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/

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.

Knowing many Magma readers are also Coffee-House regulars, we would like to bring to your attention the Fifth Annual Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

Here are the judges and prizes – to enter the competition (and for the rules of entry) visit this page of the Coffee-House Poetry website.

Judged by Susan Wicks & David Harsent (with both judges reading all poems).

Sponsored by Cegin Productions.

Prizes:

1st £2,500, 2nd £500, 3rd £250 & 20 prizes of £20 each

Plus a Spring 2012 Coffee-House-Poetry season-ticket

Prizewinners’ Coffee-House Poetry reading with Susan Wicks & David Harsent on Mon 28th Nov 2011 for all prize-winning poets

Submissions: by Monday 17th October 2011

Judges:

Susan Wicks has lived and worked in France, Ireland and America and has taught at University College Dublin and University of Kent; she is the author of five collections of poetry including Singing Underwater (1992), which won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and The Clever Daughter (1996), which was shortlisted for both T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and she was a Poetry Society ‘New Gen’ poet in 1994. A short memoir, Driving My Father, was published in 1995. She is the author of two novels, The Key (1997) and Little Thing (1998), and Roll Up for the Arabian Derby, her collection of short stories, was published in 2008. Her latest collection of poetry is House of Tongues (Bloodaxe, 2011).

David Harsent, a Visiting Professor at Sheffield Hallam University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has published ten collections of poetry and several limited editions, and has received a number of awards, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Geoffrey Faber Award and the Cheltenham Festival Prize. His most recent collection, Night (Faber, 2011) was a PBS choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His previous book, Legion, won the Forward Prize for best collection 2005 and was shortlisted for both the Whitbread Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His Selected Poems was published in June 2007, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize.

Both judges will read all poems submitted.

Click here to enter.

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

I chose this theme because all of us from time to time put on a mask of one kind or another, perhaps for reasons of good manners, or self-preservation against hurt or anger or love.

And because I have a love of the theatre where assumed or, occasionally, real masks are used to create characters or explore ideas.

And because nowadays some jobs demand real masks.

I’m hoping for poems that touch on the relationship between reality and perception, where your poem unravels hidden layers or where the poem’s central character may not mean what s/he says.  Or I’d welcome poems where the nature of perception is explored.

Or I’d welcome dramatic monologues, or poems from the view of the actor behind the monologue, or poems written from the perspective of fictional characters from books or plays who do not normally get a voice.

Or does the mask of the surgeon, the fire-fighter, the clown, the pedestrian-wary-of-car-fumes, become part of who they are?  Or become a device to conceal the individual?

Or you may not want to write a poem on this theme, and poems not on theme are welcome too.

But do you catch a glimpse of someone’s real or imagined mask out of the corner of your eye as you go about your day?  Which way does it face you as you start to write?

Roberta James, Editor, Magma 52

The deadline is 30 October 2011. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

In addition to the Magma Roadshow event, Magma and Ledbury Poetry Festival are bringing poems to those out and about at the festival (1-10 July 2011) via their mobile phones, through a project called Poetry in Motion.

Visit our Poetry in Motion page to read how to take part and find poetry all around Ledbury.

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!

At The Cornerhouse, Manchester’s warm and welcoming international arts centre, we met up with Sarah Jackson who had come from Nottingham to read for us. The event took place in a beautiful room with exposed beams in the roof and light flooding in from both sides. The acoustics were great too, so no need for a sound system. Our calm and thoroughly well-organised hosts at the Festival had sold out the event, and the three of us: Alan, Sarah and myself very much enjoyed reading for the attentive and enthusiastic audience. It was interesting to hear three poets all published in Magma reading one after the other – we’re all very different and that difference reflected the ‘Magma-ness’ of the event. Rotating editorship of the magazine for each issue means that we publish a wide range of poems.

Fellow Magma editor Clare Pollard who MC’d the event led the Q&A along with me. It’s always a worry that nobody will have anything to ask in these sessions, but our audience were full of interesting questions, ranging from ‘My poems all rhyme and it’s hard to get them published; why do you think that is?’ to ‘What is a poem?’ to ‘It’s so great to hear the poets reading their own work: why don’t you podcast your readings?’ This last question was a good one, as plans are afoot to record and podcast the launch of Magma 48 on the 15th November at The Troubadour.

It was, as always, a real pleasure to meet some existing readers and find some new ones: the sales table was very busy after the event. Big thanks are due to the terrific organisers of the Manchester Literature Festival and also to our lovely audience, who made us feel so welcome.

EDIT: There’s a very nice review of the Magma Roadshow over at the Manchester Literature Festival blog.

Jacqueline Saphra

Alan Buckley

Sarah Jackson

Clare Pollard and Jacqueline Saphra

Clare Pollard

Photos copyright Manchester Literature Festival, reproduced by kind permission.

Clare Pollard, celebrated poet and a member of the Magma team will be MCing the event. Jacqueline Saphra, (also from the Magma team) will be reading, and so will Magma contributors Alan Buckley and Sarah Jackson.

Sarah Jackson’s pamphlet ‘Milk’ (Pighog Press) was shortlisted for the inaugural Michael Marks Award and she recently received an Arts Council grant to develop a series of poems inspired by the submarine base at Farlane.

Alan Buckley’s debut pamphlet Shiver’ was the PBS Choice for 2009, he was commended in the Bridport competition won first prize in the Wigtown Poetry Competition. He recently received an Arts Council grant and is working on his first collection.

Jacqueline Saphra’s pamphlet Rock’n’Roll Mamma (flarestack) is to be followed by Arts Council funded collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions from flipped eye.

Clare Pollard is the author of three collections from Bloodaxe and was recently co-editor of Bloodaxe’s Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st Century.

Clare and Jacqueline will also be talking about the editing process at Magma Poetry and taking questions. We’d love to see you there.

Manchester Literature Festival, Magma Poetry event 20th October