The following is part of an interview series:
PRINT LITERARY JOURNALS in conversation with BENNINGTON REVIEW

via email in Spring 2019

AMAYI ANDERS

On the jubilat website it says that “the magazine creates a dialogue that showcases the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary, and how experiments with language and image speak in a compelling way about who we are.” I imagine that those lines describe what ends up in the magazine, but can you distill into a few words what you look for in the work that you accept?

EMILY PETTIT

Complexity and depth of thought and feeling. Invention. Inspiration, life, will, freedom of expression, aesthetic motivation, and something else.

AMAYI ANDERS

Do you tend to have any sort of an underlying theme for each issue that (although not seen publicly) guides the composition of an individual issue and ties the work within the issue together? If not, then, more broadly, what ties the work of an individual issue together in terms of aesthetic vision, within the overall vision of the journal?

EMILY PETTIT

There is in no underlying theme for each issue, although in the last few years we have published a few special issues, supplemental to the biannual publication of the magazine. Perhaps what ties the work together issue by issue is the continued commitment that everyone putting the magazine together has to be open to the unknown. Chance is a powerful driving force at jubilat.

AMAYI ANDERS

You probably get asked this a lot, but how do you navigate being a print magazine in a digital age? 

EMILY PETTIT

Clumsily, I think. Also with a deep love for holding in your hands pages of poems and pictures. Each year I hope we positively expand jubilat’s digital existence, while also hoping that existence in print can continue.

AMAYI ANDERS

Can you speak a little about where jubilat came from? How and why was it started? Why is it called jubilat?

EMILY PETTIT

jubilat is called jubilat after Christopher Smart’s book-length poem Jubilate Agno. jubilat was started in 2000 by UMass MFA alumni—Robert Casper, Christian Hawkey, Kelly Le Fave, and Michael Teig. Rob Casper in a Best American Poetry blog post describes jubilat’s beginnings in this way: “With the great influence of a seminar we three took with professor Dara Wier called ‘Form and Theory in Contemporary Poetry’—a seminar that used as its central text, without explanation, The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Through that class we realized the importance of reading poems within a larger context—a context attuned to poetry's unorthodox connections to the world. We decided jubilat would present contemporary American poetry, but to place it alongside a varied selection of translations, reprints, found pieces, lyric prose, art, and interviews with poets and other artists. Instead of sectioning all of this off, we wanted to mix it together, the way the mind mixes the last poem it just encountered with all matter of thoughts and observations firing at the same time.”

AMAYI ANDERS

I am also interested in the physical presentation of the journal: the actual size of the object, font choice, the presence of color prints (I am looking at issue 34), the number of submissions or pages of work in each issue. How did you arrive where you are in terms of format? 

EMILY PETTIT

I like that jubilat is small enough to fit in many bags and some pockets. I can’t believe this, but I don’t know how and why the founders came up with this physical presentation of the journal. I love jubilat’s size and font and logo and I have never questioned the origins. I am a little horrified that I have never asked these questions and I’m going to start asking and I hope to learn. I can speak to the presence of color prints, which is something that we are so happy to be to publishing at this time. The color prints are something we’ve always wanted to print regularly, but it wasn’t until only somewhat recently that we found a printer at which doing so was affordable.

AMAYI ANDERS is a third-year music student at Bennington College.

EMILY PETTIT is the editor of jubilat.