In terms of poetry, John Tranter's response to the upsurge in the late 1990s was to establish Jacket, an online literary magazine that is published two or three times a year. According to its website on 20 May 2011, the magazine is

Between 1997 and 2010, Tranter and Pam Brown (who joined in 2004 as associate editor) put out forty issues of Jacket, containing 7000 pages on the internet and featuring special issues on Polish, Turkish, Mexican and Canadian poetry, among others. There have been co-productions with Salt in the UK and Verse magazine in the US. The website added, ‘The homepage has recorded more than three-quarters of a million visits overall’ — a statement replete with a note of glorious relief that poetry, via the internet, was presumably out of its ghetto. But the number of hits does not always tell the full story, as many people surf the net and do not stay for long on any one site.

From anecdotal net evidence, though, Jacket appears to have been referred to and quoted on very regularly between 1997 and 2010. Yet despite its presumed internet reach, ‘in the thirteen years of its existence, Jacket never had a grant from the Literature Board, and was never the subject of a paper presented at an Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference’ (Tranter, ‘The elephant’ n.p.). Tranter attributed that to its international focus and the parochialism of arts bureaucrats in Australia. As from the first issue in 2011, Jacket was to be published out of the University of Pennsylvania in the US, hosted by the Kelly Writers House and PennSound. Subsequent evidence suggests that since then the amount of original poetry published has declined as ‘it needs to fit into the US university system and become a peer-reviewed journal of research and review’ (n.p.).

Leaving Jacket's excellence or otherwise aside, an understated question would always be: How are value and hierarchy inscribed and calculated in the literary magazine?