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…
It's been over a week since 700 poetry lovers — almost twice as many as last year — walked through the door of Conway Hall for the Poetry Book Fair. We had 56 publishers exhibiting their works, along with the…
We are pleased to invite you to join us for a free event on 18 February 2013 (Monday), to be held at the Studio Theatre, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) Studios at 16 Chenies Street,London WC1E 7EX, just a…
Sometimes people ask of a particular poem: Did it have to be written? Is this a necessary poem? They are wondering if there was sufficient pressure for the poem to become meaningful in the assumption that validity is based on…
In January 2012 I was notified that I had won the Judge’s Prize in the Magma competition 2011 judged by George Szirtes. The winning poem was “Hummingbird”. It was the first major competition I had won and, being a relative…
The latter half of my youth revolved around hoops, orbiting wide rings, listening out for the net’s swish, attempting to make more fluid, more instinctive, ‘mo’ butter’ the complex body geometry of knowing instinctively how far you are from the…
The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible. Gabriele D'Annunzio Poets are often advised to ‘find…
Karen McCarthy Woolf’s point about short poems not winning competitions makes me ask, why not? Do judges somehow feel short-changed, reckoning that poets don’t put as much work into writing a short poem as a long one? I don’t think this…
I am going to start this article with a statistic. No poem under 10 lines has won the National Poetry Competition since (online) records began in 1978! The website shows winning poems only prior to 2000, but between 2001-2010 you…
For years we debated it, balked, retreated, re-visited, shelved and returned to it, until eventually we decided the time had come to launch our first competition. It's been a long road: Magma is run democratically and each of us on…
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