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

Welcome to iota 68. We hope you enjoy its variety of voices - and thanks for your interest. If you’re a subscriber or regular reader, we appreciate your support.

First, the unfortunate news that we’ll have to increase the price of iota from £2.50 to £3 per issue. The reason is simple. Everything costs us more than it did when we took over two and a half years ago and the sums no longer add up. However, those who want to renew subs or extend existing subs before the end of the year can do so at the current annual rate of £10. From January 1, 2005, though, the price will increase to £12 a year or £3 per copy. For overseas rates please see our website or contact us. We hope you will understand. This is the first hike in price since issue 53.

We felt it was time to publish results from the survey that’s been on the iota website for the past nine months. Thanks to all those who took the time to complete it. As you’d expect the question about poetry that first inspired poets to write - and poetry to which they return again and again - provoked the most varied response, with T S Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and A E Housman repeatedly mentioned. A lot of those who were hooked on this crazy activity in childhood blamed it on Edward Lear. The increasing popularity of live performance was in evidence: 65 per cent said they went to poetry readings and 54 per cent said they read their poetry to live audiences when the opportunity presented itself. Of the six options for what inspires people to buy poetry books, a good review was surprisingly high at 26 per cent, with author’s reputation next highest on 23 percent. As to preferred methods of buying, bookshops were still well ahead - bad news for the small presses - with the internet favoured by only 14 per cent. It interested us that only six per cent of poets wanting their work published were happy to leave cover design and typeface to the publisher. The overwhelming majority - 83 per cent - acknowledged the publisher’s right to the final decision, but expected to have a say, while 11 per cent believed they had the right to select both.

Eighty seven per cent entered poetry competitions, which we felt was remarkably high. The yes/no question of whether or not poetry magazines should pay poets provoked an interesting response: 58 per cent said yes (especially if magazines were externally funded) with a further 18 per cent feeling a complimentary copy or payment to the equivalent value was necessary. And fi nally, how many people saw poetry as something they would do for the rest of their lives... 100 per cent!

We’ll leave the survey on the website for a few months more. Thanks to all those who have taken the time to respond. It does help in various ways, not least in ideas for the improvement of iota. We particularly liked the one that said it could be bettered ‘by taking more of my poems and by paying me’.

The best reactions to individual poems in iota 67 were for were for The Sandpiper Addresses God by Yvonne Baker and by Yvonne Baker and fee fi fo fum by Roger Amos.

Beryl Cross took issue with Tony Grist’s review of her collection Forty Minutes Late at Pont L’Eveque. Unfortunately, we don’t have space to publish her response in iota but we will put it on our website’s reactions page (which also carries feedback regarding poems in the previous issue - please keep these coming in). Anyone who reviews for iota has freedom to criticise or praise, providing the book itself remains the subject of the piece. If it’s reviewed by someone else, we’ll almost certainly not have read it, so we can’t discuss it personally. We don’t want bland, or consistently kind reviews. We all read books and react to them, sometimes with enthusiasm, sometimes very much the opposite, and our reviews should match that situation. That said, if poets feel misunderstood, they can reply through our website.

On the publication front, Ragged Raven has released two collections this year, most recently Kung Fu Lullabies by Chris Kinsey, a poised and confi dent poet from the Welsh borders. Chris launched the book at the atmospheric Cafe Loco at Newtown station in October to a packed house - and it was good to look out and see smiling faces at a poetry reading. In the summer Chris and Jane Kinninmont, whose Seven League Stilettos we published in June, read together at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Like the other Ragged Raven poets from this country, John Robinson and Tony Petch, they are available for readings - and are good! Bob readat the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham in September and visited the Metroland poets in Amersham - a reading, talk on small press poetry publishing, and then the workshopping of poems. If you think we could add variety to your poetry group’s activities, please let us know.

As to Iota, submissions of poetry continue to pour in. We do welcome that...we want as much good poetry as possible... though we would ask for a separate, reasonably short cover letter including the titles of poems. And, of course, the customary sae. Above everything else, we hope you enjoy the poetry in iota 68.