Jacket Magazine was founded in 1997 by poet, John Tranter. It is an online poetry publication that issues a new edition two or three times a year. Jacket Magazine has no advertizing on their site. Tranter and his volunteer contributors work for free. An amazing feat considering the amount of poetry that appears in Jacket Magazine. In 2004 Tranter brought on poet, Pam Brown to assist the team as the Associate Editor.
Tranter is based in Australia; however, Jacket Magazine reaches households around the globe. There are over seven thousand printed pages on the internet that include poetry, articles, book reviews, and photographs, to name a few. Often each issue is themed. Jacket Magazine has also featured poetry from across the globe. A quirk of the site: Tranter shamelessly promotes his books of poetry on the homepage.
Issue 39 is Jacket Magazine’s most recent edition. It contains 900 printed pages of… stuff! A poet’s dream. There’s a multitude of poets listed with their poem(s), a few poets are featured with their photograph. Issue 39 received poems from so many contributors that they had to spill some of the poetry over to Issue 40 which will appear from April to July 2010. When you click on issue 40 you are able to see the work Tranter’s done already, a list of poets, but the site is labeled under construction and you cannot click any of the links.
Apparently after issue 40 Tranter will retire from his work at Jacket Magazine, after 13 years of work. Don’t fret, Jacket Magazine is not dead to the world. All of Jacket’s servers will be moved to the University of Pennsylvania and will remain intact. However, Jacket2 will have its beginnings! The Kelly Writer’s House and PennSound will host the new Jacket2. It will continue to be a free website publication.
Here are a few links to Jacket Magazine pages I found interesting:
http://jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml
http://jacketmagazine.com/00/jacket-reviewed.shtml#time
http://jacketmagazine.com/39/index.shtml
