Magma’s Early Days

I’ve been around Magma since before it was Magma, a name chosen “to suggest the molten core within the world, hidden as deep feelings are and showing itself in unpredictable movements, tremors, lava flows, eruptions”.  Magma began not so much as an eruption but as a slow burn.

It must have been in the summer of 1992 when Laurie Smith and several of his City Lit poetry class decided we wanted to carry on reading and discussing our poems after the end of a shorter-than-usual summer term. So, we spent the summer bringing bottles and poems to a different flat or house each week. I remember helping wash up in the small kitchen of a flat in a Vauxhall and feeling enormously excited about the idea of starting a poetry magazine called Urban Fox.

The fox went to ground for about a year and resurfaced the following summer. Things got serious. Meetings began to be scheduled. I volunteered to write minutes. Something began to take shape – it was going to happen after all, but whatever “it” was, it was not Urban Fox.  At a meeting to decide the title the fox was outvoted but the Magma group couldn’t quite bear to put him down. He survived for several issues as the reviewer of other magazines, in a feature somewhat grandly called The Others. In magma 1, which we published in March 1994, Urban Fox reviewed PN Review and Dog. By issue 2 Urban Fox was signing himself off with a wonderful linocut by Peter Ashton Jones showing the hindquarters and tail of the fox scavenging in a proper old-fashioned metal bin, nosing out the good stuff. His tail swishes with vigour. That fox had attitude.

If the fox had attitude, so did the reviews – always a strength of the magazine. Can you guess which “long-awaited new collection”, published by Penguin, was dismissed in issue 1 as “a ragbag collection of ballad doggerel, tired polemic and unconvincing lyric”?

The concept of a rotating editorship was there from the start. We learned the magazine couldn’t afford to stand still, so Magma’s exciting new competition is the latest venture in that tradition. We learned we could be businesslike and still have fun. We learned we could have strong creative arguments and not fall out. We learned not to be ‘Laurie’s class’.  And we learned the hidden jobs as well as editorial ones, the rhythm of the editorial cycle.

Before anyone comments, “But that’s not what happened…!”, I’ll make a full and frank confession – my memory is pretty hazy and anything I wrote about it at the time is locked in an Amstrad disk. I don’t dare list “the founders” as I will miss someone out or transpose memories.

Magma 1 (A5, 68 pages, illus., red and black linocut cover depicting a livid hot metal ‘m’, eleven poets (ie ‘us’), two sets of book reviews and one set of magazine reviews) was edited by Laurie Smith, with illustrations by Peter Ashton Jones and Martin Sonenberg. The Chairman was David Boll, the Secretary was Helen Nicholson (me) and the Treasurer was Ronald Frank. We gave grateful thanks to Tabby Toussaint of the City Lit and called ourselves The Stukeley Press, as the City Lit had a site in Stukeley Street, just round from the pub where our first meetings were held.

Our first aim was not to fill the magazine with our own poems or with poems from the City Lit class. We succeeded quickly. Now, Magma receives several thousands of submissions from all over the world, but I can picture all of the eleven poets featured in issue 1 and twelve out of fourteen poets in issue 2, edited by David Boll. In issue three, edited by Vicci Bentley, we had poems from a judge for the Eric Gregory Awards and Vicci had secured our first interview – with Carol Ann Duffy. The lava was flowing, and things were unpredictable.