"If It Has to Do With Poetry, We Want to Take a Look at It." A Chat with Anna Leahy & Claudine Jaenichen, Editors of TAB: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics

Editors of a visual arts and poetry magazine take us behind their scenes

Another interview has wrapped!

Friends, if you are a visual artist, an admirer of visual art, a poet, a poetry critic, a reader of poetry, or if you are simply a lover and collector of very cool things, then please bring your attention to TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics.

Today I had the pleasure of learning all about this magazine from Editors Anna Leahy and Claudine Jaenichen. For the first part of the interview, we experienced some technical difficulties in that Claudine was upside down! She managed to get her screen right-side-up, but I found this charmingly amusing, especially for a journal focused on poetry, visual art and tying the two together in innovative ways.

Anna and Claudine are no strangers to technical difficulties. Like many university-affiliated magazines, they’ve dealt with budget cuts over the past year. Additionally, early in the magazine’s ten-year history, the university stopped supporting the web platform on which they relied. They’ve also faced paper issues due to the global supply chain crisis. And they’ve encountered occasional bungles at the printer.

However, necessity is the mother of invention, and throughout our chat I marveled at the creative solutions these two have found. Not only found, but taken evident pleasure in discovering. To get around budget constraints, their latest issue includes an enormous fold-out poster. In the process of switching web servers, they took the opportunity to consider whether their journal was visually accessible enough, and to entirely rethink what visual accessibility means. When a printer accidentally put words in the wrong place, they used hole punchers meant for leather belts to manually and deliberately poke holes through the pages.

The magazine is so cool I had to wonder why more people weren’t talking about it. This led to a conversation about outreach, niche markets, and how more people have found literary pockets and communities over the past two years, as well as what it means to have a true collaboration between writers and visual artists.

The editors also shared genuine nervousness about some of their aesthetic decisions. As a writer trained to think of editors as royal gatekeepers to a distant and inaccessible kingdom, seeing these two editors express anxiety and fear over their own process was undeniably endearing.

What do Anna and Claudine want to see in poetry submissions? Anna said, If you read our magazine and see something in it that looks like what you’re doing, submit! And if you read our magazine and don’t see anything like what you’re doing…submit!

The magazine will re-open for submissions on February 1st. They publish poetry, “English translations of poems in other languages, scholarly or creative essays about poetry, interviews, visual poems or art-poetry hybrids, or other possibilities.” They are particularly looking for more reviewers, so reach out to them if you’d like to get involved. All submissions are free.

To all who came out to participate in the discussion, thank you! Your faces bring me such warmth on this cold winter day!

And to Anna and Claudine, thank you so much for taking the time to peel back the curtain on another exciting little magazine.

Happy viewing!