As Magma celebrates 10 years in print, Mick Delap, one of the original group which started Magma, talks to the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, and looks back at the early days – Magma’s and Motion’s.

Andrew Motion, like most poets, can still remember the first magazine to take one of his poems – and with a bit of effort, the name of the poem. He’d started A levels, and suddenly started writing poetry as well. “I was taught by a man called Peter Way, and he just walked straight into my head, and turned all the lights on”. Later on in the 6th Form, he began to want to get some of these poems published: “the smell of printers’ ink is a pretty intoxicating one! And it’s also a kind of validation. Your friends will say nice things about them, but you want the validation, or simply the interest, of someone else”. The big magazines on the horizon then were the Listener, the early manifestation of PN Review, and the New Statesman. Motion remembers thinking that they were “too august. Week after week there’d be the new Larkin poem, and you’d think, ‘I can’t go there – ever! Or certainly not yet”. But somehow, Motion heard of a much more modest poetry journal.

“It was called Workshop, and it was edited by a man who I’ve always thought had the ideal name for the editor of a really small magazine – Norman Hidden. I sent him some poems, and to my delight he took one. It was called Salome’s Moon. Which shows the kind of thing I was up to then. A sort of Wildean caprice.” Workshop followed that by publishing, in Motion’s gap year, a small pamphlet of his poems. “That really felt like a breakthrough. Norman Hidden is still alive,” (and, pace Motion, distinguished enough to have been awarded a Civil List pension in 1974, for services to literature), ” and I really owe him a big debt. I don’t think these poems are any good – and the larger part of me hopes they never see the light of day again. But at the time it was tremendously important. It emboldened me in all sorts of ways.” So much so, that not long after starting at Oxford, the rejection slips began turning into acceptances – from Stand, New Review, PN Review, the Listener. “Breakthrough number two. But that first breakthrough – into my first magazine – is still incredibly important.” And Motion sees the so-called small magazines – Workshop then, the likes of Magma now – as “absolutely crucial. They are the point of entry, the means by which the poetic life of the future is guaranteed”.

Not quite the elevated objective which the group of friends from Laurie Smith’s 1993/4 City Lit poetry workshop had in mind ten years ago, when, over summer drinks, they accepted David Boll’s suggestion to come together to start a poetry magazine. As I remember it, we were initially more interested in our own individual poetic futures. But David Boll recalls setting higher targets right from the outset: “during the drinks I suggested to the others that we started a magazine. I then wondered what we had let ourselves in for. But I recovered confidence on deciding it could work provided we followed three basic principles. First, we would run it as a group, partly to add variety and interest to our choice of poems and partly because none of us wanted to do the job full time. Second, we would be ambitious – it was not worth our while to give our time to running a class magazine, and we would seek to become a first class national one. And third, we would be businesslike – most mags fail to realize their potential not for want of poets or editors but for want of business grasp”.

For Laurie Smith, two memories stand out from Magma’s early days. “The first was the vote on our title at our very first meeting. I wanted Urban Fox, as best summing up what I thought we were about – city-based, astute, nosing out good poetry in places where it might be missed. However, Martin Sonenberg came up with Magma, from the beginning of a poem called Folly of the Deep which I’d brought to the City Lit group a few weeks earlier and now feel is rather dreadful:

Four thousand metres down in the mid-Atlantic
the black smokers hot magma oozing
through the crack between Africa
and America …

“Still, the word caught people’s fancy and, to my chagrin, when we took the vote, mine was the only one for Urban Fox. As a consolation, we used Urban Fox as a column for anonymous comment in most of Magma 1 to 20.

“The second was the musical interludes in our early readings at the City Lit theatre. There was a female trio called the Penny Dreadfuls whose music was boisterous with a distinct aura of old-time music hall, and there was Mike Donaghy with his flute. He came two or three times, invited by John Stammers, to speak his poems and to play Irish folk melodies on his flute. It was a full orchestral flute, not a penny whistle, and he played it hauntingly. We saw Mike last at the Magma 21 launch, upstairs at the Troubadour, where he finished with a ten-minute narrative poem, spoken as always from memory. It was a rapt experience. Even the traffic on Old Brompton Road seemed to go quiet.”

Michael’s recent loss continues to haunt all those he touched with his music and his poetry – and he was a great support, as Magma began quickly to turn itself into a serious poetry magazine. The change was aided by the emergence of striking new voices like John Stammers and the staunch support of well established poets; not just Donaghy but Carol Ann Duffy (Magma 3), Andrew Motion (Magma 8), Don Paterson (Magma 12) – the list goes on, with Paterson back in this Magma and reading at Magma’s 10th birthday party, at the Cochrane Theatre, on 21st Jan, 2005. At the heart of Magma’s poetry, though, chosen in turn by an editorial system which passed the editorship of successive editions around the various members of the managing group, were poets new or relatively new to print: Angela Kirby, Howard Wright, Clare Pollard (like Andrew Motion and Workshop, doing her A levels when she first appeared in Magma), Mary MacRae, Lorraine Mariner, and many others. And these poets, seeking their own breakthrough, were backed up by contributions from those already better known: Mario Petrucci, Myra Schneider, Caroline Natzler. And many more, all of them, over the last ten years, making Magma worth reading, and worth working for!

Alongside Magma’s poetry was the prose, right from the beginning a wide mix of often hard hitting reviews and articles (Urban Fox on PN Review in Magma 1: “should be the poetry magazine of record … typography elegant, [but] difficult to read the prose for any length of time … The real disappointment is the choice of poetry…”). Andrew Motion has no doubts that he wants to see reviews, and plenty of other prose, in any poetry magazine. “You need a mixture, so your experience of reading the poetry is ventilated by reading interviews, reviews, profiles, competitions. You name it, the whole carnival and rag bag ought to be there. And I think that Magma is very distinguished in that respect. I can’t think of many other magazines that do have that mixture, as I like to see it. I wish there were more of them”. In particular, he feels poetry is increasingly ignored by the literary mainstream. So he’s keen for poetry magazines to seize the opportunity not just to review, but to set what they are reviewing in as wide a context as possible. Motion has major reservations, though, about reviewers he sees as self-regarding, and interested only in point scoring: “catty” even. “When I am writing reviews I want to have a conversation with the author, in a way that will allow him or her to hear what I am saying.”

What else does Motion look for in a poetry magazine? “A strong editorial presence. Most things in life, whether it be a book, a magazine or a football team, benefit from having someone driving the thing who has a very clear and strong sense of their own taste. And I also think it’s very important for magazines not to take themselves too seriously. Don’t be pompous!” Which has usually been difficult at Magma’s often boisterous committee meetings over the years – held in a variety of venues, from up-market Notting Hill to the City Lit’s scenery store, among paint pots and size brushes; with diversions to noisy pubs and, for a while, the art deco splendor of Bush House with the BBC World Service (“many voices, one world”) murmuring away in the background.

Motion reckons his own poetic voice has probably benefited from being appointed Poet Laureate. “As far as writing goes (and I had in my mind’s eye divided it – becoming PL – into two bits, a writing bit and a doing bit), I dare say there are ways it’s affected me that I’m simply unaware of. But one good thing is that it’s helped me to see things a bit more clearly, and turn my face more fully to subjects”. Anything the Poet Laureate writes is highly visible – “and that concentrates the mind! Inevitably some of the poems I’ve written in response to public events of one kind or another, whether they be royal or national, have been better than others. I’m happy to have done them; and I’m very happy when people like them!

“The difficult things about being Poet Laureate are partly the ways in which my life, and particularly my private life, has been invaded. That’s very, very difficult to live with, and has made me extremely cagey. The good thing about it is that it’s an honour; and I feel very honoured. It’s challenging in ways that are interesting to me (they wouldn’t be to everybody). What I like best about it is the opportunity that it gives me to do something about the things I believe in. Particularly about things to do with poetry and education. I spend a great deal of time nagging government about this. I said I’d do it for ten years, and I’ve now done it for five and a bit years – just over half way through. It took me a long time to work out how to do it. I knew what I wanted to do, which was to be very busy and high profile, and really to be an ambassador for poetry, as well as writing it. It needs defending. It’s been a very very interesting time. And on ninety nine days out of a hundred, I’m very glad I said yes.”