Magma Poetry

“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

The editors for Magma 53 are both poets who’ve also been practising musicians: Rob played in an indie pop band for years, while Kona dipped into not one but two Music Degrees (in composition and violin respectively), and continues to write and perform music. How have our varying musical backgrounds affected our writing? What is it that makes us choose to listen to music instead of picking up a poetry book, or vice versa? Questions like these have led us to our Magma 53 theme of Music: The Universal Language.

Does language have its own music? Of course it does; “word-music” is what permits an English speaker to distinguish spoken Chinese from spoken Gaelic without understanding the meaning of either. The poet’s skilful application of word-music is one of the things that distinguishes poetry from workaday prose – and, arguably, makes poetry so much more difficult to translate.

Music may be “the universal language of mankind,” as Longfellow said, but it takes time to learn a complex language; Handel, John Coltrane, The Clash and Steve Reich have something in common, but not all ears will find it easy to detect. Music in poetry comes in equally diverse guises. Compare the full-on effects of As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow strung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

with this deceptively casual diction from Dean Young’s Blue Limbo (from Primitive Mentor, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008):

I couldn’t tell the snowflake that foretells
my death from the other lunkhead flakes
that couldn’t scare a chicken, dandruffy
weak blips in the big what huh…

For Magma 53, we’d like to see poems which are about music or inspired by music. We’d also be glad of poems that deploy word-music with brio, or which aspire in some other way to the condition of music. Can poetry do something that music cannot? If so, show us how!

Rob A. Mackenzie and Kona Macphee, Editors, Magma 53

The deadline is 29 February 2012. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

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.)

Magma 49 is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops. The issue is edited by Julia Bird with the theme ‘Build It Up and Knock It Down’.

Don’t miss the Magma 49 launch reading on Monday 14 March at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

I’m pleased to be editing Magma 51, with Ian McEwen as assistant editor. We invite you to send us your poems on the theme ‘Profane and Sacred’. Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself. writes Carol Ann Duffy in her famous sonnet, ‘Prayer’. Is this, I wonder, symptomatic of a society where very little remains sacred, but we still hunger for spiritual fulfillment? In a largely secular world how many of us even attempt to write poems like Donne’s later works, or RS Thomas’s tortured offerings? Can language itself really give us the kind of nourishment we need?

I find that friends frequently ask me to suggest poems for weddings, christenings and funerals. Scorned by some, and adored by others, Khalil Gibran is quoted prodigiously at such rites of passage. Although the epithalamium has never gone out of fashion since the Ancient Greeks coined it, there do seem to be plenty of new poems on the subject of marriage. Perhaps poetry is taking over some of the role of religion to help us come to terms with the inexplicable and mysterious aspects of life. Duffy of course has said that poetry and prayer are very similar. You only have to look at the bible or read some Sufi or Hindu poetry to start yourself asking whether poems are in fact a subset of prayers, or prayers a subset of poetry.

Here’s an interesting short interview with Ryan Van Winkle conducted by the Scottish Book Trust. One commenter (anonymous, of course) got upset over Ryan’s answer to ‘What’s the best thing about being a poet?’ Ryan isn’t comfortable with calling himself a ‘poet’ and the commenter didn’t seem to understand that his answer wasn’t supposed to be altogether serious. That’s the problem with the Internet so often – humour, irony, sarcasm don’t always travel.

Personally, I’ve had no difficulty in calling myself a poet but that’s because, to me, a ‘poet’ is simply someone who writes poetry. It might be good, bad or indifferent poetry but if someone writes it, then they’re a good, bad or indifferent ‘poet’. I don’t care much what other people call themselves. It all comes down to the words in the end, the poems. That’s what counts. The aim is to write good poems, not to achieve some kind of meaningless title. That’s always been my attitude.