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[SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED]
Call for Submissions: Magma 51 ‘Profane and Sacred’

by Jacqueline Saphra

I’m pleased to be editing Magma 51, with Ian McEwen as assistant editor. We invite you to send us your poems on the theme ‘Profane and Sacred’.

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself.

writes Carol Ann Duffy in her famous sonnet, ‘Prayer’. Is this, I wonder, symptomatic of a society where very little remains sacred, but we still hunger for spiritual fulfillment? In a largely secular world how many of us even attempt to write poems like Donne’s later works, or RS Thomas’s tortured offerings? Can language itself really give us the kind of nourishment we need?

I find that friends frequently ask me to suggest poems for weddings, christenings and funerals. Scorned by some, and adored by others, Khalil Gibran is quoted prodigiously at such rites of passage. Although the epithalamium has never gone out of fashion since the Ancient Greeks coined it, there do seem to be plenty of new poems on the subject of marriage. Perhaps poetry is taking over some of the role of religion to help us come to terms with the inexplicable and mysterious aspects of life. Duffy of course has said that poetry and prayer are very similar. You only have to look at the bible or read some Sufi or Hindu poetry to start yourself asking whether poems are in fact a subset of prayers, or prayers a subset of poetry.

In a society where so much is permitted, what is truly profane? Does the word profane still connote something sinful or forbidden or something risky, permissible and irresistible? Invariably, what is profane to one person might be considered sacred to another: I’m thinking of love poems by Sharon Olds or Anne Sexton, work by Allen Ginsberg or more recently, Neil Rollinson and Don Paterson. It’s been shown by psychologists that swearing when you bang your thumb makes the thumb hurt less: perhaps in that sense profanity is closer to prayer than we might realize. I hope you’ll enjoy exploring and embracing the contradictions.

As ever, we’ll also be considering off-theme poems for this issue. But whatever your bag: spiritual, religious, profane or provocative, or anything that muddies the waters between those possibilities, we look forward to reading your poems, and anticipate much fun, profundity, surprise and contrast.

Jacqueline Saphra, Editor, Magma 51

The deadline is 16 July 2011. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

Comments (11)

  1. This looks quite challenging. I am definitely going to submit some poems. May I send in some from my first published collection? In that book I was exploring issues of faith in our largely secular world. The title describes the theme: Looking at Renaissance Paintings and Other Poems.(Quattro Books:2008)
    If you require entries to be previously unpublished, please let me know.

    Thank you.
    Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni,
    Toronto

  2. Gibran Khalil Gibran: the poet Gibran’s name is his first name and Khalil is his father’s name and another Gibran is his grandfather’s name…he doesn’t have surname.
    We never know his name is Khalil, but every where in the web sites are written Khalil Gibran which I think should be corrected.
    And if we write his name with the letter J as Jbran sounds even more original.
    Because in Arabic his name is composed of five letters not six…

  3. So just how exactly would you think this Persian poet’s name should be written in 2011?

  4. Thanks Sylvia. I did think about this before posting. Tricky one because of the name being translated from the Arabic.
    However you spell his name, his words are important to so many people which is why I mentioned him in this context.

  6. Hi,

    My name is Lillian Conti

    I am in the midst of writing poems on ‘the Spirital awakening of our times’.
    Would this type of poetry be appropriate for your publication?

    Blessings,

    Lillian

  8. In his sonnet of the same name, George Herbert famously summarises prayer as “something understood”. These concluding words not only literally underpin the poem but offer a cumulative literary insight into an experience which is frequently wordless. For me, a Jew, prayer replaces the now utterly out dated sacrifices of the Hebrew Bible. As a poet, I tussle with the relationship between poetry and praise, prayer as private speech and the rhetoric of traditional prayer.

    I find by far the most thoughtful book on liturgical speech is Catherine Madsen’s ‘ The Bones Reassemble’. Like her, I would expect a “good” spiritual poem to put the “Verfremdung” of revelation into the reader’s reach without allowing the experience to lose its power through a muting colloquial register.

  10. Gibran’s Arabic name was Jubran Khalil Jubran (in Lebanon the ‘G’ is pronounced as ‘J’). He came to the US at age 12 and a school record transcription error listed his name as Kahlil, which he maintained, and is how it is spelled on his books.

  11. I am happy that Magma is encouraging poets to submit works on the profane and the sacred. Prayer is such a beautiful theme.

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