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

MAGMA is a magazine of poetry and writing about poetry, published three times a year in Summer, Autumn and Winter in full on paper and in selection on our Web site. We look for poems which give a direct sense of what it is to live today - honest about feelings, alert about world, sometimes funny, always well crafted. 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.

Magma is unusual in being run by a small 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 but, for continuity, each editor is advised by the editors of the previous and subsequent issues. The strength of the rotating editorship is that each editor brings his/her particular interests to bear, resulting in poems and emphases that no-one else in the group could have predicted. We feel that this arrangement works because we have a similar idea of what makes a good poem.

Magma 25 (January 2003) will be edited by Tim Kindberg from the San Francisco Bay area. He would like to receive poems on the theme of 'Foreign Lands'. He seeks poems about seeing and feeling other places without necessarily being in them. Whatever the topic, he also strongly encourages work from the USA. For contribution arrangements, please see page 63.

The launch reading for Magma 23 is on Monday 27 May at 7.30 for 8pm at the Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5. The nearest tube station is Earls Court. The guest poets will be Kate Clanchy, Mimi Khalvati and Jamie McKendrick. Admission is the normal Troubadour charge of £5.00 (£4.00 concessions) which includes a glass of wine. The launch reading for Magma 24 will be on Monday 7 October.