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

Fuselit
Magma
Aesthetica
Poetry (Chicago)

A few issues ago I mentioned that having gone several months without being paid, I’d celebrated my return to solvency by subscribing to five or six different literary magazines.

   The more you enter the world of small publications (and all literary magazine in Britain are relatively small publications) the more you
realise it’s an entire alternative universe and you can only ever hope to stop off briefly at a few remote outposts, particularly if you don’t plan to spend your whole life reading magazines.

   The Poetry Library’s list of printed poetry-focused publications in the UK ran to about 180 the last time I counted. And there’s hundreds and hundreds more small but often very good mags, launching and folding in bedrooms and cheap cafes across the country every week.

   Fuselit is one of my favourite small magazines at the moment although, as it develops, it’s becoming less magazine more print-based work of art. Started by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone when they were students at the University of East Anglia, they’ve taken it with them as they’ve embarked on life in the real world.

    The basic principle of the magazine is that possible contributors are sent a word and have to respond to it in poetry and prose – along with artwork and music that is included on accompanying CD.

   Originally it had pleasant but simple production values and came out once a month, now it’s a glorious monstrosity that’s comes out
when it’s finished. The current issue, Cabaret, is delivered to the reader inside a black stocking. Pages open out both vertically and horizontally to reveal more pages and another stocking shape is cut out of the front cover. Each copy is bound with thread. The writing is also good.

   Moving out of the bedroom and into the world of Arts Council-backed semi-professionalism, Magma is one of the more established
players on the UK scene. It’s one that I subscribe to on and off. I
used to subscribe to it but bought the current issue because it’s guest
edited by Roddy Lumsden, whose classes I go to City University.

   The front cover features the headline “Young poets have their say” in recognition of the fact that the issue features lots of poems by poets aged under 25 as well as an interview with some of them discussing life in the poetry world.

   Magma is one of the poetry-focused literary magazines that seems most like a magazine its composition. It attempts to balance the poetry with writing about poetry including reviews,
interviews and other features.
York’s Aesthetica is definitely
a magazine. In recent year it’s
mutated from a magazine focused
on new poetry and fiction, to a
cultural review. The April/May 08
issue is the first one to feature
no poetry and short fiction at
all. Instead there’s an eclectic
range of features, interviews and
reviews of different aspects of
the cultural world, along with
excerpts from new novels.
What makes Aesthetica
interesting is that clearly trying to
operate as a business. I imagine
part of the reason why new poetry
has been ditched is that they’re
aiming to appeal to readers and if
you’re aim is to sell your magazine
to the extent that you can actually
earn a living from it then you might
feel you’re not in a position to
worry about the tiny percentage of
people who are interested in
reading other people’s poetry.
I suppose the alternative is to
find poetry so good that thousands
of people want to read it. It all
seems a bit different in the US.
Poetry (Chicago) is certainly a
professional operation although I’d
imagine not a commercial one. I
started subscribing at the
beginning of this year. Poetry comes
out 11 times a year and an annual
subscription costs about £23,
included the cost paying for it to be
posted from the US.
This is obviously partly down to
the US government’s wacking great
subsidy of posting of periodicals
but also I’d guess that the Poetry
Foundation, Poetry’s publishers are
sitting on some reasonable assets.
Poetry is serious stuff. The usual
format is poetry – by top poets from
the US and around the world – at
28
29
the front and lengthy reviews and
other prose pieces towards the
back.
The reviews are in depth without
being overly academic. The March
2008 issue is a change from that
approach with each set of poems
being followed by a short interview
with the poet discussing the poems
and why and how they wrote them.
I think getting the February
issue of Poetry was the first time I’d
had the experience of getting
poetry magazine through the post,
reading it all the way through and
being disappointed that I’d finished
reading it. I’m planning to read
more American magazines over the
next year and I also need to
describe which British ones to
carry on subscribing to.