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

Thanks go to the Arts Council for funding the FIFTY/FIFTEEN festival in London. Second Light Network is fifteen years old (!) and, more importantly, we are celebrating the rise and rise of poetry by women over the last fifty years... and the need for continuing – greater? – ambition amongst women poets. Anne Stevenson, who will read in a key spot at the festival, is the prime example of a poet who began to publish during the mid-20th century flowering of women’s poetry and has consistently surpassed herself in each new collection.

The theme for ARTEMISpoetry issues 4 and 5 will be ambition. Not a limiting theme, of course, but an invitation to submit poems that in one way or another – language, form, ideas and subject matter – are ‘outside the box’. This enterprise, funded by ACE, will only work if good poets reserve at least some of their best work for this all-women outlet. A hard choice? Yes. Women and men want to be published in the most reputable magazines, though some of these publish more men than women on a regular basis. It is up to our readers: send us your best work and you make this an oasis, not a backwater!

Our poetry editor for this issue, Katherine Gallagher, has reported a very high standard of poetry submitted and a distinct regret that several of the poems she would like to have included in her selection must be omitted because of the limitations of space in a single issue. It is very rewarding for us to see that ARTEMISpoetry is already becoming a sought-after publication credit. Long may it continue to be so.

How many of us give more than passing thought to how much we are still pioneers and ask what sort of difference the greater participation of women poets will make? Do some of us still maintain it can make no difference? Whatever our view of feminism, we should be looking to extend the boundaries of our own work, drawing on the energy and confidence derived from the great shift or artistic movement that has come about.

Some of us have attended recent inspiring events celebrating the life and work of U A Fanthorpe – our own celebration is on the first evening of the FIFTY-FIFTEEN festival (Nov 19th). We will be devoting part of ARTEMISpoetry issue 4 to UAF (see Noticeboard for details and submission guidelines).

UAF made many different kinds of contribution to poetry. One of these was to give us a new image of the genus poet. Certain images of ‘the poet’ have dominated past thinking: for example, poets as doomed young men and women; poets as the wild men of drink and drugs; poets as broad-browed, white-haired patriarchs. Fanthorpe gave us a woman not young, small, sharply intelligent, sympathetic, quizzical, polite and formidable.

This potent image – potent because her poetry gave her the right to be somebody and influence her world – is a different ‘take’ and an invitation to others to go beyond images that may, in the past, have appeared more exclusive than inclusive. Do we believe that women poets may have held back from improving their work and seeking publication because they are not male, not young, not Oxbridge and not pompous patriarchs? Yes!

It is so sad and disturbing when poets die with, we feel, so much unwritten. Amongst recent losses of poets still developing their work and producing some of their most exciting poems, are Berta Freistadt and Mary MacRae. In this issue friends remember the special contribution of two poets we were privileged to publish in ARTEMISpoetry.