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As always, Magma 9 contains a range of poems, experimental and traditional, by poets established and beginning, from the UK and elsewhere. But we want to tell you about our plans for the future. There are three.

Calling young poets

We are delighted to feature work by young poets again: Clare Pollard who is at school in Bolton and was featured in the Poetry Review’s Young Poets 1996, and two students from Trinity School, Croydon - Matthew Charles Davis and Robert Cousins. As we said in Magma 7, we particularly welcome contributions from young poets. A huge number of fine poems seem to get no further than school or college magazines and we sense that a lot of promising writers lose interest for lack of a wider audience. We hope that, by featuring their work in an established magazine, they will be encouraged to go on from strength to strength.

Calling other writing groups

London is full of writing groups and we want to make contact with them. Three of the poets recently featured in Magma - Matthew Sweeney, Maurice Riordan and Michael Donaghy - chair such groups. We now want to spread wider and both interview tutors and invite them to showcase some of their students’ work in Magma. The first outcomes of this will appear in Magma 10.

Magma readings

We’ve started a series of readings. The first was last November, the second is on 15 March and the third will be in June. They are held at the City Lit from 7.30pm, are advertised in Time Out, Poetry Society Newsletter, etc, and have a bar. Some of the readings are by Magma poets (who come as guests), but there are also open mike spots for anyone who likes to come along. We should add, though, that we are not really into performance poetry. So many venues are increasingly given over to performance that we’re more interested in poems that work equally on the page, with all the attentiveness this requires. Come along and see for yourself . . .