Magma Poetry

What better way to celebrate the longer evenings and the approach of spring than spending an evening in the company of the brilliant poets who have contributed to Magma 46?

The spring issue is edited by Jacqueline Saphra with Norbert Hirschhorn. You can read a selection from the issue online and buy the magazine via our website.

Alongside our many fine readers whose poems appear in this issue, not only do we have the magnificent Penelope Shuttle as a guest reader, but we also offer you a rare and special appearance from fabulous poet and Troubadour organiser, Anne-Marie Fyfe.

The evening will start at 8pm sharp

The Troubadour, Old Brompton Road, SW5 9JA

Tickets are £6.50/£5.50 concessions.

We hope to see you there!

We’re not necessarily looking for beautiful poems because no-one can set out to write such a thing – they may turn out beautiful or not – but rather, poems about the experience of finding something beautiful.  Beauty can arise anywhere, of course.  It may involve a work of art or a scene, but it won’t be beautiful just because they were.  It will be how the artwork or scene, or any other kind of experience, inspired you to express your feeling about it.

We’re concerned that it has become difficult to write or even talk about beauty (except in relation to the cosmetics industry) and this is a serious loss – for if we can no longer talk about beauty, will we become unable to recognise it?  The problem goes back a long way.  In An Argument About Beauty, an essay in her last book At the Same Time, Susan Sontag traces how, over centuries, certain works of art and certain scenes were claimed by academics to have ‘higher’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘intellectual beauty’.  This came to be seen as elitist in a democratic age so that, by the mid-20th century, it became difficult to describe new works of art or indeed anything as beautiful.  The common term of praise became “interesting” and this itself has become almost meaningless.  As Sontag puts it: “Imagine saying That sunset is interesting”.

Magma is having a one-off on-line sale of back issues Magma 28 to Magma 44 inclusive. Until the end of January 2010 they are on special Sale Price of £3.50 including postage and packing – or £4 if you live outside the UK. (Usually the price including p&p is £5.70 for M28 to M41, and £6.70 for M42 to M44.)

As it says in the most recent Magma e-Newsletter “They are called back issues, but one of the joys of Magma is that each issue never really goes out of date. Poems by Seamus Heaney and Billy Collins (M36), Gillian Clarke (M42), Matthew Sweeney (M42, M38)) Roddy Lumsden (M43, M41), Martyn Crucefix (M42, M39); and fascinating articles about poetry by Mark Doty (M38), George Szirtes (M39) and Al Alvarez (M33) – to name but a few – are as fresh now as they were when they were first published.”

Here’s a difficult but pleasurable task. If you were asked to recommend to other Magma readers one poetry collection (or critical work) published in your own country in 2009, what would you choose? Optionally, you can also recommend one poetry collection from any other part of the world and one poetry pamphlet/chapbook. But no more than one in each category!

Now, many newspapers and blogs have been running such surveys and people have often been recommending books by their friends. I don’t really object to that. If a friend’s book is any good, I can see why people would want to do their friend a favour, as it’s hard to get poetry books noticed out there.

If you are a regular reader of the Magma e-Newsletters, you will know about the Subscriber’s Poem Workshop in which a poem submitted by a subscriber to the magazine is workshopped by a Magma editor. Clare Pollard will be running the next workshop, and the deadline for submitting your poem and questions is end of day Wednesday 16 December. Newcomers are very welcome, and can learn more about the item and how to submit below.

Further information: Magma Subscribers are invited to send a poem on which they would like advice, by e-mail to workshop@magmapoetry.com. The aim is to give focussed advice to help poets who are working towards publication, so priority will be given to subscribers who ask particular questions about the effectiveness of their poem.

…in our ‘banned poems’ competition, that is:

Andy Jackson! (entry number 3)

In the last year, I’ve no idea how many poetry books were published, but I can get an idea of numbers by looking at how many books were entered for some of the prizes. 109 books were entered for the Forward Prize’s Best Collection category and 57 for Best First Collection. There were 92 entries for the Aldeburgh First Collection prize. In both cases, these figures represent record numbers. I know this is the tip of an iceberg. The figures won’t include the majority of self-published books or collections from small and experimental presses, many of which wouldn’t have considered entering.

In some ways, these large numbers are a good thing. Why not have a huge variety of poetry available? After all, readers will decide what they want to read and what they don’t, and restricting that choice by offering less variety would hardly be a positive step. On the other hand, a large number of books makes it harder for individual collections to come to the attention of readers. If you walk into a room, find ten books on a table, and you have to choose one, you might have a flick through all of them. If there are a hundred books, you might still flick through ten, but the perfect book for you might be among the ninety you never set eyes on.

In these uncertain times when it’s hard for some people to distinguish between a poem and a random act of violence, it is comforting to know that we have the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) to protect us from harm. You might recall that the AQA made the decision to pulp an anthology of poems for an English Literature examination because it contained a poem, Education for Leisure by Carol Ann Duffy, in which a teenager flushes a goldfish down a toilet and then carries a bread knife onto the streets. I need hardly warn you not to read the poem, which comes at the end of the linked article. One teenager made the mistake of reading it and, not having a goldfish to hand, found himself hauling a box of breaded haddock from the freezer. He flushed away a fish and then attacked the family washing line with a pizza cutter. This is a mild case but constitutes conclusive evidence (if such were needed) that teenage poetry readers are the main cause of everything currently wrong with this country.

Since the anthology was pulped and the offending poem removed from the school syllabus, knife-crime figures have plummeted and there has been an otherwise incomprehensible increase in the world’s goldfish population. Despite this, recent attempts have been made to persuade the AQA to reinstate the poem. I’m relieved to note that the AQA has – so far- ignored such attempts.

Ever looked at a Poetry Festival programme and wished you could be there to hear some of the readings? Well, here’s a festival you can attend, even though the readings take place as far apart as Tblisi, Geneva, St Andrews, Stavanger, London, Mumbai, Vicenza, Skye, New York City, Amsterdam, Ghent and Sacramento.

This Saturday 14th November from 1pm, Distant Voices: StAnza’s Virtual Poetry Festival can beam in – live – to your computer screen (details at the link). The readings won’t be available after the time of broadcast though – you need to watch in real time. You can tune in throughout the day to a huge variety of sounds, styles and languages: major literary figures and recent award winners, teenage slammers, sound poets, poetry in English and also in a range of other languages. Scottish poet and publisher, Colin Will, has an impressive post on the festival programme, complete with poems, photos and interesting links.

Magma 45 is now available. The issue is edited by Clare Pollard, with the theme ‘Telling Stories’. You can read a selection from the issue online and buy the magazine via our website.

Don’t miss the launch reading on Monday 16 November at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.