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

As you see, the magazine now has a new look.  Our readership is growing so fast that we’ve decided to celebrate our second birthday by going perfect-bound, and growing bigger.

Editing is not - as I thought before I tried it - an easy job.  Of course, you are mainly interested in getting your work into print, but I am mainly interested in producing an excellent magazine.  It is a constant struggle to maintain a high standard while remaining open to the young, the obscure and those living in the Bedford area.  We look back at previous ages and think we know who were the great writers;  Bunyan in the seventeenth century, Dickens in the nineteenth.  But today we have a much larger educated population, many people are trying to be heard and whoever looks back at us in a hundred years’ time may feel that the really important poets and fiction writers are not those who are currently in the limelight.  In my small way, I’m trying to do what history will eventually do and sort out the very best.

This is not elitist.  Elitism is when an editor accepts work only from a small group of his or her friends.  I’ve always tried to publish the best work on offer from a large number of people (that is why I normally take only one piece per person) and would much rather print a first-rate poem by someone I have never heard of than a second-rate poem by a ‘name’.  I’m happy that we have been able to give space to a great many writers from inside and outside the region.

Like Mark Steinhardt’s train, we ‘carry many moods and many ways of being’.  Blake’s house was informally known as The House of the Interpreter.  We hope you like the new-style magazine and the beautiful cover design.