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“The prince of online poetry magazines… The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.” — The Guardian

 

A free internet literary magazine — Interviews — Reviews — Articles — Poems

Editor: John Tranter [»» Homepage];     Associate Editor: Pam Brown [»» Weblog]
Visit our new [»» Jacket Notes pages]: readings, new books & magazines, blogs, etc.
You may send [»» Letters to the Editor]: please be concise and courteous.
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml

We only have time to read for Jacket in June, July and January: please don’t send material out of season.

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Jacket’s homepage has received over half a million visits since 1997. All issues are available here, featuring thousands of pages of poetry, creative prose, reviews, interviews, author photos, and informative articles. Address:

Jacket magazine
c/- Australian Literary Management
2-A Booth Street
Balmain NSW 2041
A U S T R A L I A
[»»] Electronic mail

ISSN 1440-4737

The word Jacket is the registered business name of this magazine (registration number U2708004) under the Business Names Act of 1962, New South Wales Consumer Protection Agency, NSW Department of Fair Trading. The word Jacket is a registered trademark number 886295 in the Register of Trade Marks, Commonwealth of Australia.
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Jacket is sponsored by Australian Literary Management. ALM was founded in 1980 in Melbourne, Australia, and is now based in Balmain, a harbourside suburb ten minutes from the centre of Sydney. ALM looks after the business affairs of more than a hundred authors around the world, negotiating their contracts and managing their careers. You can visit ALM’s [»»] Internet site.

All issues of Jacket magazine are archived in perpetuity by [»»] Pandora, Australia’s free Internet Archive at the National Library of Australia.

Plaudits: In January 2000 Jacket was selected for an ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica Internet Guide Award’. Jacket has been chosen as a ‘recommended site’ on a number of international web sites — see our [»»] About Jacket Page.

Note from the Editor: I cannot accept poetry contributions that I don’t specifically ask for — I don’t have the time or the space to handle them yet. If you’d like to submit a review, article or interview, send a half-page synopsis with your return email address. Because Jacket is free and has no advertising and no source of income, I regret that I cannot offer to pay for contributions.

Copyright Notice: Please respect the fact that this material is copyright. It is made available here without charge for personal use only. It may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, or used for any other purpose. The material in this issue of Jacket is copyright © the individual contributors and Jacket magazine, as at the date of this issue.

Copyright Information (for Jacket authors and copyright owners): Jacket asks for single-use non-exclusive electronic world rights, in order to protect your rights from exploitation by others. You retain all copyright, and you may publish the work anywhere in any form at any time. You don’t have to ask Jacket’s permission: just do it. It would be nice if you mentioned previous appearance in Jacket.


 

About Jacket: a brief note:

Jacket is a literary magazine that appears two or three times a year, distributed to every town, city and country in the world via the Internet and given away free, at http://jacketmagazine.com/

It was founded by John Tranter in a rash moment in 1997, to showcase lively contemporary poetry and prose. You can’t actually subscribe to the magazine — there is no print issue. 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.

Jacket has no advertising, and no source of income. Contributors offer their work free. The staff (of two) work for nothing, and basic internet costs are covered by Australian Literary Management.

After eight years of doing everything on his own — editorial, typesetting, design, code, photography, Internet — John Tranter asked poet Pam Brown to join as Associate Editor, in 2004.

The magazine now has some seven thousand printed pages on the Internet: poems, interviews, special features, book reviews, articles, photographs, colloquia, and email discussions. It has offered special features on Polish poetry, literary conference reports, Turkish poetry, computer experiments, Mexican poetry, a panel discussion on experimental US poetry, modern French poetry, a section of poetry from Overland magazine (Australia) and New Zealand poetry, Canadian poetry, a special issue devoted to poetry and prose from 1930 to 2002 from Cambridge England, poetry from the Low Countries, humour in poetry, and literary hoaxes.

Issue 13 was a co-production with New American Writing magazine, Issue 14 was a co-production with Salt Poetry magazine, and Issue 19 was a co-production with Verse magazine (US).

The home page has recorded more than three-quarters of a million visits overall.

Some comments:

"The prince of online poetry magazines is Jacket, run from Australia by the poet John Tranter.... The design is beautiful, the contents awesomely voluminous, the slant international modernist and experimental.' — Peter Forbes, The Guardian (UK).

"I polled poet and writer friends .... Almost everyone I contacted pointed me to Jacket..." — Glen Helfand, SF Gate magazine, San Francisco.

"As a contributor, I've simply never had as much response to anything I've published elsewhere (including pieces in large-circulation magazines such as The Nation or Village Voice).... everyone I run into seems to have read it." — Eliot Weinberger, New York, in Sulfur magazine.

Visit our current issue:
[»»] Jacket 37: Early 2009

Remember, Jacket is traditionally a little late.

“I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry — all of the past you read is usually quite great — but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.”

 — Frank O’Hara

In brief, Jacket 37 contents:

========== Articles ==========

Caroline Bergvall: A Cat in the Throat — on bilingual occupants

Louis Bury: The Exercise and the Oulipo: 99 Variations on a Thesis

Christopher Rizzo: An Extensive Body of Work: Robert Creeley's Poetics of Affect: "American poetry is indeed "full of daybooks," but American poetry — and criticism — are also filled with what Harry Frankfurt accurately terms well-developed programs of producing bullshit..."

Beverly Dahlen: Some notes on George Stanley 's "Vancouver: A Poem"

Christopher Funkhouser: Presents: Maria Damon's textile styling

Jack Spicer's "The Book of the Death of Arthur", by Jim Goar

George Kalamaras (ed.): Surrealist Inquiry: "Would You Lend Money To?"

David Kaufmann: Frank O'Hara's Timing

Kevin Killian: Jack Spicer's Secret

Burt Kimmelman: George Oppen and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy and Poetry of "Gelassenheit", and the Language of Faith

An excerpt from John Latta's blog, "Isola di Rifiuti", May 2009

Stephen Mooney: Discontinuous Visuality — Brakhage's 'just seeing', and background temporality in contemporary poetics

Douglas Piccinnini: Ashbery In Paris: Out of School

H. K. Rainey: Along Comes Something: Mapping Motion in Selections from Lyn Hejinian's "Happily"

Dale Smith: 'Lyric Poetry after Auschwitz'?: Kent Johnson and Political Satire

Richard Swigg: Parts, Pairs, Positions: A Reading of George Oppen's "Discrete Series"

Duncan White: "The American Areas": Place, Language and the Construction of Everyday Life in the Novels of Ben Marcus

========== Heaney Agonistes ==========

Jeffrey Side: The Dissembling Poet: Seamus Heaney and the Avant-garde

Rob Stanton: 'A shy soul fretting and all that ': Heaney, Prynne and Brands of Uncertainty

The Group in Belfast, 1960s: (Seamus Heaney: The Early Years)

Letters to the Editor from: *** Ira Lightman; *** John Muckle; *** J.P. Craig; *** Jamie McKendrick; *** David Latane; *** Aidan Semmens; *** Ira Lightman (2); *** Jamie McKendrick (2); *** Ira Lightman (3); *** Desmond Swords; *** Todd Swift and Jeffrey Side; *** Jeffrey Side, reply to Desmond Swords; *** Jamie McKendrick (3); *** Ira Lightman (4); *** Jeffrey Side responds to Ira Lightman; *** Jeffrey Side responds to Jamie McKendrick; *** From Desmond Swords, 2009-04-07; *** From Jamie McKendrick, 2009-04-09; *** Jeffrey Side responds to Jamie McKendrick; *** Andrew Boobier

========== Poems ==========

Louis Armand: Correspondences

Joel Chace: Six poems: Scaffold, 19-24

Tom Clark: Three poems: Keats on Shipboard, September 1820 / Comic Interpretation / from "Little Cantos": 1

Peter Davis: Five poems

Elizabeth Fodaski: Two poems: Latent Progress / Short History

Joergen Gassilewski, "saturation", translated by Robert Oesterbergh

Chrissie Gittins: Three poems: Anxiety / Menopause / Sex Drive Problem

Jim Goar: Three poems: Just passing through / Sunken treasure / overseas edition

Phil Hall: Four poems: An Apprenticeship Ends / Variorum / Stephen Foster / Sawmill Tuning

Barbara Henning: Three prose pieces: Out of Detroit / Organ Light / Protestants and Catholics

Brian Henry: Three poems: Oklahoma / George W. Bush / Actually Sounding

Tom Hibbard: Poem: VII. Big Snow

Fanny Howe: After Watching Klimov's "Agoniya"

John Kinsella: Seven poems from "Graphology"

Heller Levinson: from green therapeutics this whale

Steve McOrmond: Night Figures

Geoff Page: Southward

Alan Loney: Testament : tenth muse

Camille Martin: 8 Sonnets

Annie Mullen: Three poems: You're Highness / Jarlyth and Phyllis / News of the World

Tomas Salamun: Three poems, translated by Brian Henry: The Loire Delta / poem ("If I don't know what to do...") / Greece

Edgar Saavedra: "Island", translated by Kristin Dykstra

Lisa Samuels: from "Metropolis"

Beth Staley: The first voice loop was an echo

John Tranter: Two Poems: Derek Walcott's Lips; and Craig Raine's Arsehole: variations on a theme by Helen Farish

Barry Wallenstein: Five poems: Shades of Keats / The Fabulous Backdrop / Euphoria Ripens / The Mite and the Peacock / Gazing at Raindrops

Les Wicks: Healed and Hurt

Harriet Zinnes: Two poems: The Wilderness / Conclusion

 
Listening for Faint Poems

William Empson’s batman, listening for Faint Poems, Magdalene College, Cambridge UK, April 1928

========== Interviews ==========

Joe Amato in conversation with Chris Pusateri, 2009

Eric Baus in conversation with Cynthia Arrieu-King: Bushwick, N.Y., 4 May 2009

Aaron Kunin in conversation with Ben Lerner

Jennifer Moxley in conversation with Noah Eli Gordon

Murat Nemet-Nejat in conversation with Kent Johnson, 2009

David Shapiro: in conversation with Kent Johnson, 2009, with an Introduction by Don Share

Rachel Zolf in conversation with Joel Bettridge, 2008-2009

========== Featured Review ==========

Philip Mead: Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry, reviewed by Pam Brown

========== Feature ==========

Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Draft 94: Mail Art

========== Reviews ==========

Louis Armand: "Solicitations: Essays on Criticism and Culture", reviewed by Jeroen Nieuwland

Anny Ballardini: "Ghost Dance in 33 Movements", reviewed by Crag Hill

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand: "Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space", reviewed by Philip Metres

Jacques Derrida: "Monolinguism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin" (translated by Patrick Mensah), reviewed by Tom Hibbard: When Poetry Becomes Visual: Derrida's "Monolingualism of the Other"

Rosmarie Waldrop (ed.). Dichten = [number ten], 16 new (to American readers) German poets, reviewed by Catherine Hales

Sharon Dolin: "Burn and Dodge", reviewed by Robert Mueller

Joseph Donahue: "Terra Lucida", reviewed by John Olson

Elena Fanailova: "The Russian Version" (poems), Translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler, reviewed by Stephan Delbos

Adam Fieled: "When You Bit", reviewed by Jeffrey Side

Sandy Florian: "The Tree of No", reviewed by Robert Savino Oventile

Tim Gaze: "Noology", reviewed by Michael Farrell

Nora Delaney: The Poetry of Melissa Green

Rob Halpern and Taylor Brady: "Snow Sensitive Skin", reviewed by Thom Donovan

John Hollander, "A Draft of Light: Poems", reviewed by by Alex Lewis

Mystery Man! "... he may be a hypocrite, like some fornicating Baptist pastor. This seems to be what some of his critics think." Kent Johnson: "Homage to the Last Avant-Garde", reviewed by Peter Davis

Rae Desmond Jones: "Blow Out", reviewed by Martin Duwell. See over 80 photos from the launch for that book here.

August Kleinzahler: Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected, Reviewed by Michael Aiken

Ben Lerner: Barbara Claire Freeman and S.M. Stone: "No, / but... ": Ben Lerner's "Didactic Elegy"

Jonathan Littell: "The Kindly Ones", translated by Charlotte Mandell, reviewed by Stash Luczkiw

Clive Matson: "Mainline to the Heart", reviewed by Kevin Ring

George Messo: "Entrances", reviewed by Alistair Noon

Jennifer Moxley: "Clampdown", reviewed by Rob Stanton

Eugene Ostashevsky: "The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza". Drawings by Eugene Timerman, reviewed by Timothy Leonido

Ron Padgett: "How to Be Perfect", reviewed by Jack Cox

Barbara Roether; "The Middle Atlas: Poems from Morocco 2004-2006", reviewed by Monica Peck

Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds. "Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry". Volume Three, reviewed by Joe Safdie

Craig Santos Perez: "from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY", reviewed by Mary Kasimor

Ryoko Sekiguchi: "Two Markets, Once Again", Translated from the French by Sarah Riggs, reviewed by Eric Selland

Brandon Shimoda: "The Alps", reviewed by Brandon Downing

"Gertrude Stein: Selections", Joan Retallack (Ed.), reviewed by Jill Magi

Stephanie Strickland; "Zone : Zero", Ahsahta Press, 2008 reviewed by Rachel Daley

Tao Lin: "you are a little bit happier than i am", reviewed by C.S. Perez

Steve Tills: "Rugh Stuff", reviewed by Gerald Schwartz

Keith Waldrop: "The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon with Sample Poems", reviewed by C.S. Perez

Sonja Yelich: "get some", reviewed by Lisa Samuels

Andrew Zawacki: "Petals of Zero Petals of One", reviewed by Daniel Shoemaker

Lila Zemborain: "mauve sea-orchids" (Trans. Rosa Alcala and Monica de la Torre), reviewed by Marie Larson



Shameless self-promotion: John Tranter has a homepage of his own at http://johntranter.com/. Below, some of his recent books. Most of them can be bought à la plastique via the Internet.

Urban Myths, cover

2006 — Urban Myths: 210 poems: New and Selected University of Queensland Press, 2006. 322 pages. ISBN-0-7022-3557-1, paperback. You can buy the book via UQP’s Internet site.

Publisher’s cover blurb: Urban Myths: 210 Poems brings the best work to date from a poet considered one of the most original of his generation in Australia, together with a generous selection of new work. Smart, wry and very stylish, John Tranter’s poems investigate the vagaries of perception and the ability of language to converge life, imagination and art so that we arrive, unexpectedly, at the deepest human mysteries.

“Tranter has produced a body of work remarkable for its intellectual vitality, formal versatility, and powers of renewal over a long and formidable career.”  — Peter Pierce, The Melbourne Age, July 15, 2006. Peter Pierce is professor of Australian literature at James Cook University.

“This new and selected poems reminds us, if we needed reminding, just how powerful John Tranter’s cumulated work is. There is a density, an intensity, and a many-sided explorativeness that probably cannot be matched in Australian poetry. Surprisingly, at 210 poems, it is a comparatively small book and has been pretty ruthlessly selected, but there is no doubting the size of its author’s achievement.”  — Martin Duwell, Australian Book Review August 2006, page 41

 

The Floor of Heaven, cover image

The third edition of the book The Floor of Heaven, a collection of four loosely-linked narrative poems.

‘A rattling good read’  — JOHN ASHBERY

‘The Floor of Heaven is a tour de force, a devious and profoundly subversive conjuring trick by a poet writing at the peak of his powers… the book pulses with a curious resonance… reminded me irresistibly of the best moments in Twin Peaks… a strange lyricism.’
 — ANDREW RIEMER, Sydney Morning Herald

‘...It is a sentimentality which has always lurked beneath the surface of Tranter’s work, a crudity of feeling that gives many of his early poems the glazed, dated air of 70s airport lounges.’ Alison Croggon ABC Radio National «Books and Writing», 8 November 1992.

You can read all of The Floor of Heaven on John Tranter’s homepage, and you can buy a printed copy from the publisher’s website:
http://www.uqp.uq.edu.au/book_details.php?id=0975698001
or from the University of Queensland Bookshop mail order department: phone (617+) 3346 9434, fax (617+) 3365 1988 and email at
benc[ât]uqp.uq.edu.au
The book can also be purchased on the bookshop internet site.


Cover of At The Florida

At The Florida
University of Queensland Press, 1993, first and only edition, 99 pages, paperback, ISBN 0 7022 2553 3
AUD $15, USD $15, £10 — air mail postage paid

From discursive free verse to intricate rhyme, from the classic Sapphic stanza to the ‘haibun’, a 17th-century Japanese hybrid form, John Tranter exploits the full range of his technique.

 
Cover of Late Night Radio

Late Night Radio — Polygon Press, Edinburgh, 1998. 92 pages, ISBN 0 7486 6238 3

‘John Tranter’s amphetamine-fuelled, demented jeremiads... this work is... a form of pornography.’ — Caitriona O’Reilly, P.N.Review

‘... a startlingly accomplished pragmatist, a poet alert to what works... Tranter gives us... new, unpredictable ways to describe the world — by turns energetic, exuberant, exasperated; hip, antipathetic, pathetic; attentive, fantastic, fed-up, ridiculous, serious; in his own words “quizzical”, “grateful”, “daft, adolescent and deeply wise”...’ — Stephen Burt, TLS

 
Ultra, cover image

[ In Ultra ]Tranter has conjured with great verve a babel of voices — plangent, angry, sentimental, melancholy, at times despairing — which carry the reader into vivid evocations of a feverish kind of urban life, despite the poems’ hermetically sealed refusal to yield conventional sense.  — Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald, May 11-12 2002

How ultra is ultra? Is ultra exemplified by its relentless form, the brilliant style or more by its refusal of easy epiphanies and resolutions, bathey glows?  — Michael Farrell , CORDITE, May 06, 2003

The poems are masterful because they survive so much thin ice. They do not fall into cliché, sociology or archness. They are highly visual, cinematic poems that Tranter directs like Polanski. They can make us feel like we are in a film; then, just at the right time, we are back on the street, where the poet stands with his merciless phrasebook… Brilliant. — Barry Hill, The Weekend Australian, 13 October 2001

Ultra is available from Brandl & Schlesinger, PO Box 127, Blackheath NSW 2785, Australia. Ph (612) 4787 5848 / Fax (612) 4787 5672 / vsumegi [ât] brandl.com.au, or:
http://www.brandl.com.au/

 

Cover of Heart Print

Heart Print, Salt Publishing (Cambridge England), November 2001, 106 pages, ISBN 1-876857-32-3.

“Tranter may now be Australia’s most important poet... During the 1990s, Tranter emerged as an international figure, first by editing well-received anthologies, then with the Internet journal Jacket...
      Of its four sections, the second and best, ‘The Alphabet Murders’, makes a great introduction to his work: its 27 segments (from ‘After’ and ‘Before’ to ‘Zero’ and ‘After’ again) use their meta-detective tales as excuses to talk about reading, writing, associative thought and literary history.
      The untitled set of 28 sonnets and delightful prose poem that conclude the book present light-fingered commentary on subjects from ‘Starlight’ to absinthe and middle age: ‘I re-live youth asleep,’ one affecting line admits, ‘and leave it behind at dawn.’ Readers... will see why Tranter has mattered to Australians for so long.” — U.S. Publishers’ Weekly

You can browse a detailed annotated bibliography of John Tranter’s published books on his homepage.

You can order many of his books via the Internet (even some out-of-print titles):

For pre-loved or hard-to-find books: http://www.bookfinder.com/
In Paris, France — The Village Voice Bookshop at
          http://www.paris-anglo.com/clients/vvoice/html/info.html
In Sydney, Australia — Gleebooks at http://www.gleebooks.com.au/
In Melbourne, Australia — Readings at http://www.readings.com.au/
In Amazonia, at Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/

..and our Bookstores pages have links to 30 stores around the world!

visits counter Counter at left: number of times French poet Jacques Prévert has been mistaken for the underwater explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, inventor of the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, the acronym for which is often mistakenly identified as ‘aqualung’; cumulative tally.

Warning: Commercial databases who charge a subscription or fee may not ‘deep link’ to Jacket items without Jacket’s permission. Such links attract fees... Read further.