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

This is the last edition of Magma of the century and millenium and, though we don’t set much store by the date (if China had been the dominant economic power, we would be in the middle of a different millenium), number 15 seems a good point for a brief look back over the past five years and then a glance at the future.

Magma is unusual in being run by a group rather than an individual. Several writers with a roughly similar view of poetry got together and shared out the various jobs that needed to be done. They decided that each issue should have a different editor, not always from among themselves.

This policy works because we have a similar idea of what makes a good poem: broadly speaking, contemporary rather than traditional, provisional rather than assertive, urban rather than rural. However, every edition contains exceptions. When we decided on the title Magma, it was to suggest the molten core within the world, hidden as deep feelings are and showing itself in unpredictable movements, tremors, lava flows, eruptions. The strength of the rotating editorship is that each editor brings his/her particular interests to bear, resulting in emphases and poems that no-one else in the group could have predicted.

One example was the San Francisco edition (number 11) which has led to a large increase in contributions from the United States and Canada. Through the same editor, Magma was one of the first British poetry magazines to go on the Internet and we now receive about a third of our contributions in this way.

So we have steadily pushed at our own boundaries and now print, we like to think, an exceptional range of poems. Recent editions have been celebrated by readings at The Troubadour and elsewhere. Writers in the current and previous issue are invited and there are also open-mike spots on a first-come-first-served basis. Magma 15 is being launched at The Troubadour, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5, on Monday 4th October at 7.30 for 8pm.

Our policy of interviewing interesting poets continues. In this edition we make our first serious foray into the avant-garde with John Stammers’ interview with Caroline Bergvall. From now on, book reviews will be more numerous and shorter. Urban Fox, who was our critic of the magazine scene in early editions, returns now and for the future to write short reviews of poetry books and magazines. Urban Fox sees himself as responding to the cunning, often devious quality of modern poetry, creeping up on the reader’s feelings by stealth.

Looking to the future, we shall seek to improve the magazine’s production values - the quality of printing and binding, for example. This depends on funds, of course, and we’ve lived and grown without any grants, just sales and a welcome donation from our bank, the NatWest.

Magma 15 is our first ‘return match’ in that it is edited by Laurie Smith who edited Magma 1. We reckoned that a five-year gap was long enough to avoid the risk of repetition! Laurie is interested in arranging the poems thematically, so that each connects backwards and forwards in some way, for a more satisfying read.