Our first meeting, and taking the lead in setting us up with an Agenda, Minutes, a Chairman, a Treasurer, a Secretary – paraphernalia surprising to some of the others, fellow members of Laurie Smith’s poetry class at the City Lit.  But no point bothering unless we were ambitious, and no chance of realising our ambitions unless we were businesslike.
Getting off the ground fine. But then our nadir, two or three years in. Meeting in a dingy dark basement room in the City Lit. Fewer members, some having given up. Sales static. Quality of poems fine, but who cared? Decision – persist.

On the up and up – all sorts of different things coming together. Meetings in a high bright BBC room in Bush house, the office of Mick Delap, newly back from reporting in Africa – surprisingly transformative of morale. Our launches at the Troubadour working a treat. Magma slowly gaining in awareness and regard. A gift of cash that meant we could risk going up from 8” x 5½” to the size we are. New Members, among them Tim Robertson who masterminded our first application for a proper grant, from the London Arts Board. Two more since from Arts Council England – we owe them a great deal.

The high point of my own Magma life – Aldeburgh and St Andrews Festivals in 2006-7. At Aldeburgh, the buzz, milling around in the throngs of the poetry world. At St Andrews, the almost domestic scene, the Scots treasuring themselves, unexpected poets from all over Scotland – getting to know Jim Carruth, laureate of cattle. At both, the pleasure of talking with the poets from our own sessions – Mathew Caley, Vicky Feaver, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Lorraine Mariner, Jane Routh.

A summer afternoon in an Oxford garden, interviewing David Constantine, another favourite of mine. Holderlin, Goethe – relief from London chat about someone or other’s latest collection.

Evenings in the Troubadour with our contributors reading. The wonderful unpredictability of poets, never conforming to how I expected them to look – randy evocations from lean old ladies, weary reflections on futility from the young. The numbers, the buzz. Enjoying my own role, a payoff for the hours of administration.

Memories of poems and poets over the years. The best poems by no means always came from the most recognised poets. Anyway it was the less recognised we could do the most for – the well known would be published anyway.

Changes over the years. So many more poems coming to us – from 200 or so an issue to well over 2000. And many fewer duds. A higher level of competence – maybe because there is so much more good teaching of poetry, maybe also because we are better known.
Also a downside – a certain monotony of competence, to this editor at least. Reading on when every individual poem is capable enough but the overall effect can feel limited. A tendency to take as eternal truths the maxims developed a hundred years ago to free us from Victorianism, till I found myself pining for poems that would tell not show, would not be written in normal conversational speech, would not be about the details of personal life but the great themes and movements that form and frame those lives.

But finally and at the end of my time on the magazine, I feel great pride in how Magma has given so many poets the opportunity to be read and often to launch or develop successful careers, and pride too in how many of the best poets of the age have graced our pages. I look back with affection and pride on the members of our group over the years who have made Magma what it is, and at the legions of poets and readers who, in my mind’s eye, crowd in behind them, flourishing the banners of the eternal muse.

The spring issue is edited by Jacqueline Saphra with Norbert Hirschhorn. You can read a selection from the issue online and buy the magazine via our website.

Alongside our many fine readers whose poems appear in this issue, not only do we have the magnificent Penelope Shuttle as a guest reader, but we also offer you a rare and special appearance from fabulous poet and Troubadour organiser, Anne-Marie Fyfe.

The evening will start at 8pm sharp

The Troubadour, Old Brompton Road, SW5 9JA

Tickets are £6.50/£5.50 concessions.

We hope to see you there!

We’re concerned that it has become difficult to write or even talk about beauty (except in relation to the cosmetics industry) and this is a serious loss – for if we can no longer talk about beauty, will we become unable to recognise it?  The problem goes back a long way.  In An Argument About Beauty, an essay in her last book At the Same Time, Susan Sontag traces how, over centuries, certain works of art and certain scenes were claimed by academics to have ‘higher’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘intellectual beauty’.  This came to be seen as elitist in a democratic age so that, by the mid-20^th century, it became difficult to describe new works of art or indeed anything as beautiful.  The common term of praise became “interesting” and this itself has become almost meaningless.  As Sontag puts it: “Imagine saying That sunset is interesting”.

The most numbing effect of ‘higher beauty’ is a belief that beauty is found only in certain subjects and in certain literary, visual and musical forms.  This has led to intolerance and, at worst, destructiveness:  the Nazis’ admiration of traditional artworks while burning modern art as degenerate; Orwell’s wish that the Anarchists had blown up Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia; the Taliban’s destruction of the huge statues of Buddha at Bamyan.

The opposite view has long been expressed quietly and is now being heard more clearly.  In her radical essay of 1856, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, George Eliot had no doubt that fiction could be both unconventional and beautiful: “Like crystalline masses, it may take any form, and yet be beautiful”.  She believed in experimentation with form and in the power of beautiful writing to make people more thoughtful, to make them in a practical sense more moral.

Both these themes have been taken up in Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just (1999) and by Zadie Smith implicitly in her novel On Beauty (2005) and more explicitly in her essays, some recently reprinted in Changing My Mind.  Sontag’s summation is most far-reaching:  contemplation of beauty makes us wiser (“the wisdom that becomes available over a deep, lifelong engagement with the aesthetic cannot be duplicated by any other kind of seriousness”) and is fundamental to being human (“Unlike beauty, often fragile and impermanent , the capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions”).

Perhaps the clearest statement of what we’re looking for is in George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

If we had a keen vision and feeling for all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.  As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.

We believe that to see something as beautiful is the surest way of piercing the wadding, however briefly, and that this can arise with other people (all ordinary human life) as well as with nature (the grass growing, the squirrel’s heartbeat).  It was this that led George Eliot’s great contemporary poets, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, to their piercing visions of the world and their radical experiments with form and language.  And both respond to human life as strongly as to nature: Hopkins found beauty in the life and death of a labourer (Felix Randal) as much as in the flight of a hawk (The Windhover).

Or take the two erotic poems from the past printed in Magma 46:  Sir Thomas Wyatt’s They flee from me that sometime did me seek and Anne Sexton’s Us.  Readers have found them beautiful, but the poets were writing about experiences they found beautiful and wanted to record and relive.  We hope you will want to do the same.

Laurie Smith, editor of Magma 48, with Rob A Mackenzie as assistant editor, invites you to submit poems stimulated by anything connected with ‘it was beautiful’ as well as poems on other subjects.  Please send any queries about the theme to the editors at contributions@magmapoetry.com

The deadline is 16 July 2010.  Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

As it says in the most recent Magma e-Newsletter “They are called back issues, but one of the joys of Magma is that each issue never really goes out of date. Poems by Seamus Heaney and Billy Collins (M36), Gillian Clarke (M42), Matthew Sweeney (M42, M38)) Roddy Lumsden (M43, M41), Martyn Crucefix (M42, M39); and fascinating articles about poetry by Mark Doty (M38), George Szirtes (M39) and Al Alvarez (M33) – to name but a few – are as fresh now as they were when they were first published.”

I agree, and in fact I hold the uncontentious view that a good poem is always relevant, and a great poem can be re-read many times It is also fascinating to look at early published work of a poet who is now fully published and acclaimed – such as Jen Hadfield, Tim Turnbull or Lorraine Mariner; or read about the New Imagination by Laurie Smith which is still new, or articles such as “Mistakes Poets Make “ in Roddy Lumsden’s article in Magma 31 (2005) which continue to be made or avoided.

Picking out the gems of what was published in the past is a real education, and revisiting trends in their nascent stage can be like reading with fresh eyes.

But old articles about developing trends may seem dated; or a poem written to a new idea which has since been explored more successfully by others, may now simply seem adequate. So I am asking myself the question of whether a poetry magazine has a shelf-life, and what it is. There is something wonderful about a newly minted magazine, and reading poems and articles never seen before in public. I have a need to know what poetry magazines are publishing in the here and now, what subjects and forms are being explored and how, and what that says about the future.

As I write this I am flicking through some back issues and I am falling on the Presiding Spirits articles, which appropriately are in themselves about looking backwards and forwards. Maybe that is it – some of us need to look both ways.

About the Sale:

The Magma Archive will give you a taster of what is in each issue. When you click on the issue number under a cover image more information will appear. Once you have selected the issue(s) you wish to buy, following the links to make your on-line purchase at the current reduced price, and the magazine(s) will be posted directly to you.

Now, many newspapers and blogs have been running such surveys and people have often been recommending books by their friends. I don’t really object to that. If a friend’s book is any good, I can see why people would want to do their friend a favour, as it’s hard to get poetry books noticed out there.

However, for this particular survey, books written by friends aren’t allowed. By ‘friend’ I don’t mean a ‘Facebook friend’, or someone you’ve chatted to at a poetry festival bar or exchanged a few emails with because you liked their book. I mean someone who is actually a friend in the traditional sense.

So let’s have your Best of 2009 nominations – a link to the book would also be appreciated. Please post yours as a comment below. Include the book’s title, name of author and publisher. There’s no prize for the book that gets the most votes, but perhaps the recommendations will result in much-needed sales for some hard-working individuals and publishers and hours of pleasure for readers.

Further information:
Magma Subscribers are invited to send a poem on which they would like advice, by e-mail to workshop@magmapoetry.com. The aim is to give focussed advice to help poets who are working towards publication, so priority will be given to subscribers who ask particular questions about the effectiveness of their poem.

Only one poem can be chosen for any one Newsletter. The poem and the poet’s question(s) together with feedback will appear in the Newsletter. All the other poems received will be acknowledged. While we will clearly not be able to workshop every poem submitted, we hope that all readers of the newsletter will benefit from having an insight into the editors’ criteria.

Poems submitted to the Subscribers’ Poem Workshop:

• must not exceed 30 lines in length
• must obviously be the subscriber’s own work
• must not be a translation or adaptation of an existing work
• must not have already been published on paper

Only poems submitted by e-mail to workshop@magmapoetry.com can be considered, and we would ask the poem be included in the body of the text, rather than as an attachment unless it is layout sensitive.

If you are a subscriber and have a poem which you would like to submit to be workshopped, do e-mail it to workshop@magmapoetry.com. If you would like to subscribe to Magma Poetry, you can do so by clicking here.

Andy Jackson! (entry number 3)

For his very funny and well thought-out comment on banning Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress.’ Congratulations, Andy! You’ve won an annual subscription to Magma and a copy of the banned AQA anthology will be winging its way to you very soon.

It was a very tough decision for the judges. It even took us a day longer to make this announcement than we had expected. Many entries impressed us for one reason or another and narrowing down our shortlists to a single winner was a hard task.

We’ll try to mention a few of the entries that came close in the comments section. Thanks to all of you who gave this a shot!

In some ways, these large numbers are a good thing. Why not have a huge variety of poetry available? After all, readers will decide what they want to read and what they don’t, and restricting that choice by offering less variety would hardly be a positive step. On the other hand, a large number of books makes it harder for individual collections to come to the attention of readers. If you walk into a room, find ten books on a table, and you have to choose one, you might have a flick through all of them. If there are a hundred books, you might still flick through ten, but the perfect book for you might be among the ninety you never set eyes on.

The growing presence of poetry publishers on the Internet means prospective readers are faced with what must feel at times like a bewildering amount of choice. Would less choice actually be a relief?

I also wonder whether the quantity of new poetry books is sustainable in such a small (and often niche) market. Let’s say ten books are published and each sells an average of 500 copies – that’s 5000 sales. But let’s say a hundred books are published. Are people going to buy any more than 5000 books? If they don’t, that means an average of 50 sales per book. A growing number of poetry books requires a growing number of poetry readers. Current readers don’t have either unlimited time or bank balances.

Now, I had a collection published this year. It’s hard then for me to argue that fewer should be published! I wouldn’t want my book to have been given the chop. But are current levels sustainable? And does a large choice help readers or hinder them?

Since the anthology was pulped and the offending poem removed from the school syllabus, knife-crime figures have plummeted and there has been an otherwise incomprehensible increase in the world’s goldfish population. Despite this, recent attempts have been made to persuade the AQA to reinstate the poem. I’m relieved to note that the AQA has – so far- ignored such attempts.

However, Magma fears that Duffy’s poem is not alone. Many other poems exist which, if read by unsuspecting schoolchildren, would surely unleash a frenzy of antisocial behaviour. The AQA needs to be made aware of those poems so it can take appropriate action for all our sakes. One thing is certain: today’s poetry-reading adolescents become tomorrow’s deviant adults. We must make sure that poems taught in our classrooms are uniformly bland and as irrelevant to their readers as possible.

Therefore, we have decided to hold a competition. We want you to suggest a poem that should be banned from appearing in the school syllabus and explain why. The best entry will receive an un-pulped copy of the anthology (including ‘Education for Leisure’) and a year’s subscription to Magma (if you are already a subscriber, we’ll extend your subscription for a year).

Here are the rules:

1. Post your entry as a comment below, comprising (a) the title of the poem, (b) a link to the poem, if the poem is online, and (c) your reasons for wanting it banned, which can include short quotes from the poem. But please don’t post the poem’s full text.
2. Entries should be a maximum of 300 words.
3. Only one entry is allowed per person.
4. Entries are accepted from anywhere in the world.
5. A display of AQA-style bureaucratic language and/or reasoning is encouraged.
6. Members of the Magma board and their families are not eligible to win the competition, although they are free to enter for fun.
7. Judges will be Mark McGuinness, Rob A Mackenzie and Laurie Smith.
8. Deadline for entries is midnight GMT, Saturday 28th November 2009.
9. The winner will be announced on or before Wednesday 2nd December 2009.

This Saturday 14th November from 1pm, Distant Voices: StAnza’s Virtual Poetry Festival can beam in – live – to your computer screen (details at the link). The readings won’t be available after the time of broadcast though – you need to watch in real time. You can tune in throughout the day to a huge variety of sounds, styles and languages: major literary figures and recent award winners, teenage slammers, sound poets, poetry in English and also in a range of other languages. Scottish poet and publisher, Colin Will, has an impressive post on the festival programme, complete with poems, photos and interesting links.

It strikes me that this is a highly ambitious project and could so easily go wrong! But, as the organisers say, “It might be smooth, it might be bumpy, it will definitely be different.” If any of you tune in, whether for nine minutes or nine hours, I’d be interested to know what you think.