[SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED] Magma 88: Underworld – Call for Submissions

The submission period opens on 1 July, 2023

‘The history of the atmosphere is recorded in the subsurface: in the sediments of the deep seas, in deep peat bogs and lakes, in the air bubbles in the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. You can’t understand heaven without knowing hell. The Earth is its own history book.’ (Salomon Kroonenberg, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur, 2011).

Following on from Magma’s seminal environmental issues – including Anthropocene (81) and The Climate Change Issue (72) – editors Ella Duffy, Kate Simpson, and Leo Boix are searching for previously unpublished poems for Issue 88, Underworld. With a focus on ecologies, groundwork, concealed networks, and the physical landscape, this issue will be told through the lens of the climate crisis. It will consider emerging cultures, communities and modes of thought, as well as more-than-human modes of communication, as we search for a new ecopoetic.

We’re excited about how this theme might open up a variety of dialogues with both literal and metaphoric readings of Underworld, from depictions of undergrowth – mycorrhizal networks, decomposition, transformation, and biodiversity – to considerations of parallel planes, or the effects of celestial mechanics upon terrestrial events as seen in the doctrine ‘as above so below’.

Submissions might begin with the idea of ‘roots’ or ‘embedding’ in the soil – its possible futures and voices. In what ways is naming important in the ways that we speak of, and define, our underworld? What are the textures of the words we use; how important is their musicality? What limitations are we working against, and how can poetry offer expanded forms of communication?

—Something in the field is
—working away. Root-noise.
—Twig-noise. Plant
—of weak chlorophyll, no
—name for it.

—from ‘Pastoral’ by Jennifer Chang

We’re also interested in human/more-than-human communication and relationships on Earth, particularly those which might manifest or take place beneath the surface. How might poetry allow us to expand beyond our sensory perception, and create new encounters with the worlds under our feet? What kinds of conversations are we having, and how might poems allow us to shift the ways we view the natural world, reframing subject and object?

—Everything has a voice,
—even if low, diffuse—or outside
—of human hearing.
—And what doesn’t speak
—appears as signal: driven up
—from the giant tracts of the underworld

—from ‘Mushroom Season’ by Jenny George

And what meanings might the underworld contain in a fluid sense? In water columns and benthic life? It’s thought that two thirds of the planet are covered in water, and some of the earliest evidence of life begins in the ocean. How do the depths call to us? In what ways do we dive into poems like we might a body of water? And where do we find ourselves once we go down?

—There I think I glimpse you, covered in fluid,
—break out the stars in a bright astral birth,
—showering confetti ever downward,
—into dust all through the moving earth.

—Is it land or sea beneath
—my stretched body falling?
—Is it your hand or water underneath
—the moon calling.

—from ‘The Voice’, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

Underworlds might also constitute geological and palaeontological records – species buried in the strata of deep time. How does poetry excavate the world for meaning, akin to the ways we excavate the land for its past stories? Indeed, how might poetry enable us to reframe our understanding of worlds that existed billions of years ago: how they interact with, or allow us to better understand, the current rates of anthropogenic destruction and connected extinction events?

—Ancient and young, oldest
—bone of the planet that was just
—last week laid bare by the blunt
—sculpting of the ice: it seemed a land designed
—to summon mammals – haunched and shouldered,
—socketed.

—from ‘Precambrian Shield’ by Don McKay

This issue also welcomes Queer and LBGTQIA poetry, and an exploration of sub-cultures and communities. How might queer ecology reveal an ecopoetics that illuminates the entanglements of the human and the more-than-human? How might it work to challenge dualisms and binaries?

—I would make a burnishing
—of you, by which I mean a field in flower,
—by which I mean, a breaching – my hands
—making an arrow of themselves, rooting
—the loosened dirt.

—from ‘Love Poem: Centaur’, Donika Kelly

Elsewhere, poems might explore mythological readings of the landscape, and the roles of fable and folklore in our understanding of nature. How might poetry draw attention to familiar tropes, known unknowns, and perhaps, even, unknown unknowns: the mystery of worlds?

——————————————–…we raised the arms
—of our imaginations: kept rewriting the story: removed
—the human protagonist: we unchained ourselves from
—Prometheus’s fire: the sun, wind gave motion, heat: to us:
—a plenty: the same hand redirects our gaze from the pain
—as from the paradise: the winters were beautiful and
—gentle: We gathered people to shelter: What animal or law
—could hold me back while we worked: to rush the world back to joy.

—from ‘Cassandra: The Second End’ by Sasha West

And, looking to the future, speculative world building or destruction is on our minds…

—Born into each seed
—is a small anti-seed
—useful in case of some
—complete reversal:
—a tiny but powerful
—kit for adapting it
—to the unimaginable.
—If we could crack the
—fineness of the shell
—we’d see the
—bundled minuses
—stacked as in a safe,
—ready for use
—if things don’t
—go well.

—‘In Case of Complete Reversal’ by Kay Ryan

As part of the curation of the issue, we’re looking for fresh and contemporary depictions on what Underworld could mean today; could mean poetically. The issue will be sequenced in a way that allows the poems to spark new dialogues with and against each other, pulling focus back to the climate and returning to the earth and its hidden worlds, whilst expanding into new meanings across a range of styles and forms. We’re excited about how the poems in the issue will speak to one another, reinforcing the ideas of ‘roots’, ‘entanglement’ and ‘interconnectivity’. Please disperse our call as widely as possible! We look forward to reading your poems.*

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Wanting to submit to Magma 88? You may submit:

Up to 4 previously unpublished poems in a single Word document.

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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About the Editors

Ella Duffy is a Bristol-based poet. Her debut pamphlet, New Hunger, was published by Smith|Doorstep in May 2020. Her second pamphlet, Rootstalk, was published by Hazel Press in November 2020, and was shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards. She is the editor of Seeds & Roots, a botanical poetry anthology. Her work has appeared in The Poetry Review, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review and The Rialto, among others. She was shortlisted for the 2020 Pat Kavanagh Prize and winner of the 2019 Live Canon International Poetry Competition. She is currently a current doctoral candidate at King’s College London, where she is completing her debut poetry collection.

Kate Simpson is an editor, poet, writer, and critic based in Yorkshire. She is the former Associate Editor of Aesthetica, and has independently edited for Faber, Valley Press, and Ambit, amongst others. Her anthology, Out of Time: Poetry from the Climate Emergency (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation – lauded as the ‘definitive anthology for this decisive decade’. It was also listed as one of the Guardian/Observer’s Books of the Year. Her work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, and The London Magazine, amongst others. She is currently part of the Poetry Centre at the University of Leeds as a Leverhulme-funded researcher exploring poetry and the reimagining of deep time.

Leo Boix is an Argentine-British poet, translator and journalist based in the UK. He is the author of an English collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (Chatto & Windus, 2021) and two Spanish collections, Un lugarpropio (2015) and Mar de noche (2017). Boix has won the Bart Wole Poetry Prize Award and the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. Boix’s poetry has been included in several anthologies such as Ten: Poets of the New Generation (Bloodaxe, 2017), Why Poetry? (Verve Poetry Press, 2018), Un Nuevo Sol: British Latinx Writers (Flipped Eye, 2019), 100 Poems To Save The Earth (Seren, 2021) and The Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2019-2020 (The Black Group Press, 2021). His poetry was also published in magazines and journals such as Poetry, The Poetry Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, PNReview, The Rialto and The Morning Star.

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