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.

Magma 51 is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops. The issue is edited by Jacqueline Saphra with Ian McEwen with the theme ‘Profane and Sacred’.

Don’t miss the Magma 51 launch reading on Monday 14th November at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

“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

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 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.

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.