Magma Poetry

‘We are the bees of the Invisible’ - Rainer Maria Rilke

For Magma 54, we invite you to submit poems on the subject of visibility / invisibility – or either one of the two!

We chose the theme partly because of a shared interest in visual art but mainly because so much poetry seems to be reaching towards something beyond the tangible, yet often takes as its starting point things we can see and hold.

Perhaps your poems on what can and can’t be seen will bear vivid witness to the evidence of your eyes – or describe a failure (or refusal!) to see.  Poetry is a form of magic too, and a poem may give visible form to something which never existed.

We’re certain you’ll have something to tell about what lies beyond the world of our senses.  In the letter quoted above, Rilke stresses how deeply we need to know the visible world in order to transform it into its invisible, enduring form, “its next deepest reality”.  What invisible realms might your poems suggest and how will you take us to them?  These could be religious, spiritual, fantastical – or anything else.

Maybe poems will approach the topic via the science or biology of eyes or light, seeing or blindness, or, like Michael Donaghy’s ‘A Discourse on Optics’, consider what is and isn’t visible in reflecting surfaces.

Of course, something invisible might just be hidden – a dirty secret or a natural mystery.  Peter Redgrove conjures a ‘Visible Baby’ whose skin and flesh are transparent – when the normally-visible is magicked from sight, we see miracles:

His heart like two squirrels, one scarlet, one purple
Mating in the canopy of a blood-tree;

Or you may find inspiration in the relationship between the visible and invisible. In moving towards invisibility, a poem might find an in-between dimension where something can be discovered as Wislawa Szymborska suggests in ‘Some People’:

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or even better, non-being
for a little or a long while.

We are definitely expecting to be surprised, and off-theme poems are also welcome.

Judy Brown and Cherry Smyth, Editors, Magma 54

Come and join us for the launch reading of the new issue of Magma on Monday 5th March at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London, as part of the Coffee House Series.

The event will be full of contributors who’ll be coming to read, and we’re also thrilled to have as our guest readers Greta Stoddart and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch who have both contributed poems to this issue.

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.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” – Walter Pater

“If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music.” – Gustav Mahler

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.

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.

Magma celebrated its 50th issue on Monday 27 June with a full-house Troubadour. A huge and yummy cake was brought in, and everyone collected their Magma 50 souvenir badges. This issue is edited by Clare Pollard, with the newly redesigned Magma magazine featuring  fabulous hand-drawn illustrations by poet-and-designer Henry Simmonds.

Magma 50 is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops. The issue edited by Clare Pollard with the theme ‘Journeys’.

Don’t miss the Magma 50 launch reading on Monday 27 June at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

Magma Poetry is going to be hosting its first Online Meet-the-Editors Q&A session via Twitter on Friday 3 June at 1.00 p.m. British Summer Time (12 noon GMT) for about an hour. And we welcome questions and queries – on Twitter please! – from now until Friday.

Julia Bird, editor of the current issue, Magma 49, will answer your questions and queries about editing the magazine. You will need a Twitter account to ask a question, but you can read the dialogue even if you don’t. So if you’ve ever wondered whether poems have to be on theme, how the rotating editorship affects decisions, whether you can submit a poem if you’ve never been published before, or how long a poem should be, or any other query related to publishing poems in Magma, on Friday 3 June, Julia will have the answers.

If you weren’t able to attend the launch of Magma 49, you can still listen to poems read on the night by some of the contributors to Magma 49.

These recordings are introduced by Julia Bird, the Magma 49 editor. (If you’re reading this via email you may need to click through to the main site to listen to the recordings.)