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.