Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Poetry Library Southbank Centre - The Poetry Library housing the Arts Council Collection at Southbank Centre

About this site

This site contains Poetry Library's free access non-profit-making online archive of English 20th and 21st century poetry magazines which is part of the library's ongoing digitisation project funded by the Arts Council England.

The Poetry Library launched www.poetrymagazines.org.uk in 2003. It aims to reach new audiences and preserve the magazines for the future.

It already holds more than 6,000 poems published in over 50 different magazines, with work by Fleur Adcock, Jen Hadfield, Seamus Heaney, Michael Horovitz, Jackie Kay, Edwin Morgan, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Sheenagh Pugh, Owen Sheers, Fiona Sampson, Penelope Shuttle and many more.

The website has been selected by the British Library to be archived by its digital heritage web archiving project, the UK Web Archive.

Content we feature - all creative content from the magazines which includes poems, prose, articles and some artwork and excludes content such as advertising and listings. Most of the issues featured on the site can be also consulted in their printed form at the Poetry Library.

Content formats:

Text
We wanted to feature magazine content in as close a shape and form it was featured in the original publications. However, we also wanted to make all the material on this site fully searchable and as accessible as possible. This is why we have chosen text format for most content.

Formatting
Poems and other texts have been reproduced as closely as possible to the printed versions. We have also attempted to preserve as many accented, foreign and special characters as possible.

Images
Images featured on this site are in gif or jpg format and have been optimised for the web. We have endeavoured not to have any individual images larger than 20k on the site.

PDF files
We have only included links to PDF files of certain items when we have felt that:

  1. the user will have substantial benefit from being able to see the item and/or its context in more detail
  2. in case of artwork, that we are able to reproduce the artwork in real size at a sufficiently good quality in PDF format
  3. the item is illegible or difficult to view in any other appropriate formats

In most cases where the PDF files are included, we have endeavoured to also feature a thumbnail image and, if relevant, a transcript of the content.

We have made the PDF files as small as we could, which means that the visual quality of the content might not always be entirely satisfactory. Our priority was to enable the majority of users to download the file and read or view the content.

To view PDF files you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed. Most browsers these days come with Acrobat Reader, but if you find out that you don't have it already installed, you can download it here.

MP3 files
We have included links to MP3 files of certain items.

Unless otherwise stated in footnotes, all poems are read by the poets themselves and have been recorded by SBC.

SBC holds the copyright to these recordings.

To listen to MP3s you will need to have a media player installed on your computer, such as Windows Media Player, Real Player or Quicktime.


Other content information:
Please note that any information about books, such as prices, is likely to be out of date, particularly in older issues that we feature.

All effort has been made to proof-read the texts which have been scanned and converted to text format with Optical Character Recognition software, but some errors might have gone unnoticed. We appreciate being notified of any errors you notice on the site.

Usability information
The site has been designed to be accessible and easy to use.

If you are experiencing any problems with our site, please email [email protected].

 

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