Magma Poetry

We would be delighted if you would join us for this event at Waterloo East Theatre, Brad Street, London SE1 8TN (5 minutes walk from Waterloo Station)

Doors (and bar) open 6.30.

The readings start at 7.30 and you’ll be able to hear our winners, alongside guest poets Fleur Adcock, Martyn Crucefix, Tamar Yoseloff and Inua Ellams reading specially commissioned short poems. George Szirtes, the judge, will talk about the judging process and read some of his own work.

We’d love to see you there.

For more information, go to http://magmapoetry.com/competition/

What an evening it was. A cold night, a packed house, and the utterly complementary talents of Pascale Petit and Selima Hill as our guest readers.

We were also fortunate to host a large number of contributors, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels and even California.

The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible. Gabriele D’Annunzio Poets are often advised to  ‘find a voice.’ This voice can only come,  I think, from the unique past and terroir of the poet.  In his essay, ‘Something to Write Home About’, Seamus Heaney describes growing up in Ireland between the Catholic and the Protestant communities, between a railway and a road, between the sound of a trotting horse and that of a shunting engine, between a variety of accents and dialects. One of the dialect words which lodged in his memory from that past was ‘hoke’.

‘The word means to root about and delve into and forage for and dig around, and that is precisely the kind of thing a poem does so well. A poem gets its nose to the ground and follows a trail and hokes its way by instinct to the real centre of what concerns it.’

Karen McCarthy Woolf’s point about short poems not winning competitions makes me ask, why not?  Do judges somehow feel short-changed, reckoning that poets don’t put as much work into writing a short poem as a long one?  I don’t think this is true – a short poem where every word counts is just as likely to have uncertainties, weaknesses that need working on as a .longer poem.  But I suspect it’s what most judges feel deep down and it’s a prejudice that will continue.  In this case Magma’s new poetry competition is long overdue, joining the Plough Poetry Prize with a competition which poems up to 10 lines will definitely win.

I’ve been trying to think what makes a really short poem good and, at first, there seems no answer – great short poems are as varied as longer ones.  When the Magma team decided on the 10 line limit, we thought of some famous short poems – Blake’s The Sick Rose, Wordsworth’s A slumber did my spirit seal, Herrick’s Upon Julia’s Clothes which Eavan Boland had written brilliantly about in Magma 48.  And we could all think of very short poems in recent collections which we’d enjoyed, though they tended to be exceptions among longer poems or arranged in sequences.

In June this year, in celebration of 50 issues of Magma Poetry magazine, and in anticipation of more to come, Magma Poetry launched a new competition.

The entry period for both the Judge’s Prize for poems of up to 80 lines, and the Magma Editors’ Prize for poems of up to 10 lines is NOW OPEN and runs until end November.

I am going to start this article with a statistic. No poem under 10 lines has won the National Poetry Competition since (online) records began in 1978! The website shows winning poems only prior to 2000, but between 2001-2010 you can see all the shortlisted poems and only a handful of them were under 14 lines and none under 10 lines. The shortest is Frank Ortega’s eleven line poem Searching for An Affordable Crossbow which was commended in 2009.

I use the National as an example, as they keep very comprehensive records online, but this trend bears out. Mslexia shows the last seven years with no short poem winners, while the Cardiff International Poetry Competition offers the exception in 2001-2 with Joan Newmann’s commended Carrageen Mousse and the Boy from Nepal which surely must have been a contender for the title alone.