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

Alfred Bishop, age 46. Born Glasgow. Gardener at the Ayrshire Hospice. Interests: art, wildlife, sex, current affairs. Favourite poets: Auden, Eliot, Larkin, Herbert, Clare, Donne, Coleridge, Sweeney, Jamie.

Rebecca Bruce: Born in 1983, Camberwell, South London. I’ve been writing since I was 12 and will carry on for however much longer my healthy anger lasts . . . I write on the basis that I choose to see that nothing is white. Or pure. Or honest. Or whatever you want to call it. It’s just something black that’s been painted to look white. I choose to see both sides of beauty, then make it ugly. Something beautiful was ugly in the first place. There is no such thing as beauty. There’s just a stunning ugliness that we call beauty. This ‘ugly’ is all we have. I try to make it beautiful again. I write perhaps for the same reason most poets do: I want to shake up the world, even if it’s only my own.

Rip Bulkeley’s poems have appeared in Fire, The Shop, South and other magazines. Others have been published at poetry sites on the internet including Snakeskin and PoetryRepairShop. One was displayed in the international photographic exhibition Following the Kosovar Refugees, held at Colgate University, U.S.A., in 2000. He is the secretary of an Oxford poetry group Backroom Poets.

Penelopeanne Dalgleish was born in Northampton in 1977 of mixed South African and East Anglian stock. She studied at St Andrews where her tutors included the poets Robert Crawford and Kathleen Jamie and where she met her husband John, whose generosity enables her to write full time. She has held residencies at Safeways and Northampton Rugby Club. Now living in Peterborough with two cats, she is a practising Pagan. <http://uk.geocities.com/mightypenelopeanne/> is her poetry website.

Elaine Dunn: I first came to London as an art student, but twenty years later I’m beginning to think that that might be long enough for the time bring. My only regret would be leaving behind the garden that I created from scratch eight years ago. When not in the garden I spend a lot of time at the cinema. About five years ago I realised that I had neither enough money for materials to paint with, nor enough space to paint in, so I started to write poems instead.

Julian Flanagan was born in Peru and lived in India and Dubai as a child but was mostly brought up in Cheshire. He now lives in London with his wife and two daughters and works as a freelance copywriter. He has had poems published in Smith’s Knoll, Tandem, The Spectator, The Rialto, Staple, Smoke and Envoi and will have one in a forthcoming issue of The Penniless Press.

Michael Henry taught for many years in Canada and England and now lives in Cheltenham. His third collection from Enitharmon Footnote to History was published recently.

Mike Hoy aimed to live fast & die young . . . but missed. Has had short stories, poems & articles published & broadcast. Brilliant performance poet, modest to a fault.

Jon Mathewson: I'm a museum consultant by day and a poet by night. I'm just now (after seven years of writing poetry and self-publishing two chapbooks) in the last few months sending out my poems for other people to publish. Also, for the last two years, I have been a member of a poetry and percussion performance group called VIBES! - four poets and three drummers. Each show has about fifty instruments in it.

Andrew Mayne lives in Stockport; he teaches at Manchester Grammar School, where he has been Head of English for sixteen years. He has published several textbooks (Considering Prose; Considering Drama), some critical writing (a study of Conrad’s The Secret Agent) , and also student editions of plays (The Winslow Boy; Loot). At present he writes only poems, with a number of recent acceptances.

Graham Mummery was born in Altrincham, Cheshire but has lived in the South East for most of his life. Writing poetry is his means of getting at truths and finding what there is to say. The results are not always what he expects. More recently he has also been attempting translations (particularly from the French of René Char). He finds this opens up further possibilities for his own writing. His work has appeared in several magazines.

Helena Nelson irons most garments beautifully, including (sometimes) socks. ‘Hesitation Over Socks’ is part of a sequence that appeared as a pamphlet from Ketillonia this summer.

Leonard Orr teaches literature, critical theory and creative writing at Washington State University. His stories and poems have appeared in [editor takes a deep breath] Midstream, Bold Print, Rashi, Sifrut, Jewish Spectator, Reconstructionist, Riverside Quarterly, StarSong, Rocky Mountain Review, Riverrun, Protea Poetry Journal, Exquisite Corpse, Voices International, Phoebe, European Judaism, Poetry Forum Journal and Other Worlds, and in the anthology From Adam to Zipporah, edited by Judith Caplan.

Lisa Pacynko was born in 1971 in Loughborough, where she continues to live with her husband and two cats. For the past  twelve years Lisa has worked in the arts and she is currently employed by the regional Arts Board for the East Midlands. She is a persistent eavesdropper and people watcher, and enjoys collecting quirky comments and personalities as a stimulus for her writing. She is studying ‘The Experience of Poetry’, a creative writing course with the Open College of the Arts.

Ra Page is scruffy. Despite this he works for the Manchester listings magazine City Life, and edited The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories (Penguin, 1999). He was born on Portland, grew up in Derbyshire and read Physics and Philosophy at Uni. Poems in a handful of magazines.

Ilina Sen: I grew up all over India, moving almost every year to a different town. At 18 (left for the U.S., lived there for II years, did my college, University, and worked in Washington D.C. in the environmental field. Given how culturally varied India is and how the 24 states tend to treat each other as independent nations, I always found myself to be “the outsider”, wherever I went. The one question I would be invariably asked, all my life, is “where are you from?” My poems written upon my return attempt to answer that question for myself, undoing the various entities I had assumed in my need “to belong”, and uncovering the being who would be, wherever she is.

Kath Shaw: I was born in Manchester in 1957. I lived in the North of England until the age of 18 when I moved to Birmingham. When I was 23 (had the first of my manic-depression breakdowns. I have met many courageous people through my experience of mental illness. I studied poetry with the Open College of the Arts, seeking to have a new focus in my life after the death of my husband. I have been published in several magazines, including Spare Rib, Crossing the Border, Raw Edge and Never Bury Poetry.

Chris Taylor: I have only been writing poetry for a couple of years but reading Dylan Thomas for about 20. I try not to be so sophisticated and just write about what I see and how I feel and sometimes what other people see and feel.

Gary Webster: I come from a family of plumbers in Ambler, Pa.; got my Journeyman's Card in 1968; worked as one until the early 1970's. Later I went through school, got a PhD in Anthropology; was an associate professor at Penn State until last year. I've written a lot of scholarly stuff on my archaeological research in Sardinia. Now, I've retired from all that; I'm writing more poetry and fiction. My first book of verse - Archaeology: Verse Accounts of the Writings of V. Gordon Childe was published this year by Edwin Mellen Press. A chapbook on the mining tradition here is under consideration by Ginninderra Press. I've published a few poems in Arion, Ice-Flow and Marlboro Review. I live in northern Sweden with my wife and son.

John Younger: I studied painting at the Royal College of Art, taught, but had to resign with the onset of blindness. Then read English Literature at Leeds University, followed by a lectureship in the School of English, where I taught for twenty years until retirement. I’ve been writing poetry during the past thirteen years, with some ninety poems published in thirty magazines. I’m interested in everything as subject matter and use a computer fitted with a voice synthesiser to compose.