Magma Poetry

This year Magma Poetry was lucky enough to be running a workshop at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. This was appropriately titled ‘Writing Poetry’ and we shared it with Don Paterson, who has just won this year’s Forward Prize for his collection, ‘Rain’.

Don spent two fascinating hours at the workshop taking questions and talking about the English language lyric poem, and covered large areas of poetic ground, offering us his take on prosody, metre, phonetics and even managing to squeeze in a brief sentence or two on the subject of metaphor.

I’m pleased to say he is writing a book about poetry – publication date still up for grabs – so that those who haven’t had a chance to hear some of his insights will be able to read about them – eventually. Those who have been lucky enough to hear Don talk about poetry will know that it’s partly his particularly original turn of phrase that is illuminating; for example, the idea that most poetry that uses iambic pentameter is ‘magnetised’ to the metre or a sonnet is just a ‘wee black square’ on a white page.

I offered the participants a chance to become editors for an hour so, putting into practice some of Don’s insights and suggestions. Split into small groups, they were invited to select which of three very different poems by dead poets (selected so that there was no danger of offending the living) they would choose.

They pursued this task with enormous gusto and there was a wide range of opinions, all of them justifiable, which I’m delighted to say proved the point I was trying to make. Poetry, like all art forms, is a hugely subjective business, and once a poem has reached a certain benchmark of quality (also a subjective matter, I know), selection becomes a matter of the editor’s personal taste. This is where Magma has the edge. A rotating editorship means that the flavour of each issue will be different and if one editor returns your poetry, the next one may publish it. Keep sending it in!

We at Magma Poetry are delighted to be working with the celebrated poet, Don Paterson, to bring you a seminar-style workshop for participants with all levels of experience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Jacqueline Saphra, editor of Magma 46, will be joining Don to give you insights, ideas and probably anecdotes about poetry and publishing. Expect helpful advice as well as the kind of inspiration and surprising technical tips for which Don is justly famed. Hear from Jacqueline what it’s really, truly like to edit an issue of Magma Poetry and how she has been going about choosing around sixty poems from the thousands that find their way to Magma’s inbox for each issue.

Magma Poetry is on the road again, this time taking a trip to the lovely Ledbury Poetry Festival.

We’re proud to be sponsoring a reading by Ros Barber and Glyn Maxwell. Glyn recently featured in Magma in our ‘Presiding Spirits’ feature and was interviewed about the beautiful  and resonant poem we commissioned from him – a homage to one of his poetry heroes, Thomas Hardy.

What a varied and exciting evening as we launched Magma 44 into the summer with a splash. On what felt like the hottest night of the year, the cellar of The Troubadour was packed with poetry lovers.

The contributors who read (including our two distinguished guests, Imtiaz Dharker and Lawrence Sail) were fabulous and many had travelled a long way to be with us. It’s always so good to hear the poems when you’ve only seen them on the page, and put faces to names and voices to their words. It’s also a revelation to hear the poems read more or less in the order in which they appear in the magazine, to experience the connections and juxtapositions. The ‘Vertical Dimension’ theme brought us a broad range of work, full of surprises.

Don’t miss the launch reading for Magma 44, edited by Tim Kindberg and Rosie Shepperd, on Monday 22 June at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

We are delighted to have two leading poets as guest readers: Imtiaz Dharker, poet, artist and documentary film-maker, whose next collection Leaving Fingerprints is due out from Bloodaxe later this year, and whose four poetry collections Purdah and other poems, Postcards from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table all include her own drawings; and Lawrence Sail, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former chairman of the Arvon Foundation and director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, who has nine collections of poems, most recently Eye-Baby, and two books due in Autumn 2010: Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems and Songs of the Darkness.

So the Magma Roadshow is now back from the magazine fair at the fantastic Scottish poetry festival, StAnza up in Saint Andrews and there’s a podcast to prove we were really there.

Click to listen to the interview

We’ll be taking the Magma Roadshow to StAnza in St Andrews this coming weekend. StAnza is a wonderful Scottish Poetry Festival in a gorgeous setting, not to be missed.

On Saturday 21st March, we’ll be taking part in the magazine fair, imaginatively described as the Poets’ Market, which is in the Queens Gardens between 2pm and 5pm.

This is a brief reminder that the launch reading for Magma 43 is next Monday 2 March at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court.

Our guest readers are Glyn Maxwell, whose poetry collections have attracted awards including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (for The Nerve, 2004) and whose latest collection, Hide Now, was shortlisted for the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize; and John Stammers, whose first collection Panoramic Lounge Bar won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2001), and whose second, Stolen Love Behaviour, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Regular Magma readers will also recall the terrific issue John delivered for us as guest editor of Magma 31.