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.

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

As well as the usual host of contributors who’ll be coming to read, we’re also thrilled to have as our guest readers Pascale Petit and Selima Hill 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 and you can also pick up a copy of the magazine or take out a subscription.

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

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.

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.)

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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!

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!

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.

In a society where so much is permitted, what is truly profane? Does the word profane still connote something sinful or forbidden or something risky, permissible and irresistible? Invariably, what is profane to one person might be considered sacred to another: I’m thinking of love poems by Sharon Olds or Anne Sexton, work by Allen Ginsberg or more recently, Neil Rollinson and Don Paterson. It’s been shown by psychologists that swearing when you bang your thumb makes the thumb hurt less: perhaps in that sense profanity is closer to prayer than we might realize. I hope you’ll enjoy exploring and embracing the contradictions.

As ever, we’ll also be considering off-theme poems for this issue. But whatever your bag: spiritual, religious, profane or provocative, or anything that muddies the waters between those possibilities, we look forward to reading your poems, and anticipate much fun, profundity, surprise and contrast.

Jacqueline Saphra, Editor, Magma 51

The deadline is 16 July 2011. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

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

We are delighted to have Philip Gross and A.B. Jackson 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 £7 / £6 concessions.

We hope to see you there!

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.

Firstly, I’d love to see some exciting travel poetry – poems about encounters with otherness, or what it means to be a western traveller in today’s globalised world. I hope your journeys into other cultures might also produce translations or versions.

Secondly, I often write whilst walking, and know this has been a source of inspiration for many poets – Wordsworth, Baudelaire and the flaneurs, Frank O’Hara. Talking to other writers, modes of transport from train-carriages to aeroplanes are also cited as a stimulus – there’s something about moving through the world whilst being slightly detached from it that seems conducive to poetry. Think ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Adlestrop’ or, a poem I enjoyed recently, Heather Phillipson’s ‘The Distance Between England and America’, where she is seated next to a large man on a United Airlines flight.

Finally, I’ve realised that a lot of the classic poems I love include some kind of quest – The Odyssey, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. I’d love to see some narratives of epic journeys – from a search for the Grail to a contemporary road–trip.

And then, of course, at the risk of sounding a bit X-Factor or Tony Blair, there are the emotional journeys we go on…

I look forward to seeing where you will take me.

Clare Pollard, Editor, Magma 50

The deadline is 28 February 2011. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.