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

While celebrating small press collections published in the last decade was the driving aim of this issue, as a magazine of new writing we are
committed to presenting previously unpublished work in the magazine. In the following pages, therefore, we feature new work by a selection of writers chosen by the Staple Editorial Board. We are proud to be one of the few magazines in the UK which provides a platform for new prose writing as well as for new poetry; this is especially important for short fiction writers who have significantly fewer publication outlets than poets. Although this special issue has had poetry as its focus, in the following pages we present new prose writing as well as new poetry from our selected writers.

In making an Editors’ Choice we wanted to celebrate new writers, and writers who the pamphlet or collection has unfairly eluded, as well as those with sole-authored publications to their name. We asked the members of our Editorial Board – ourselves plus C.J. Allen, Chris Jones and Matt Black – to select 10 poets and 5 prose writers from those published in the magazine since we took over as editors in 2001; our brief was to identify those writers whose work they had found particularly original and exciting. Our selections were not informed by the number of times writers had been published in the magazine or by their biographical notes.

The selection of writers which emerged from this process is, in a sense, a ‘committee choice’; while all of the poets and short fiction writers presented here were nominated by at least two members of the Editorial Board, there was universal support for only one. All of us chose writers who didn’t make it into the final selection and who we are sorry not to see ncluded. Although they emerged from a committee process, these writers are not safe selections; we did not opt for the consensus decision where we were comfortable with, rather than excited by, the selections. Each one of these writers is passionately championed by someone on the Editorial Board – and a number of them were equally passionately argued against.

Provoking such responses to writing is, we would argue, one of the vital contributions of the small press magazine. For us, the editors, it was an interesting experience to hand-over some editorial responsibility and live with the consequences. We decided to take
this process further by inviting the selected writers to represent themselves, in terms of the work they submitted to us, as they wished, exercising only the lightest editorial intervention. We found it challenging to turn the editorial process on its head and to begin with the writers instead of with the writing. We are aware that it has produced quite a different selection of material to that we would usually offer to our readers and we would be interested to hear your views on this.

Some of the writers presented here have already published several full length collections but the majority have only recently published their first collection, or are currently putting together a manuscript. We believe that they all deserve a wider audience for their work and we are pleased to be featuring them in Staple.