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

Subscribers to The Rialto will find that a copy of our new flier, with its heartening endorsement of the magazine from the Poet Laureate, is accompanying this issue. I hope this doesn’t confuse those of you who also receive notice that your subscription needs to be renewed, or those of you who reponded to a recent mailout of the same flier to lapsed subscribers. The flier is simply there to give those of you who don’t yet know about it the opportunity to sign up, by sending us your email address, to the new ebulletin service that we are launching.We’ll be sending out news of events that we are organising, or that we hope may interest you, etc.We might even include information as to where the editor is up to in the submission reading process....

Dean and Helen and Nick at Starfish, our wonderfully tolerant designer, have put in a lot of work in recent months thinking about and reshaping our visibility on the internet. Hence our Facebook presence which hasn’t gone unnoticed by diligent surfers. The new website, when it eventually ‘goes live,’ sometime after the publication of this issue, promises to be clearer, easier to look at, more informative. It’s going to become famous for its ‘Editors Choice’ page, in which I choose a poem from each issue of the magazine and tell you why I selected it. We are also going to be able to update the information on the site more regularly (as well as sending out the bulletin to those of you who sign up for it).

Those of you who don’t have internet access (and in some cases vigorously eschew it) will find these paragraphs boring, irritating. But my colleagues have convinced me that it is vital for The Rialto to get up to speed in this area.We have to do it - though The Poetry Trust with its poetry channel, [email protected], looks to be chopping through the jungle way ahead of us. So, watch not only this space but the space on your computer screen.

While we’re in the e-world we’ve had a letter from StephanieMoncrieff who has been managing, in recent years, Inpress, the online Small Press catalogue and marketing organization, of which The Rialto and many other small presses are members. Stephanie has worked incredibly energetically for the organization, pulling it back from the brink of disaster and, as far as we are concerned, making it something that has markedly increased our sales, both of books and of magazines. And now she announces her intention of retiring. We’ll be sad to see her go: it’s a difficult job trying to keep any number of poetry publishers up to speed and aware of their responsibilities to the products they produce. She’s done it well and deserves recognition and thanks.

There’s a paragraph in her letter that I want to quote from (it wouldn’t be a ‘From The Editor’ piece without some comment on the Arts Council):

‘As you know, the Arts Council has renewed our funding for the next three years, although they continue to remind us regularly that it’s never entirely certain that the grant will be maintained. Our lead officer has also indicated their support for Inpress to move towards an internet platform for sales to reduce dependence on Trade sales and for members to look at digitising their published output....’

The first sentence is so familiar to all of us (perhaps I should call us ‘customers’) who depend on the Arts Council. I find myself greatly sympathetic towards the unfortunate officials of that organization, they are the piggies in the middle, entrusted with the difficult task of passing on to the Arts community the continuing story of this, and of all government’s, distrust of the Arts. They keep us on our toes by moving the goalposts (often silently and in the night).We none of us know where we stand - we know that we can be trusted to work our socks off for our art but they don’t believe us. Personally I’ve been quietly passionate about poetry since I don’t know when: I think I’ve been hooked since I first heard the nursery rhyme ‘I had a little nut tree’ (though the suspicious student of Dr. Freud in me suggests it might be the King of Spain’s daughter that stirs the passion).Maybe poetry is scary - after all the at last arrested Radovan Karadzic is a poet, and Italy’s current culture minister Sandro Bondi, also a published poet, has said ‘I struggle to find evidence of beauty in contemporary art’.

Also there could be a sting in the tail of the quote from Stephanie’s letter. This business of digitising our published output. There’s already a voluntary Arts Council/Poetry Library scheme which requests poetry magazines send a digital version of each issue to be held as a record, which you can access online. I’ve resisted joining in The Rialto to this because, a bit like Wendy Cope, I am not convinced that it isn’t an infringement of copyright. Wendy, as you may have heard if you listen to Radio 4, is on a one person campaign to get people who download her poems from the internet to pay a royalty fee. In a way she is right. With printed publication (in a magazine or a book) there’s a chance that the poet will get paid. Once the poem is on the net there’s no comeback. Some poets are, of course, only too happy to think that the world is gloriously edified by their freely available genius: others of us would like to make a living (even to retire at some point). As far as I’m concerned it’s not just the poem, it’s the book it’s printed in that’s a thing of beauty.Which is why The Rialto is continuing to work towards higher standards of excellence in its presentation both of the magazine and of the books. Hands up who noticed the new font in the last issue and the larger font size - our, at last, response to those many of you over the years who have asked for it.

Speaking of books we are about to publish Emily Wills’ second collection, Developing The Negative, with ringing endorsements from U A Fanthorpe and Anthony Thwaite. Thinking of the magazine, I’m tremendously pleased to be publishing Peter Scupham’s long poem ‘Figures in a Landscape:1944’ in this issue; it’s a brilliantly crafted and astonishing piece of writing, and it’s an honour to be the first publisher. And speaking of retirement, Janet Fisher, after many years, is leaving The North our much loved companion in the world of poetry publication. We wish her well.