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Pam Brown: Jacket


John Tranter

B ACK IN 1996, I DOWNLOADED The Bare-Bones Guide to HTML from the internet and began, painstakingly, to make my web site. I searched for any Australian electronic literary journals (web-zines) to create links to and found only Gangway -- a bi-lingual (German-English) quarterly edited by Sydney-based publisher Gerald Gangblauer. Gangway continues to publish many Australians alongside European and American writers.
     Later, in October 1997, John Tranter started an on-line literary journal called Jacket. Some others have followed since -- Gillian Savage's democratic Ozpoet; overland magazine's overland express, begun by Dean Kiley as overland extra!, and edited in its current guise, with audio bites, by Anna Hedigan; the mildly new-age The Animist; the more academic Australian Humanities' Review begun by Cassandra Pybus; and the associated creative-writing teachers' TEXT. But, graphically, Tranter's Jacket is pretty much the state-of-the-art. It's snazzy.
     John Tranter has been fascinated by typeface for years, always detailing the particular design-history of fonts used in his printed publications. For a few years now Tranter has also been using one of several text-randomising computer programs, Brekdown, to collapse and combine texts to create his own prose-pieces and poems. Something like an electronic William Burroughs cut-up, one example is his combination of Allen Ginserg's poem 'Howl' with a Bobbsey Twins story to make a new work called Howling Twins. Tranter's recent book Different Hands (Folio/FACP) and new Vagabond Press pamphlet, Blackout, were produced this way. So it follows that Jacket might reflect these interests in its design and selection of material. Included on the site, Tranter's general essay on the internet, 'The Left Hand of Capitalism', also foregrounds his magazine's rationale, the labour involved and the interminably frustrating problem of the distribution of poetry which internet publication, he argues, largely solves.
     Jacket makes Deleuzian lines of flight within a Euro-American realm -- transmitting and collecting buzzy literary signals. It's eclectic. Tranter gathers material from many sources -- hard-copy and electronic -- transfers them to the site and uploads them into cyber space. He often selects international work from the poets, critics and teachers who participate in discussion lists like the S.U.N.Y. Buffalo-based Poetics list, the British poets' list and John Kinsella's poetryetc list.
     The content is lush with contributions from a sweeping range of luminaries, lesser-knowns and soon-to-be-someones. The genres are broad -- essays, reviews, poems, interviews, conference papers and reports, memorials, special issues, literary histories, featured writers, all accompanied by jokey photographic oddities, cartoons and comic-strip panels as well as many original photos of the authors, locations and the Jacket mascot (a pup called 'Tiger') mostly taken by Tranter who is also an experienced photographer.
     Apart from the late Martin Johnston and John Forbes (a memorial) and the hoax poet Ern Malley, the special issues feature U.S. poets -- John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Paul Blackburn, Joanne Kyger, Jack Spicer, and Philip Whalen, British-born Mina Loy and Ecuadorian-American Jorge Carrera Andrade. These features are comprehensive and include critical essays, reviews and interviews as well as writing by the showcased poet.
     To give some idea of Jacket's voluminous scope, its index of varying contributors encompasses the respected U.S. critic, Marjorie Perloff, Australian indigenous poet Lionel Fogarty, the editor of the Norton Anthology Postmodern American Poetry Paul Hoover, Victorian visual-poet pete spence, OULIPO member Harry Mathews, renowned German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, L=A=N=G= U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein, Skanky Possum magazine founder Dale Smith, Ted Berrigan's son Anselm, Japanese poetry expert Leith Morton, Sydney Poets' Union web-master John Bennett, the late-lamented Ed Dorn through to Fast Speaking Woman, American feminist, Anne Waldman and many, many others.
     Australians, apart from Johnston, Forbes, an interview with Dorothy Hewett (which first appeared in overland) and the piece on Malley, are represented mainly by new poems and occasional reviews. Just about any contemporary Australian poet of interest is given expression here. The list is too long to even attempt and there are just as many new poems from the U.K. and U.S.A.
     If I was to look for an overall tone I'd say Jacket's style has all the liveliness of a post-modern glossy and is also influenced by the so-called New York School of the late 1950s to mid-'60s mixed with a tinge of Black Mountain and the U.S.A's West Coast plus a generous pinch of Sydney.
     Tranter solicits the material he publishes and, given the daunting eight printed A4 pages that comprise the Jacket style-guide (a mini-encyclopaedia about web publishing; complete with a digression on why not to send chain-letters via the internet that displays Tranter's skill with mathematics), it would take an intrepid cyber-cadet to send anything uninvited. He includes handy browsing hints for his visitors (for example;- refresh each page by choosing the 'Reload' button to ensure viewing the latest version) and offers links to web-design sites for aspiring web-masters and mistresses.
     One of the efficacious aspects of web-zines is the ease of accessing the archive of previous issues. Every issue of Jacket is always available. To move from the first issue to the latest, or any in-between, just takes a quick click of the mouse.
     Jacket, like most web-zines, is hands-on. Tranter does all the designing and uploading himself. (This is the case for most hard-copy journal editors these days as well). It is sponsored by Australian Literary Management and access is free of charge. Jacket's application for financial assistance was knocked back by the Australia Council in November 1997 so contributors remain unpaid.
     Jacket has been a quarterly for the past three years but now, following the trend of several hard-copy Australian journals, it's been cut back to only three issues a year. In the next two years while continuing to garner contemporary poetry's brightest modes, Tranter will be producing collaborative print/electronic issues with Salt, New American Writing and overland.
     A chapbook 'From the Sublime to the Devious: Writing the Experimental/Local Pacific' by the peripatetic academic Rob Wilson, published recently by the Hawaiian journal Tinfish, appears in the latest issue of Jacket. Wilson's interesting take on current Pacific-rim writing could well signal a direction Jacket might explore.
      Somewhere in Jacket's small print, John Tranter asks 'Is this the future, and is it here already?'

End notes

HTML -- Hyper Text Mark Up Language -- a word-processing program for the internet

Web sites in order of mention :-
Pam Brown -- www.geocities.com/SoHo/Workshop/7629
Gangway -- www.gangway.net
Jacket -- www.jacket.zip.com.au
OzPoet --www.ozemail.com.au/~gbsavage/ozpoet.html
overland express --www.overlandexpress.org
The Animist -- www.the animist.netgazer.net.au
Australian Humanities' Review -- www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/
TEXT -- www.gu.edu.au"80/school/art/text/

Complete:

Pam Brown's Drifting topoi was published recently by Vagabond Press. She is the poetry editor for overland magazine.

Rolling Columns are sponsored by Mietta's Queenscliff Hotel

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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000