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[SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED] Call for submission— Magma 78, Collaborations

Closing date: 31st March, 2020

The submissions window for ‘Collaborations’ is open from 1st February – 31st March 2020.
We welcome poems that have not been previously published, either in print or online.
One piece of work from your collaborations of up to 140 lines in a single Word document or PDF may be sent via Submittable, or by post if you live in the UK. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.
If your submission includes any physical or digital elements please include links to other media and we will contact you for further details.

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Co-labour-ation seeks out the expression of multiple minds working together and asks what that expression will discover. We are inviting submissions from active collaborations of two or more poets rather than individuals writing about collaboration. Issue 78 aims to be a bold showcase of the active poetry collaboration scene.

Collaboration in poetry has a long and diverse history. More recently, the practice has grown in popularity in the UK with The Enemies Project, organised by SJ Fowler bringing together over 600 writers working across a glorious range of themes and disciplines. In Threads (Clinic, 2018) the three voices of Sandeep Parmar, Nisha Ramayya and Bhanu Kapil creatively weave poetry and theory to create fluid ‘coordinates of being’. Composite eco-poet kin’d & kin’d is inventing new poetic forms in their sensual place-made work.

We invite you to experiment with the de-individualised joy of writing as one expression of mind. This radical de-centring of the individual might speak convincingly of the non-human or give rise to cross-genre experiences. Nurturing, symbiotic relationships can also model soulful alternatives to identity poetics, to division and isolation. It may also create productive tensions that the solo writer does not have to face; a mutual trust, and sharing risk and effort come into play. We think of it as an act of shared creation where poets enhance the capabilities of each other.

The poet j/j hastain says, “For me, collaboration is only troubling when it ends. I feel affront in my cosmic identities when this occurs, when for whatever reason/s we can’t work out a way to keep the telepathy open and pumping, and it atrophies due to human limit.” (On Collaboration by Alli Warren, Poetry Foundation, 2014)

Our hunch is that poetic collaborations can be vanguards of new poetic forms; hive-minded, symbiotic, experimental and downright radical works of art. Perhaps a collaboration is a poem you simply could not have written without ‘the other’.

When we think of the collaborative space required for mutual engagement it might be face to face across a table or back to back in a hedge / it might be in VR / across different time-zones / by letter / in shared garments or in thirsty bodies / on social media / in the hand-made / in performance / with sound and environment / in communion with the non-human / singing from city-towers / as works of reconciliation / in getting your hands dirty / through the simultaneous / and with or without wetsuits! Spontaneity, accident, intuition and play all come to the fore in poetic collaboration.
Please send us your many voices in collaboration.

We look forward to reading your poems,

David Floyd and Alice Willitts, Editors, Magma 78

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Wanting to submit to Magma 78? You may submit:

One piece of previously unpublished poetry up to 140 lines in a single Word document or PDF.
We are now accepting simultaneous submissions – but please withdraw your submission or contact us if it is accepted for publication somewhere else first.
Go to Submittable for more details.

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