A hundred years ago Ezra Pound was busy creating modern poetry in London. He helped Yeats to write more directly and more symbolically, then set about “breaking the pentameter” by following T E Hulme and others to create imagism and,…
How many ears does Mr Spock have? Three! The left, the right and the final front. Maybe working on Magma 57 has addled my brain, but the old playground joke seems to me about the best summary of the role…
Every competition it’s the same thing, we poets get sucked into endless debates on Facebook as to whether there is a ‘male’ of ‘female’ way of writing and whether this is responsible for female writers getting less coverage. So here’s…
Well, in fact, Philip Gross, himself a winner of the National Poetry Competition, the T.S. Eliot Prize and Wales Book of the Year. Here he gives a view from the Magma Poetry Competition 2013 judge's bench: I'm starting this with caution. Even…
So, you’ve drafted a poem and you want to publish it or perhaps even win the Magma Poetry Competition! But, is the poem ready? Could it do with a few edits or a wholesale makeover? Below are a few rules…
The Ireland of flamed haired children bringing turf home from the bog with a little help from the family donkey probably never exactly existed. But these days, the donkey is definitely dead and the traffic jams in Galway rival any…
I was surprised when I heard a well-published poet say he writes a line at a time, always finishing one before moving onto the next. Surprised because it is so counter to my own way of writing, and I began…
When you commute to work or make your way home, it is always such pleasure to spot and read, in your part of the train carriage, poems that crop up unexpectedly in the Underground. This year being the 150th anniversary…
Poetry: at first it’s all around us, in nursery rhymes, ‘children’s poems’, at primary school, even in some form on children’s television. We learn to speak in rhyme, which is patterned language, and it makes up our earliest games. It’s…
Sometimes people ask of a particular poem: Did it have to be written? Is this a necessary poem? They are wondering if there was sufficient pressure for the poem to become meaningful in the assumption that validity is based on…
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