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

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.

The evening will start at 8pm sharp, at The Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 (near Earl’s Court Tube). Tickets are £7/£6 concessions; doors open at 7.30pm. Come early for the best seats, to get yourself a drink, buy a copy of the magazine or chat to a member of the Magma team.

This issue, edited by Roberta James with Helen Nicholson, is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops.

Hope you can make it. We’d love to see you there.

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/

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.

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.

On the same weekend as our trip to Ledbury, Magma ran a poetry afternoon at St John’s Waterloo, the church on the roundabout by London’s Imax cinema.  The afternoon was part of a five-day festival about War and People, remembering the bombing of the church in 1941 and its restoration. St John’s became the Festival of Britain Church in 1951.

Clare Pollard ran a workshop on how poets express feelings about war. Later, workshop members read their original poems, and members of the Magma team read poems like Sitwell’s Still Falls the Rain and MacNeice’s The Streets of Laredo, coming up to date with a great poem originally published in Magma 37 – Steve Lorimer’s Gandhi’s Statue, Tavistock Square, about 7/7.

The afternoon ended with David Harsent reading poems about the experience of war. He finished with a new poem, The Headshot, written specially for the Festival.  Everyone felt it was a moving occasion, especially as a celebration of people’s resilience and humour in a time of great suffering.

Meanwhile, in a two-pronged Magma attack, I headed to Ledbury with Roberta James. I’d been invited to read, as a past prizewinner, from my new collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions. The event was a Magma-sponsored one, and so I was lucky enough to have, also as readers, two poets I very much admire, both of whose work has appeared in Magma Poetry. Tim Turnbull gave us a lively and thought-provoking reading which included Dionysus is Our Friend from the recent Magma Poetry and also Ode from a Grayson Perry Urn, originally published in Magma and nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Simon Barraclough read from his second collection, Neptune Blue, which is simultaneously clever, moving and funny.

Alongside the readings, Magma’s Tim Kindberg, always at the cutting edge of technology, supplied a Poetry Turntable where viewers could interact with poems, as well as watch short films. He also curated and set up ‘Poetry in Motion’ where visitors to Ledbury could download poems onto their mobile phones using key words displayed on posters.

It’s always a pleasure to go to Ledbury where it feels as if the whole town mobilises to host the festival, and you meet a friend on every corner. Now we take a deep breath and begin to plan for next year … suggestions, anyone?

Tim Turnbull, Jaqueline Saphra and Simon Barraclough at Ledbury Festival. Photo by Harry Rook.

David Harsent reading at Waterloo.

The sea at Bridlington

Matthew Hollis and Clare Pollard at Bridlington

Jacquiline Saphra, Simon Barraclough and Tim Turnbull at Ledbury

Tim Turnbull at Ledbury

Simon Barraclough and Tim Turnbull

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.

There was a brilliant poetry line-up for the evening, with David Morley coming all the way from Warwick; the resonant-voiced Anthony Joseph; and Helen Ivory whose book The Breakfast Machine was published by Bloodaxe. Lorraine Mariner read a selection of poems, all of which have been published in Magma since its very early days.

This was the perfect occasion for Magma to launch its first-ever poetry competition, which will accept short poems of up to ten lines for the Magma Editors Award, in addition to the poetry prize whereby all poems will be judged by George Szirtes. This is a poetry two-for-one you cannot miss: the deadline is 30 November.

Well, for those who missed the launch, we’ve not left you out: make yourself some tea and click to watch the video of readings by these stellar poets. (If you can’t see the video in your email or RSS reader, click here to watch them on the Magma site.)

The poet's badge

What an occasion!

Magma 50 is

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

As it’s a special occasion to mark our half-century, we have twice as many guest poets reading as usual: David Morley, Antony Joseph, Lorraine Mariner and Helen Ivory. As usual, all poets published in the issue have the opportunity to read, making for a full and lively evening poetry.

The evening will start at 8pm sharp, at The Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 (near Earl’s Court Tube). Tickets are £7 / £6 concessions.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

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.

Twitter Users – How the Q&A Works

1. Magma’s Twitter address is @magmapoetry.
2. Questions should be tweeted to @magmapoetry any time from Tuesday 31 May and particularly between 1.00 and 2.00 p.m. BST on Friday when Julia will answer as many as she can.
3. The hashtag for the session is #magmachat so please add this to all your question and query tweets. Julia will add #magmachat to all the replies, so the conversation can be followed via the hashtag.

Not a Twitter User?

For those of you who would like to follow the Q&A session but do not wish to join Twitter, Julia’s answers can be read from 1.00 pm BST on 3 June by clicking on this link. Please note this will only give access to comments, or tweets, by Magma. If you would like to read the incoming questions as well as the answers you will need to go to Twitter’s home page at Twitter.com and put #magmachat into the search box. You may need to refresh it every now and then to get recent posts.

For those of you who would like to join in or learn more about Twitter. Here are a couple of really useful guides to Twitter and how it works, one from ArtsProfessional.co.uk
and another at CommonCraft.com.

Look forward to hearing from you and joining in the chat on Friday.

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.)

W.N. Herbert, ‘Errant’

Laura Scott, ‘Buster Keaton’

Jackie Wills, ‘Circo Group Plc’

John McCullough, ‘The Other Side of Winter’

Jackie Wills - Guest Reader

Isobel Dixon

W.N. Herbert - Guest Reader

This podcast is for private non-commercial use only. Copyright in the individual works and performances is that of their authors.