Magma Poetry

All of seventeen years chairing the Magma group, eleven years presenting our launches at the Coffee House Poetry sessions at the Troubadour – hard to believe it. And now I bow out, at our AGM at the end of March. A few memories, a few thoughts.

Our first meeting, and taking the lead in setting us up with an Agenda, Minutes, a Chairman, a Treasurer, a Secretary – paraphernalia surprising to some of the others, fellow members of Laurie Smith’s poetry class at the City Lit.  But no point bothering unless we were ambitious, and no chance of realising our ambitions unless we were businesslike.
Getting off the ground fine. But then our nadir, two or three years in. Meeting in a dingy dark basement room in the City Lit. Fewer members, some having given up. Sales static. Quality of poems fine, but who cared? Decision – persist.

On the up and up – all sorts of different things coming together. Meetings in a high bright BBC room in Bush house, the office of Mick Delap, newly back from reporting in Africa – surprisingly transformative of morale. Our launches at the Troubadour working a treat. Magma slowly gaining in awareness and regard. A gift of cash that meant we could risk going up from 8” x 5½” to the size we are. New Members, among them Tim Robertson who masterminded our first application for a proper grant, from the London Arts Board. Two more since from Arts Council England – we owe them a great deal.

The high point of my own Magma life – Aldeburgh and St Andrews Festivals in 2006-7. At Aldeburgh, the buzz, milling around in the throngs of the poetry world. At St Andrews, the almost domestic scene, the Scots treasuring themselves, unexpected poets from all over Scotland – getting to know Jim Carruth, laureate of cattle. At both, the pleasure of talking with the poets from our own sessions – Mathew Caley, Vicky Feaver, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Lorraine Mariner, Jane Routh.

A summer afternoon in an Oxford garden, interviewing David Constantine, another favourite of mine. Holderlin, Goethe – relief from London chat about someone or other’s latest collection.

Evenings in the Troubadour with our contributors reading. The wonderful unpredictability of poets, never conforming to how I expected them to look – randy evocations from lean old ladies, weary reflections on futility from the young. The numbers, the buzz. Enjoying my own role, a payoff for the hours of administration.

Memories of poems and poets over the years. The best poems by no means always came from the most recognised poets. Anyway it was the less recognised we could do the most for – the well known would be published anyway.

Changes over the years. So many more poems coming to us – from 200 or so an issue to well over 2000. And many fewer duds. A higher level of competence – maybe because there is so much more good teaching of poetry, maybe also because we are better known.
Also a downside – a certain monotony of competence, to this editor at least. Reading on when every individual poem is capable enough but the overall effect can feel limited. A tendency to take as eternal truths the maxims developed a hundred years ago to free us from Victorianism, till I found myself pining for poems that would tell not show, would not be written in normal conversational speech, would not be about the details of personal life but the great themes and movements that form and frame those lives.

But finally and at the end of my time on the magazine, I feel great pride in how Magma has given so many poets the opportunity to be read and often to launch or develop successful careers, and pride too in how many of the best poets of the age have graced our pages. I look back with affection and pride on the members of our group over the years who have made Magma what it is, and at the legions of poets and readers who, in my mind’s eye, crowd in behind them, flourishing the banners of the eternal muse.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

Is the devil you know better than the devil you don’t? Does the devil take you? Do you speak of the devil? Have you been having a devil of a time and was it the devil to pay? Was the devil in the detail? Are you playing devil’s advocate? Is the devil he, she, both, or neither? Are you caught between the devil and Deep Blue Sea? Are you in limbo? Are you in Purgatory? Did you ever make a Betty Crocker Devil’s Food Cake? Is your hell private or public, and at which station on the Circle Line do you get off? Why does the devil have so many names and why does he have all the best tunes? Are you one of the beautiful and the damned?

Annie Freud, Guest Editor of Magma 47, with Roberta James as assistant editor, invites you to submit poems stimulated by anything connected with the devil and all his works.

A comment posted after one of our recent blog articles suggests that readers should lose “interest in writers’ biographies” so they don’t know whether the poet has direct experience of the subject matter. I agree, but take it further: biographical notes should not be included in poetry magazines in the first place because they lead the reader’s views of the poem.

I suggest readers do not want layers of meaning added to a poem by perceived notions of who or what the poet is. A biography which gives more than name and past works is at fault because it inevitably influences the reading of a poem. A reader should not be prompted to a particular point of view about a poem outside of the poem itself. For example, if readers know that a writer spent formative years in foster care they will be prompted to think that a poem about dysfunctional families is written from the standpoint of a damaged child. It may be, but I argue that should come from the poem not from knowledge of the poet’s life.

One of the problems faced by poets is that due to the large volume of poems submitted to major poetry magazines, it’s impossible for editors to give detailed feedback on those poems that are not accepted for the publication.

To address this problem we are delighted to announce a new service for subscribers to Magma Poetry magazine – a Subscribers’ Poem Workshop which will start in our next Newsletter and appear regularly after that.