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

We are indebted to John Fuller and Alan Hollinghurst, who solicited and collated all the present material. Little need be added to this small tribute to Mick Imlah except, perhaps, to mention his importance to Oxford Poetry.

The magazine’s history may well have ended with John Fuller and Francis Hope in 1960, the last of the hardback editions. There was a brief and over-ambitious effort by Mark Wormald and Robin Leanse to restart on a fortnightly basis in 1970, running to only three issues; and two further, separate initiatives to rebrand and relaunch were frustrated (Oxford Poetry Magazine and Oxford Poetry Now).

Mick Imlah et al. brought out Oxford Poetry I.1 in 1983, a creature independent of its parent, inheriting the name but counting its own years. Humble appearances belied content that was fresh, with some very early David Constantine poems, but clearly proud of its past: unpublished Auden material in OP I.3 helped establish the magazine on sure footing in the national context. It continued, more or less in the same format, until some troubled pre-teen years. Now clad in the new fashion, OP is set to develop and grow. Features introduced by the Imlah generation, such as interviews and a translation competition, will return next year, 100 years since the original magazine’s conception.

Looking ahead, we are delighted to announce that a one-day conference on the work of Mick Imlah will be held at Senate House in London on 10th December 2010, followed by a reading of poems by and about Mick. This reading will be free and open to the public. Participants will include Alan Hollinghurst, John Fuller, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Isabel Fonseca, Martin Amis, and Mark Ford.