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?

In celebration of fifty issues of the magazine, Magma has launched a new poetry competition, which will be judged by TS Eliot Prize winner, George Szirtes. The rules for entry are here, although please note that that the competition opens for entries only from 16 October. We’re very much looking forward to receiving your poems after that date, both for the open competition and the competition for poems of under 10 lines (the latter judged by a Magma panel). On this blog, over the next few months, we’ll feature several articles relating to the competition, starting with this one on imagery. This is not even remotely intended to be an exhaustive treatment of such a huge subject, but I hope it will provide a springboard for reflection. As ever, comments and reactions below are welcome.

In his inspirational book about reading and writing poetry, Making Your Own Days, Kenneth Koch tells the story of an image, “I am a cloud in trousers”, which came to Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. How it made its arrival and what it meant, was at first unclear to the poet, but he recognised its potential for poetry. One possibility, Koch suggests, would have been to create a bizarre list – “I’m like a cloud in trousers,/ a night in gloves,/ a hurricane in a hat” – but this kind of list, while amusing (and much aped in contemporary writing), fails to connect to any strong concern or emotion. Mayakovsky went on to use the phrase to describe a character of shifting moods:

[Introductory note from Magma Reviews Editor, Rob A. Mackenzie: This is the first in a new series of monthly blog reviews. We've lined up a great team of reviewers to write these, which will (I hope) be up to the same standard as the print magazine, and will enable us to review an extra twelve or so books a year. For this feature, I send reviewers a list of five recent collections and ask them to choose one to review. Mark Burnhope chose Egg Printing Explained, Katy Evans-Bush's second full collection.]

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It’s been a busy summer for Magma Poetry; we’ve taken part in three fantastic festivals all in the space of a month.

Clare Pollard and I took the train up to Bridlington in June, and spent a couple of days at the fabulously located Bridlington Festival, in the setting of the gorgeous Sewerby Hall. The hall itself is grand enough, but the grounds are even grander and overlook the sea. Clare took an editing workshop which sounded brilliant. I say sounded brilliant, because as I went up there to see how things were going, I could hear the laughter coming all the way down the stairs. But of course serious things were said and done, and it was clear from the faces of the participants that they were enthused about poetry and the editing process. Later, I took part in a panel discussion with Peter Sansom, longtime editor of The North, and Clare did a wonderful reading from her new book, Changeling.

I’m excited to be Editor of Magma 52 with Helen Nicholson as Assistant Editor, and the theme for the issue is “putting on the mask”.

I chose this theme because all of us from time to time put on a mask of one kind or another, perhaps for reasons of good manners, or self-preservation against hurt or anger or love.

The Poetry Turntable was in action at the Market Theatre during Ledbury poetry festival.  The turntable featured as part of Poetry in Motion, the joint initiative by Magma and Ledbury poetry festival to bring poems and poetry-related content to people out and about in Ledbury.  For further details, see the Poetry in Motion page.

Note to those trying to follow the instructions to connect to the turntable via their mobile phones: this facility was for those standing around the turntable itself, to request the turntable to play their choice of content.