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Let’s imagine for a moment that you have been asked to programme two events at a poetry festival. You have an unlimited budget, but each event must contain only three poets. For the first event you can invite three living…

The way a poem begins clearly has consequences for mood, tone, register, voice, line length, pace, style, and so one. It may contain at least a hint of form or structure. The first couple of lines may work together or…

Do you get fed up with poets’ efforts at self-promotion? Well, you’d be in good company because many poets find doing it awkward, which perhaps explains why their efforts are often clumsy and sometimes ill-considered. Poets these days are expected…

I followed a Facebook discussion last week on whether poets are best to work as full-time writers, or work in a completely different field. Those advocating the former were (unsurprisingly) full-time writers and supporters of the latter had other forms…

“As one who once considered himself in the vanguard of writing as writing, it is difficult for me to describe my feelings when confronted by a new generation of writers who are dedicated not to an exploration of any particular…

Adventurous forms of poetry barely made a showing in the contributions submitted for consideration for Magma 47 - by “adventurous forms” I mean unfamiliar forms, whether old or new, including experimental and invented forms. Even scarcer were poems where these…

In a discussion last year on the Magma blog, Sheenagh Pugh used the phrase, “as if any writer weren’t liable to get better with more experience of both life and handling words.” Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? And some…

All of seventeen years chairing the Magma group, eleven years presenting our launches at the Coffee House Poetry sessions at the Troubadour – hard to believe it. And now I bow out, at our AGM at the end of March…

Here’s a difficult but pleasurable task. If you were asked to recommend to other Magma readers one poetry collection (or critical work) published in your own country in 2009, what would you choose? Optionally, you can also recommend one poetry…