Magma Poetry

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.

We are delighted to have W.N. Herbert and Jackie Wills reading at the launch. As usual, all poets published in the issue have the opportunity to read, which will make for a lively evening.

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.

Hope you can make it!

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.

I am surprised by the passion in the poetry community about the word “shards”. Having heard from two reputable poets / teachers of creative writing whose opinions I value that “shards” is a no no, and having read on the website of another poetry magazine that the word “shards” should be avoided, I said on twitter that it was pretty clear the word should not be used.

But opinion is divided. There was support for the view that such, what I shall I call them, old-fashioned or twee words should not be written into poems, with people volunteering other words such as “gossamer” and “flux” that should also not be used. But I was reminded that luminaries such as Heaney with “In ash-pits, oxides, shards and chlorophylls”, Hughes with “Then you smashed it/Into shards, crude stars/And gave them to your mother”, and Khalvati with “our algebra of shards” clearly have no such qualms.

Magma 48 is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops. The issue is edited by Laurie Smith, assisted by Rob MacKenzie, with the theme ‘It was beautiful’.

Don’t miss the Magma 48 launch reading on Monday 15 November at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

I’m pleased to be editing the 50th issue of Magma, with Mary Tymkow as assistant editor. We’re planning some special celebratory features, and thinking about the distance Magma has travelled has inspired our theme.

I invite you to submit poems on the subject of journeys. Every poem should in itself be a journey – as Robert Frost said: ‘A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.’ But the theme also suggests three areas of writing that I’m interested in.

The Forward Prizes were awarded last Wednesday evening. All of us at Magma were delighted that Julia Copus won the £1000 award for Best Poem for An Easy Passage, which was published in Magma 45, edited by Clare Pollard. Laurie Smith, who attended the awards ceremony on Magma’s behalf, reports:

The occasion was packed out with poets and publishers. The chair of the judges, Ruth Padel, spoke warmly about each of the shortlisted poets before announcing the winner (there are no runners-up). Julia went up and read her poem very effectively and the audience clearly found it moving.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you have been asked to programme two events at a poetry festival. You have an unlimited budget, but each event must contain only three poets.

For the first event you can invite three living poets from anywhere in the world to read together. Who would they be? And why would you invite them?

Do you get fed up with poets’ efforts at self-promotion? Well, you’d be in good company because many poets find doing it awkward, which perhaps explains why their efforts are often clumsy and sometimes ill-considered.

Poets these days are expected to do more than write poems. As well as doing readings, many poets are on Facebook and Twitter. They write blogs, make videos of their poems on YouTube, and post to online discussion forums. They network, make contact with festivals and reading series, and publicise their books – if they don’t, no one else is going to do it for them (well, publishers do their bit, but what they can do is limited). Stephen King and Jodi Picoult have massive publicity budgets to get their books in the public eye and shift millions of copies. That isn’t true of any poet. In among all this frenetic activity, poets must write poems. If they have a family and paid employment, the time to write poems will be further curtailed.

We at Magma were thrilled last week when the Forward Poetry Prize shortlists were announced. One of the poems shortlisted for the Best Single Poem prize, is Julia Copus’ ‘An easy passage’ – first published in Magma 45. The fact that the prize is, for the first time, in memory of Michael Donaghy, a poet known and loved by many of us on the Magma team, makes it particularly special.

Having chosen to give Magma 45 the theme of ‘Telling Tales’, I knew Julia’s poem was remarkable as soon as I read it – a master-class in narrative poetry, it seems to compress an entire coming-of-age novel into a few dazzling lines. As a teenage girl in her bikini tries to break into her family house through a window, we pan out to see the whole world around her: her friend, her mother, suburban frustration, empty lives, ‘the long, grey eye of the street’, the bravery and resourcefulness needed to survive small-town adolescence. The poem’s devastating question is: ‘What can she know / of the way the world admits us less and less/ the more we grow?’