PHILADELPHIA – One of the world’s earliest online poetry and poetics magazines, Jacket, which ceased publication last year, now has a new home at the University of Pennsylvania and a new name, Jacket2. 

When Jacket was first published in 1997, the Guardian hailed “Jacket” as “the prince of online poetry magazines.”

“We want to preserve what Jacket editor John Tranter did with the magazine in its first 40 issues and in a somewhat new mode and a somewhat different context continue and extend it,” said “Jacket2” publisher Al Filreis, a professor of English at Penn and director of Penn’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.  

Jacket2, www.jacket2.org, is paired online at Penn with PennSound, www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/, the vast digital audio and video archive of streamable and downloadable poems, poetry programs and podcast series.

Jacket2 explores modern and contemporary poetry and poetics through articles, reviews, interviews, commentaries and symposiums and programs at CPCW and Penn’s Kelly Writers House.   

Filreis and PennSound co-director Penn English Professor Charles Bernstein, are permanent Jacket2 commentators.  They will be joined by guest commentators.

Jacket2 maintains a full, searchable archive of Jacket magazine issues published between 1997 and 2010.  The database has more than a thousand pieces of criticism on contemporary poetry and more than a thousand original works of poetry.