Magma Poetry

Magma’s launch readings have been hosted by Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour for many years.

Knowing many Magma readers are also Coffee-House regulars, we would like to bring to your attention the Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

Here are the judges and prizes – to enter the competition (and for the rules of entry) visit this page of the Coffee-House Poetry website.

Judged by Susan Wicks & David Harsent (with both judges reading all poems).

Sponsored by Cegin Productions.

Prizes:

1st £2,500, 2nd £500, 3rd £250 & 20 prizes of £20 each

Plus a Spring 2012 Coffee-House-Poetry season-ticket

Prizewinners’ Coffee-House Poetry reading with Susan Wicks & David Harsent on Mon 28th Nov 2011 for all prize-winning poets

Submissions: by Monday 17th October 2011

Judges:

Susan Wicks has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America and has taught at University College Dublin and University of Kent; she is the author of five collections of poetry including Singing Underwater (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and The Clever Daughter (1996), which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and she was a Poetry Society ‘New Gen’ poet in 1994. A short memoir, Driving My Father, was published in 1995. She is the author of two novels, The Key (1997) and Little Thing (1998), and Roll Up for the Arabian Derby, her collection of short stories, was published in 2008. Her latest collection of poetry is House of Tongues (Bloodaxe, 2011).

David Harsent, a Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published ten collections of poetry and several limited editions, and has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Geoffrey Faber Award and the Cheltenham Festival Prize. His most recent collection, Night (Faber, 2011) was a PBS choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His previous book, Legion, won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published in June 2007, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Both judges will read all poems submitted.

Click here to enter.

I’ve been around Magma since before it was Magma, a name chosen “to suggest the molten core within the world, hidden as deep feelings are and showing itself in unpredictable movements, tremors, lava flows, eruptions”.  Magma began not so much as an eruption but as a slow burn.

It must have been in the summer of 1992 when Laurie Smith and several of his City Lit poetry class decided we wanted to carry on reading and discussing our poems after the end of a shorter-than-usual summer term. So, we spent the summer bringing bottles and poems to a different flat or house each week. I remember helping wash up in the small kitchen of a flat in a Vauxhall and feeling enormously excited about the idea of starting a poetry magazine called Urban Fox.

I’m a sucker for dogs. Dogs are not taboo in poetry as cats are. I cite Suzanne Batty’s ‘The Barking Dog’ and Chase Twitchell’s ‘The Language of Dogs’. Mark Doty, too, writes dogs into poems and his memoir Dog Days. However, the dogs of the aforementioned poets appear as energetic Buddhas; cheerful, deep, embracing the ‘now’ that contemporary writer-owners find elusive: “This shining bark// a Zen master’s gong, calls you here,/ entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow” (‘Golden Retrievals’ in Doty’s Sweet Machine). Gregory Woods does not present dogs in this way.

The title poem is, after all, ‘after Kakfa’. This dog chases an ambulance and then turns off: “the bystanders reconcile themselves/ to knowing / it was just an ordinary dog.” This disappoints: don’t we want the dog to follow its injured owner all the way to hospital? We already know that life is bleak, don’t we want the poet to transfigure the ordinary dog? But Woods might be right to deliver such a poem and he avoids (even comments upon?) the sentimentality of other poets who rely on emotionally manipulative story-telling. Yet Woods does not restrict himself to a purely plain-speaking or realistic stance.

For years we debated it, balked, retreated, re-visited, shelved and returned to it, until eventually we decided the time had come to launch our first competition. It’s been a long road: Magma is run democratically and each of us on the board has strong opinions and part of the work was the inevitable round the table discussion about what we planned to do and how we planned to do it. We’re never ones to shy away from a debate (it’s half the fun), and much argument was had as we discussed how to go about running the competition and how best we might reflect Magma’s personality and aspirations. Many of us have been on the other side of the fence, entering competitions rather than running them, and we tried to use our own experiences to help us design a competition that we ourselves would want to enter.

Yesterday, I heard about a U.S. creative writing student who had handed in a batch of poems, one of which consisted of a blank page (I’m not sure whether the page had a title or not). The student felt the piece was ‘Zen’ or ‘experimental’. There is, of course, nothing experimental about it. The blank page is well trodden ground for poets and writers, as this site on empty texts shows. Some of the pieces there are interesting and were in turbulent dialogue with the political, cultural and social forces of their time but, to succeed with a blank page now, you’d need a new angle that hadn’t been covered before. I would love to take a look at Michael Gibbs’ book about blank books, part of the conference detailed here, which looks as arcanely fascinating as it’s possible for a book to be.

In recent times, Don Paterson’s ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’ (from his 1997 collection, God’s Gift to Women), followed by an otherwise empty page arguably succeeds due to the playful link with Zen and the absurd juxtaposition of wordlessness with the incredibly long title. Matthew Welton’s ‘Six Poems By Themselves’ from his second collection, We needed coffee but… (the full title is 101 words long) consist only of lines, 12 lines for each poem – no words at all. Whatever else these are supposed to do, they do draw your attention to the effect the shape of a poem has on an otherwise blank page, quite apart from any meaning we might find in it. In his new collection, Neptune Blue, Simon Barraclough has a poem about the recently demoted-to-dwarf-planet, Pluto, called ‘Plut’. The page below at first looks empty until you notice a tiny ‘o’ at its far margin. There is something rather touching about it. So maybe there is still life in the blank page, if you have a clever enough idea?