Kathryn Simmonds on naming your poem. Finding the right title for a poem can feel like trying to solve a particularly painful crossword clue, but once you’ve hit on the solution, sometimes after dozens of false starts, the answer seems…
I say to the man at the desk I’d like to see my original birth certificate Do you have any idea what your name was? Close, close he laughs. Well what was it? So slow as torture he discloses bit…
The margins are where the clues to the liveliness and breadth of the text make themselves apparent. Rowdy animals bodied like musical instruments gambol, exact and glorious and gross. They make fanciful noise. Tiny plants spread like gorgeous weeds, rendered…
If all the world’s a page, as one might say, most of it is the margins. As in the ancient tragedies, offstage is where you find the real action. Most people are marginal, by today’s political and economic reckoning –…
American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien recently won the 2014 Troubadour International Poetry Prize, 2013 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize for War Reporter. You can read two new poems by O’Brien in . Exclusively for Magma, he considers the issue’s theme of…
Following the success of the inaugural Winchester Poetry Festival, we asked poets, performers, organisers, attendees and Magma team members for their highlight of the weekend and to share an individual moment that might have gone hidden or unseen. Check back over…
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…
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