Magma Poetry

Magma 45 is now available. The issue is edited by Clare Pollard, with the theme ‘Telling Stories’. You can read a selection from the issue online and buy the magazine via our website.

Don’t miss the launch reading on Monday 16 November at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

We are delighted to have Catherine Smith and Jacob Polley as guest readers. As usual, all poets published in the issue have the opportunity to read, which will make for a rich and varied programme.

The evening will start at 8 pm sharp, at The Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 (near Earl’s Court Tube). Tickets are £6.50 / £5.50 concessions.

We hope to see you there!

Is the devil you know better than the devil you don’t? Does the devil take you? Do you speak of the devil? Have you been having a devil of a time and was it the devil to pay? Was the devil in the detail? Are you playing devil’s advocate? Is the devil he, she, both, or neither? Are you caught between the devil and Deep Blue Sea? Are you in limbo? Are you in Purgatory? Did you ever make a Betty Crocker Devil’s Food Cake? Is your hell private or public, and at which station on the Circle Line do you get off? Why does the devil have so many names and why does he have all the best tunes? Are you one of the beautiful and the damned?

Annie Freud, Guest Editor of Magma 47, with Roberta James as assistant editor, invites you to submit poems stimulated by anything connected with the devil and all his works.

I’m thrilled and excited to be editing Magma 46 with Norbert Hirschhorn as assistant editor. This issue will be launched in Spring 2010 and the theme is Hunger in all its possible manifestations.

I hope that it will inspire some visceral, strongly felt poems touching on some areas that are very close to my heart as both writer and reader: food, sex and desire, intimacy or the lack of it, spiritual hunger, as well as the wider, political aspects. You may want to take some surprising sideways glances at the subject too; maybe your own cravings take you to some unpredictable places, or perhaps you hunger for something unexpected. We’d love to read poems that have an unusual take on our theme.

What a varied and exciting evening as we launched Magma 44 into the summer with a splash. On what felt like the hottest night of the year, the cellar of The Troubadour was packed with poetry lovers.

The contributors who read (including our two distinguished guests, Imtiaz Dharker and Lawrence Sail) were fabulous and many had travelled a long way to be with us. It’s always so good to hear the poems when you’ve only seen them on the page, and put faces to names and voices to their words. It’s also a revelation to hear the poems read more or less in the order in which they appear in the magazine, to experience the connections and juxtapositions. The ‘Vertical Dimension’ theme brought us a broad range of work, full of surprises.

Don’t miss the launch reading for Magma 44, edited by Tim Kindberg and Rosie Shepperd, on Monday 22 June at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court, London.

We are delighted to have two leading poets as guest readers: Imtiaz Dharker, poet, artist and documentary film-maker, whose next collection Leaving Fingerprints is due out from Bloodaxe later this year, and whose four poetry collections Purdah and other poems, Postcards from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table all include her own drawings; and Lawrence Sail, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and former chairman of the Arvon Foundation and director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, who has nine collections of poems, most recently Eye-Baby, and two books due in Autumn 2010: Waking Dreams: New & Selected Poems and Songs of the Darkness.

American writer, Kent Johnson, sounds off on the thorny subject of poetry reviewing. He suggests that reviews and blurbs have ‘begun to blur in purpose and effect’:

Fawning, toadyish criticism, then, is likely to remain the default setting so long as “negative” reviewing constitutes a potential hazard to the position and advancement of the poet-reviewer. (Interestingly, by the way, it’s in top-tier journals like Poetry where negative reviews are most likely to appear, since the capital accruing to the poet-reviewer compensates for the risk.) Given this, maybe it’s time that magazines, of all aesthetic shapes and circulation sizes, resurrect the venerable practice of “unsigned” reviews. There’s no question readers, in the main, would be tickled and intrigued.

I’m thrilled to be editing Magma 45, and have decided to ask for poems on the theme of ‘Telling Stories.’

As a poet who has written plays, as well as a screenplay that never got made (a rom-com about a psychic that I still feel would have been a surefire hit…) I’m currently very interested in the way we tell stories through poems – cuts, flashbacks, unreliable narrators, twists. Many playwrights believe in cutting everything that doesn’t drive the story forward, and, though poetry has always been more tolerant of digression, it is always interesting to think about what we should include (and edit out) of our tales. For example, should poetic scenes obey the screenwriting adage: ‘arrive late, leave early’?

This is a brief reminder that the launch reading for Magma 43 is next Monday 2 March at The Troubadour, Earl’s Court.

Our guest readers are Glyn Maxwell, whose poetry collections have attracted awards including the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (for The Nerve, 2004) and whose latest collection, Hide Now, was shortlisted for the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize; and John Stammers, whose first collection Panoramic Lounge Bar won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2001), and whose second, Stolen Love Behaviour, was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Regular Magma readers will also recall the terrific issue John delivered for us as guest editor of Magma 31.

Here’s your opportunity to give us some feedback about Magma 42 – what you liked and what you think could be improved. And of course it’s our opportunity to hear from you.

Did you enjoy the selection of poems? Did it introduce you to some new voices you didn’t know, as well as offering you some more familiar ones?

Launches of Magma Poetry always have the feeling of An Occasion. The launch of Magma 42 perhaps even more than usual; we had planned it as a celebration of the newly refreshed Magma – bigger, better and with an enhanced design.

Many of the poets featured in the issue were there to read their poems, and one of the pleasures of the evening was to hear the poems read in the order in which they appear in the magazine, giving a sense of the connections and juxtapositions. From my point of view, it was fascinating to have sight of some of the poets whose work we chose, to put faces and voices to the words.