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 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

 Ashbery week, 2007 (PennSound Rewind #1) 

 How one poet’s generosity set the stage for PennSound’s early growth

 PennSound Rewind

 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

 Interviews

 Vancouver to New York City 

 Catching up with Kevin Davies

 Kevin Davies, Scott Inniss

 ‘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

 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 4 

 Landscape without Friction

 William Lessard 

 Open door -> open text 

 A few thoughts on the founding of the Kelly Writers House 30 years later

 Al Filreis 

 Dreams and exercises 

 Melinda Amorosi

 Capsule reviews 

 On Erica Hunt’s “Invisible Hands” with Al Filreis and Charles Bernstein 

 for ModPo

 Charles Bernstein 

 Uldis Bērziņš’s poems on the Qur’an 

 Uldis Bērziņš, translated by Kevin M. F. Platt and Sintija Ozoliņa

 Poetic Languages of Latvia 

 Fanny Howe (1940–2025) 

 Charles Bernstein 

 In Memoriam: Alice Notley (1945–2025) 

 Jacket2 Editors 

 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) 

 Archive

 “The zing of unimpeded transmission” 
 Notes on ‘Go Figure’ by Rae Armantrout

 Susan Lewis

 The made place (PoemTalk #27) 
 Robert Duncan, "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow"

 A few good words (PoemTalk #29) 
 Kit Robinson, "Return on Word"

 King of Cummings 

 On LeRoi Jones, 'Preface to A Twenty-Volume Suicide Note' 

 Kristen Gallagher

 Norman Fischer: A 'test case for being' 

 Brian Unger

 Take your time: The ethics of the event in 'Drafts' 

 Catherine Taylor

 A Gertrude Stein book review 

 surveillance, correction, normalization surveillance, correction, normalization surveillance, correction, normalization 
 A short excerpt was presented at “Poets Confront AI and Surveillance Capitalism,” curated by William Lessard, at Poets House, New York, on April 7, 2026

 can't stop the cars (PoemTalk #13) 

 Mad cartographer (PoemTalk #28) 
 Jack Spicer, "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy"

 'Unsayable secrets' of diaspora's bodily history 

 Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

 Duncan's made place 

 Charles Borkhuis on Susan Bee's pop neo-expressionism 
 The face of noir

 Is Flarf corrosive? (PoemTalk #33) 
 Sharon Mesmer, “I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken and Now I'm in Love with Harry Whittington”

 Mad cartographer (PoemTalk #28) 
 Jack Spicer, "Psychoanalysis: An Elegy"

 Kinsella & Milne collaborate on 'Reactor Red Shoes' 
 Not the building of a megaphone for bardic harmonics, nor the people’s microphone, but a dance of many feet...

 'The Futurist Moment' 

 Jean-Michel Rabaté

 Rothenberg non-Adorno: writing after Auschwitz 

 The poem is remembering me (PoemTalk #30) 
 William Carlos Wiliams

 James Berger, “Naive and Sentimental Poetics” 
 Excerpt from a new book in draft

 Susan Howe: marginalia is no longer marginal 

 Gertrude Stein: A complex itinerary, 1940–1944 

 Edward Burns

 Just begun to learn (PoemTalk #22) 
 Louis Zukosky, "Anew" 12

 Winston Churchill For Black Counterviolence? 
 Claude McKay and the Uses of Poetry in a Time of War

 Back to geography (PoemTalk #34) 
 Charles Olson, "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 (withheld)"

 The poem is remembering me (PoemTalk #30) 
 William Carlos Wiliams

 The landscape of Hannah Weiner's late work 
 'The Book of Revelations'

 Marta L. Werner

 Christian Boltanski 
 Art: clothing in piles

 The sort of person you imagine (PoemTalk #18) 
 Lydia Davis, "A Position at the University"

 Less conversational (PoemTalk #222) 

 Podcast 

 Marianne Moore, "To a Giraffe"

 PoemTalk 

 from left: Autumn McClintock, Jordan Trice & Elizabeth Gregory

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW 
 Al Filreis convened Autumn McClintock, Jordan Trice, and Elizabeth Gregory to talk about a famous poem by Marianne Moore: “ To a Giraffe .” The recording of a performance of the poem we hear toward the start of our conversation comes from a reading Moore gave at the Poetry Center of the 92nd St. YM-YWHA (known as the 92nd Street Y) in New York City in 1965. The poem was first published in The Dial magazine in 1924.  

 Read more about Less conversational (PoemTalk #222) 

 Lines for Beverly Dahlen’s ‘Lines’ 

 Article 

 Susan Gevirtz 

 A feeling between the lines. An invocation and description of the horizon line as it recedes and of a line of poetry as a drawing that disappears like the horizon line, “a gray pencil mark unshaded” — the hand that draws this line invisible to us as we read and draw that line in/with our “mind’s eye” — and of a sentence as a content-filled line that attempts to represent but whose content itself reveals that it cannot, so it disappears too. 

 Read more about Lines for Beverly Dahlen’s ‘Lines’ 

 The epistemic edge of poetic language 

 Review 

 On Adeena Karasick’s ‘Sonic Warfare’

 Johanna Drucker 

 From left: from the cover of Karasick’s “Sonic Warfare”; Adeena Karasick.

 [F]raming the discussion of Adeena Karasick’s work in terms of epistemology, poetry as knowledge about language, provides a useful way to pinpoint its specific qualities. The poetry of ideas, particularly the non-representational approach to poetics, enacts thought and pushes our understanding of how we can know our contemporary conditions.

 Read more about The epistemic edge of poetic language 

 “The zing of unimpeded transmission” 

 Review 

 Notes on ‘Go Figure’ by Rae Armantrout

 Susan Lewis 

 From left: Rae Armantrout (photo from ModPo), the cover of Armantrout’s “Go Figure.”

 The title of this collection says it all. Admonishing the reader to “go figure” for ourselves, it also nudges us to appreciate the curiousness of what we find. Armantrout’s sense of fairness is reflected in the admonition’s bilateral application, as the collection itself enacts its own exhortation, reporting back from the poet’s investigations with the light but rigorous touch of her genius.

 Read more about “The zing of unimpeded transmission” 

 Book paintings, a poetics 

 Commentary Post 

 A conversation with Ken Krug

 J. Walter McSpadden, Robin Hood and His Merry Outlaws and Pen Knife

 I have long wanted to interview Ken Krug about his “Book Painting” series. He’s the most avid reader I know. His associational thinking is rampant and it’s mostly visual rather than literary. The combination of these two traits makes for a series of quasi-nonintentional juxtapositions that suggest a poetics. There’s a red wheelbarrow and some white chickens, but the wheelbarrow is a book. Whose title is obscured as constructed of words because Ken has chosen a palette knife, forbidding alphabetic drawing. — A.F.

 Read more about Book paintings, a poetics 

 “All those views to reconcile” 

 Review 

 On Rae Armantrout’s ‘Safe Rooms’

 David Lloyd 

 From left: The cover of Armantrout’s “Safe Rooms,” Rae Armantrout (photo by Rosanne Olson).

 While poems are not formally grouped, readers of Armantrout’s previous twenty poetry collections will recognize clusters addressing her distinctive terrain: images from the natural world, challenging segues, shape-shifting words and phrases yielding diverse perspectives on the environment, time, language, contemporary culture, lived experience, and the function of poetry in our fraught national moment. Poems present as modest in scale but soon explode with outsized ambitions.  

 Read more about “All those views to reconcile” 

 Resonance and recognition 

 Review 

 A review of Roslyn Orlando’s ‘Ekhō: A Poem in Three Parts’

 Georgiana de Rham 

 From left: Roslyn Orlando (photo by Cindy Lin), the cover of Orlando’s “Ekhō: A Poem in Three Parts.”

 Roslyn Orlando’s Ekhō: A Poem in Three Parts  gives voice to two unlikely poet-speakers: Ekhō, the Greek nymph famously condemned to repeat the words of others, and Alexa, the artificial voice emanating from Amazon’s popular Echo speakers. Orlando’s first book-length publication, the wildly creative and richly intertextual Ekhō  seems aligned with Orlando’s creative and interdisciplinary background: she holds degrees in journalism and arts politics and is currently based in Melbourne, Australia, on Wurundjeri country. 

 Read more about Resonance and recognition 

 “Would you listen with another ear” 

 Interview 

 A conversation between Inna Krasnoper and Eugene Ostashevsky

 Inna Krasnoper 

 Eugene Ostashevsky 

 In both [languages], I work with formally similar words and explore speech patterns. I sometimes take idioms literally or take them apart. When attempting translation, it is fun to trace and discern what is being mixed (up). Translingual puns occur in both and are often the trigger for beginning to write. 

 Read more about “Would you listen with another ear” 

 “The imagination is not a state” 

 Feature 

 A folio in honor of William Blake

 K Prevallet 

 This folio presents twenty-two poetic souls whose work draws creative energy from William Blake’s vast oeuvre. It consists of writers whose practice of deep listening into the field of William Blake has elicited a continuation of Blake’s prophetic languaging into wonderfully various poems, reflections, critiques, images, and soundscapes. 

 Read more about “The imagination is not a state” 

 Poetry, contemplation, and the writing life 

 Review 

 A review of James Loop’s ‘Metronome’

 Matt Reeck 

 From left: the cover of “Metronome”; James Loop.

 Perhaps you’re like me, and you walk around during the day innocently enough, if with a host of questions about poetry in the back of your mind, and from time to time, when crossing a street, or walking down a long avenue, you pull out them and wonder about them some more. […] James Loop’s Metronome brought these questions to mind, in productive, pleasing ways. Its 43 poems span 118 pages. Its back cover announces that the volume contains poems written over a decade, and so it advertises itself as a sort of selected poetry volume. 

 Read more about Poetry, contemplation, and the writing life 

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 Commentaries

 Asemic writing turned out to be mysticism 

 An update from Grzegorz Wroblewski

 Detail from asemic writing

 Grzegorz Wroblewski writes: My very first poems and images appeared in Warsaw in the 1980s in underground magazines when I was still a teenager. Those were times of repression in Poland. In 1985 I emigrated then to Copenhagen. I was impressed by visual artists like Cy Twombly and Pierre Alechinsky. That was my world. Then I started my own path. It wasn't easy. Asemic writing turned out to be mysticism. I worked on it for years. I don't know if people will like it. Maybe just in terms of pure aesthetics. But I live in it. The feeling of experience and my problems. I'm searching for the meaning of life. I'm looking for a way to find the great blue.  

 Read more about Asemic writing turned out to be mysticism 

 Jacket2 turns fifteen! 

 On April 5th, we celebrated Jacket2 ’s fifteenth birthday! We would like to present, in honor of this anniversary, one piece from each of the last fifteen years at Jacket2 . These selections are intended to highlight the diversity of pieces and projects that have called Jacket2 home over the years.

 Read more about Jacket2 turns fifteen! 

 Semyon Khanin’s Everyday Absurdism 

 Semyon Khanin, translated by Kevin M. F. Platt

 Semyon Khanin, photo by Mārtiņš Grauds.

 Semyon Khanin’s texts are experiments in a linguistics lab. They make a calculated deployment of common place, formulaic constructions, leading through minor, often hilarious catastrophes of meaning, to flashes of revelation. Revelations concerning: the underlying social mechanisms of language; its metaphysical foundations or lack thereof; or the reliance of meaning on Wittgensteinian language games. The past several decades have witnessed a boom in free verse and experimental form in Russian-language poetry. Khanin has been, from the start, at the leading edge of this wave of poetic innovation. 

 Read more about Semyon Khanin’s Everyday Absurdism 

 Plastic barriers 

 Emi Wong Shing

 Jacket2 editorial assistant Emi Wong Shing reviews three titles from the shelves of books here at Jacket2 : facture by Raymond de Borja, rock flight by Hasib Hourani, and I Was Working by Ariel Yelen.

 Read more about Plastic barriers 

 Digital Poetics 4 

 Landscape without Friction

 We are lost. The road we were running along has disappeared beneath us. For decades we scrolled sideways across its thoroughfares, jumping, running, feeling brave as we collected Fire Flower and Starman and Super Mushroom. Now the game has stalled. Without the platforms and pits we are fobbed into stillness. Into cartoon pastoral. The clouds we had once raced past dangle above us. They yield neither rain nor power-up, and any question we thumb at them disappears into their swirls.

 Read more about Digital Poetics 4 

 PoemTalk

 Larry Eigner (PoemTalk #97) 
  Michael Kelleher, Daniel Bergmann, and Ron Silliman joined Al Filreis for a discussion of three poems by Larry Eigner. The first, “ Again dawn ,” was written in November 1959; the second, “ A temporary language ,” was composed on September 1 and 2 in 1970; and the third, “ Unyielding / rock ,” was written on May 31, 1971. These poems, respectively, can be found in the magnificent Stanford University Press four-volume Collected Poems , edited by Robert Grenier and Curtis Faville, volume 2, page 357 ; volume 3, page 970 ; volume 3, page 1,013 . PennSound’s Eigner page has remarkable recordings of various occasions when Eigner read his poems. Our recording of “Again dawn” was made during Eigner’s appearance on KPFA radio in Berkeley with Jack Foley in March of 1994. Our recording of “A temporary language” and “Unyielding / rock” both come from an album entitled around new / sound daily / means: Selected Poems , produced and issued by S Press as their Tape No. 37, recorded by Michael Kohler at Swampscott, Massachusetts, July 1 and 11 in 1974. LISTEN TO THE SHOW [ more ]

 PennSound

 Barbara Henning, George Quasha, Bob Kaufman 

 The editors and curators at PennSound are more or less constantly adding new materials to the archive. Here is a list — with links — of the ten newest additions:

 Michael Ruby reads from his new book Sounds of Summer in the Country (BlazeVOX, 2025) 
 George Quasha reading view of the sleeping dragon , Barrytown NY, August 28, 2025 
 Two new recordings featuring Brian Ang 
 New author page: James Dunn, featuring readings from 2015 to 2024 
 Peter Gizzi reading for the But Company reading series, Kelly Writers House, September 25, 2024 
 Six new readings by Lonely Christopher, 2018–2025 
 Barbara Henning reading for the launch of Girlfriend , Detroit Public Library, July 18, 2025 
 34 poems read by John Ashbery, compiled by Gryphon Rue, 2025 
 Language/Noise Festival, New York Public Library, January 11, 1982 
 Bob Holman: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (2006), The Awesome Whatever (2007), and The Cutouts (2019) 
 Bob Kaufman reading at Malvinas Cafe, San Francisco, December 6, 1974 
 Philip Lamantia reading with Carmen Valle at St. Mark's Church In-The-Bowery, New York City, April 21, 1999 

 Media highlights

 The Baroness 
 Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven is featured in the main ModPo syllabus — represented there by one poem. But if you look into ModPoPLUS, you will find more poems and a filmed discussion of each of these poems. We have talked, for instance, about the Baroness’ poem “ Ancestry .” Here is one discussion of that poem, joined by Jerome Rothenberg:

 And here is a conversation between Lee Ann Brown and Robert Reiss:

 Here, below, is a photograph of her sculpture titled “God.” An inverted household plumbing trap mounted on a wooden miter box, this piece shares a kinship with Marcel Duchamp's readymade Fountain , a porcelain urinal turned on its side. Made collaboratively from Philadephia-born artist Morton Schamberg and German baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, this construction of common, incongruous objects exemplifies the Dadaists' interest in machine imagery, while the sacrilegious title reflects the provcative irony of the movement.

 We discuss “God” in this video HERE . 
 And finally we offer a brief biographical profile:

 Jacket2 index

 Articles 

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 Jacket 1997–2010

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

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