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

Just when you thought you might have to look somewhere else for your latest dose of groundbreaking literary things, here’s another issue of Brittle Star.

   As always we’ve burned the candles from every conceivable angle and downed gallons of tea and soya milk, complemented with pancakes and strangely flavoured German biscuits, to bring you another hot, tasty feast of new writing.

   Following two issues full of poetry, this issue includes some great new short stories or, more accurately, one new short story by Duncan White and Robert Chandler’s new translation of Leonid Dobychin’s short story, The Father, first published in 1931 – we are also pleased to be able to include the orginal.

   We’re unashamedly devoting this editorial to the plight of one of the most important venues on the modern London poetry scene, the Torriano Meeting House in Kentish Town.

   For more than 20 years, Torriano has hosted poetry readings on Sunday evenings featuring everyone from John Hegley to John Heath-Stubbs, from Dannie Abse to Labi Siffre.

   It’s not big but it’s usually full. That means 30 to 40 people turning up every week to listen to poetry and/or to read one of their own poems from the floor.

   As well as holding readings, John Rety and Susan Johns also run Hearing Eye Press, which has an amazing track record for publishing new poetry by both established poets and new poets who’ve never been published before. 

   John and Susan’s hard work, unpaid, over more than 20 years has given all sorts of poets, young and old, from a wide range of personal and poetic backgrounds, a chance to get their voices heard.

   From humorous rhyming couplets to complex literary metaphors rooted in classical mythology, Torriano readings and Hearing Eye publications have provided a cosy and distinctive home for poetry in all its forms.

   Torriano has also been good to Brittle Star, providing a venue for several of our launch readings and giving our featured writers the chance to read in public, some for the first time.

   The present situation is that Camden Council, which until this year had written-off the rent for the Meeting House in exchange for John and Susan running it voluntarily as a community resource, have now decided they need their rent money.

   The two options currently available to John and Susan and the hundreds, possibly thousands, of us who want to see Torriano keep going are either to persuade Camden Council to change their minds or to find the rent money from other sources. Neither option is looking very easy at the moment.

   Camden Council have agreed to pay the rent for the first quarter while alternatives are being investigated; these include: a Torriano Friends’ Scheme, general fundraising, and venue partnerships. If you can help or want to offer your support contact: [email protected] or visit www.torriano.org for the latest news and events.