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

THE NORTH hasn’t had a price rise for two years and our belts are as tight as they’ll go. Production costs, postage, fourstar for the Porsches, they’ve all gone up. So, gentle reader, hear with us. We’re still the best value magazine this side of Viz and with considerably more literary acumen, not to say élan.

Note that if you resubscribe now there’s a discount.

You may have heard that Huddersfield is the Poetry Capital of Britain. Well, we’ll run with this fiction as long as we can. We do have an axe to grind and the sharper it’ll be the more hype we get. Most who submit material to us know from our comments that we have definite ideas about what we don't want, and where some poems fail. Nevertheless, there isn’t a Huddersfield School. What we’re looking for is authenticity, that’s all, authenticity without tedium. There are magazines for the dull but worthy. This isn’t it. Likewise the slick and modish get short shrift in our neck of the woods.

That other northerly organ, IRON, recently gave our Reading Service much-needed publicity. A reading service is the best way of getting your work attended to from the roots up. Which is where it counts. You can fiddle with surface effects till the cows come home singing hallelujah and you’ll be no nearer writing what you genuinely need to. It is worrying, having so many poems come in here either cluttered with static or speaking clearly only what they think they ought to say. Well, keep the genuine poems coming. And, to sign off in time-honoured fashion keep the subs coming too.