parentheses, quotation, and book objects

Digital Poetics 3

Adventures in Self-Surveillance

Thirteen color televisions. Portable. All from the mid-1990s. The three largest are lined end-to-end. Below them, eight smaller televisions, square, stacked in two columns of four. The stacked televisions suggest legs, while a second television draws our eye. The way it lists above a smaller one suggests a head and neck, fronted by a snout. At the rear, a handheld video camera curls off like a tail. At the top, two plastic air horns pointed upward. They imply the ears of an alerted animal. Nam June Paik is the artist who assembled these objects. Paik, a refugee from Korea, sniffed the trail we were on, even then. Watchdog II (1997) is his warning from the first Internet boom, when dotcom fumes wafted from every screen. Today, there is no arguing: People inhale under constant surveillance by technology that has been domesticated to watch us. Every moment of every day, the watchdog is at our heels, huffing our steps, our sweat. Such a good dog, right? Always looking out for us, or so we think, until we find out who the beast belongs to.

Read more about Digital Poetics 3

PoemTalk

Highlighted episodes

PT#56: Charles Reznikoff’s Mishnaic poetics
PT#57: Djanikian & the alphabet of genocide
PT#58: Mayer's Statue of Liberty
PT#59: Blackburn on baseball & imperialism
PT#60: the bebop verse of Clark Coolidge
PT#61: Bill Berkson's signature song
PT#62: post-9/11 with Charles Alexander
PT#63: Laynie Browne's daily sonnets
PT #64: Caroline Bergvall chants Dante
PT #65: Lisa Robertson's weather

Depicted above, left to right: Bernadette Mayer, Emma Lazarus, the Statue of Liberty

PennSound

Here’s a sampling of new recordings added to PennSound — and several older readings that we have now segmented:

1. George Quasha readng "flayed flaws & other finagled opacities": MP3
2. Reading by Barbara Henning, Kimberly Lyons & Maureen Owens: VIDEO
3. William Fuller records his work in KWH's Wexler Studio, March 16, 2023: LINK
4. Charles Borkhuis' Segue reading, 2006, now segmented: LINK
5. Jerome Rothenberg performs "Khurbn/Hiroshima" with Charlie Morrow and Makoto Oda, Bread & Puppet Theater, Glover VT, 1995: LINK
6. Reading by 32 minority poets from China performing poems in their mother tongues: LINK
7. Susan Schultz in conversation with Tim Dyke to launch Lilith Walks, Feb. 2023: LINK
8. The T.S. Eliot Speech Lab Recordings, ed. Chris Mustazza: LINK
9. Russell Banks, new PennSound page: LINK
10. Boise State University MFA reading series: LINK
11. A film about Larry Eigner: LINK

Media highlights

Guest & Mullen — two new "on location" videos

Here are two recent videos created "on location" in Los Angeles (February 2023) for ModPo.

In the first video, Al Filreis, Laynie Browne, Sophia DuRose, Jake Marmer, Prageeta Sharma, and Jen Hofer convene outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California to discuss Barbara Guest’s “The Minus Ones.” Here is a link to the text.

In the second video, Al Filreis, Laynie Browne, Kaliyah Dorsey, Will Alexander, and Harryette Mullen gather at UCLA's Mildred Mathias Botanical Garden to discuss Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed. Here is a link to all of the Mullen materials — poems, audio, commentary — in ModPo.

Jacket2 index

Jacket 1997–2010

We maintain the complete archive of Jacket magazine, founded and edited by John Tranter.