Doors (and bar) open 6.30.

The readings start at 7.30 and you’ll be able to hear our winners, alongside guest poets Fleur Adcock, Martyn Crucefix, Tamar Yoseloff and Inua Ellams reading specially commissioned short poems. George Szirtes, the judge, will talk about the judging process and read some of his own work.

We’d love to see you there.

For more information, go to http://magmapoetry.com/competition/

the woven shawl, the grey hair
Gathered in a careful bun …

The next I was seeing Psycho through Simon Barraclough’s eyes in ‘Being a Woman You Will.’ He opts for a wide angle lens, taking a more detached view of Lila’s sister, Marion as she hires a car, driving through the rain in the direction of the Motel where she will meet Norman Bates. Using the second person, often a feature of Barraclough’s verse, we are informed that “Tiredness kills”. She waits, honking her horn for the arrival of the man who will eventually be responsible for her murder.

Though the two poets have much in common, especially a splendidly surreal sense of humour, it seems to me that it is this which distinguishes them: Simon Barraclough habitually takes a wider view of the worlds he occupies as a citizen of Plant Earth, owing a great debt, in particular, to Edwin Morgan. This can be seen especially when he whirls around the solar system, his destinations ranging from Mercury to his very short poem on that now officially non-planet, ‘Pluto’. (To recount it here would rob of its punch-line, if one could be said to exist!) On one occasion, he even directly references him in his poem to ‘Neptune’, declaring that this particular planet is the source of

Edwin Morgan’s ‘Little Blue Blue’
Inexhaustiblue.

On his travels, he makes some exceedingly good jokes. Mercury’s “unevolved ankles” are “tickled by feathers that never grew”. Uranus is knocked into a “cocked hat”. Earth is “God’s gobstopper”. He even continues this theme when he adopts the heart as a motif in his work. As well as a ‘Magpie heart’, a ‘Havisham heart’ and a ‘Pizza Heart’, he summons up school-days in the shape of ‘Wrigley’s Heart’, where the sheer adaptability of chewing gum is seen in the endless items to which it can be stuck – from desks to walls to hair.

In all this, Barraclough’s verse fizzes with the madcap energy of that world of gobstoppers and chewing gum. He is enormously inventive with an endless zeal for puns and in-jokes. Referring to the movie world that frequently inspires his verse, his narrator declares in ‘Flashbacks Of A Fool’;

I am but mad North by Northwest.

Describing certain planets, he draws upon the songs and lyrics of Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. Accusing Neptune of vanity, he echoes Carly Simon in declaring its world is so blue,

you probably think that Jarman’s Blue
is about you.

There did, however, come a point in my reading when I was unable to suppress an involuntary groan. This occurred when I came across the line, “I am the Lord of the Dance Settee”, words that, as a young boy in a school hostel, we used to shout out a number of decades ago. (The Corries version was constantly on the record turntable.) It seemed to me, too, that for all Barraclough’s verse is largely inventive and exuberant, it can often be too much rooted in a world where people watch similar movies and listen to the same song and tell familiar corny jokes. I feel, if he is to grow and develop, he needs to step away from this. There is little doubt that he has the creativity and talent to undertake the nifty footwork required.

I have fewer reservations about Isobel Dixon’s work. It possesses great range and inventiveness, dipping into several distinct and different worlds. It is true that, like Simon Barraclough, some of these involve both cinema and modern rock. Like him, she writes about Hitchcock; on another occasion, she draws inspiration from the film, ‘Into The Wild’ and Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ when she writes – ironically – of ‘Days Of Miracles And Wonders’ when visiting a city Common.

She draws us, however, ‘Into the Wild’ in other ways too. No one who lived my existence could fail to recognise the truth of ‘The Parliament Of Gulls’ where seagulls gather around marooned baby sharks on the shoreline. The delicacy of ‘Vision’ is also appealing, where she describes how bats invade the garden during a summer evening. In ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, it is the media who stand “gawping” at the intrusion of a whale into the modern world, noting how, a few years ago, one swam up the Thames,

searching for his Jonah, righteous bellyful.

It is mythic, too, in the way its presence recalls how there was at one time a whale “beached in Dagenham”, said by some to be predicting the death of Cromwell. In Isobel Dixon’s view, perhaps this arrival on the scene

spouted out his warning of the melting ice.

In particular, she writes well of her childhood world in South Africa. In writing that recalls the verse of D.H. Lawrence, she tells us of the ‘Toktokkie’, that country’s large black beetle. Dramatically, it conveys the insect’s

Ridiculous performance, till you realise –
Tap-tap, tap-tap – this suitor’s soundings out
Are spot on, as he homes in on his date.

She deals with that nation’s political legacy too in ‘The Only Brunette On The Beach’. She finds herself on Bloubergstrand, a place of great significance in the country’s history where the invading British forces defeated the Dutch before going onto colonise much of southern Africa. In the final verse, she recalls other tensions that exist in the landscape, referring to Nonqawuse, a Xhosa girl whose prophecies led many of her people to kill their cattle in a forlorn attempt to drive the British from their land.

Her political insights are not just confined to either that nation or the distant past. In ‘Mountain War Time’, she connects volcanic Mount St Helens with its nearby atomic energy plant which helped to develop the Fat Man Bomb that fell on Nagasaki, recalling how

molten kimono flowers singed to skin,
a city threshed and sewn with flowers, fissioning.

It seems to me that this is what makes Isobel Dixon an extraordinary talent. She may not veer and buzz around the solar system with quite the same gusto as Barraclough, but the entirety of this planet – from its animal life to politics, past to present – is found in close-up in her verse.

Donald S. Murray
Donald S. Murray is the author of the non-fiction books, ‘The Guga Hunters’ and ‘And On This Rock’ (Birlinn). His poetry and short-fiction works include ‘Small Expectations’ (Two Ravens Press) and ‘Weaving Songs’ (Acair). The latter, a collaboration with photographer Carol Ann Peacock, has been published to commemorate the centenary of the Harris Tweed trademark, the Orb, and celebrates the life of his father, employed as a weaver for many years.

Neptune Blue and The Tempest Prognosticator are both published by Salt, 2011, £9.95.

for blog review 6, see Karen McCarthy Woolf on Susan Wicks’s ‘House of Tongues’
for blog review 5, see Dave Coates on Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’

In the poem, Wicks skilfully interweaves the original narrative with a more intimate domestic tableau, where

Next to the back door
the tongues of our battered trainers
strain under laces, swell
crusted and luminous.

Throughout the collection the body is often in a state of flux, whether from ageing, sickness or an inflicted violence. In ‘Under the Blue Umbrella’ Wicks juxtaposes a fragile and metaphorically encircled Mediterranean idyll with wider political concerns: “No one’s heart clenches here. No one is seen to bleed/from the anus, or stand naked at a wall to be shot.” Likewise, the ‘Untitled (Wheelchair)’ after the Lebanese/Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which like many poems here, gives voice where voice is lost. Even the seemingly anecdotal sonnet, ‘Box’, about a topiary bush in the shape of a bird, which “daily becomes less bird, and more completely bush” provokes a contemplation of the ongoing human wrestle with nature, the manicured garden versus wilderness, bush against bird.

This sense of tension and fragility is elegantly expressed elsewhere. In a short sequence at the beginning of the central section, ‘What She Was’, deer wander into the house, and the narrator has to “wake/and feel their noses on my face,/my breasts, nudging between my thighs.” Here Wicks avoids the myriad ‘Bambi’ pitfalls and instead manages to capture the experience via a precise and visceral approach:

I sensed rather than saw them move
in the darkness, the dark fractionally displaced
at the edge of seeing…

The sea is also a recurrent motif and is often a conduit for the book’s emotional and thematic core. In the opening poem, ‘Pistachios’, physical ageing is pitched against a sensuous vivacity, yet these contradictions are empowered by simple expression. If sex, “as they say, is a kind of dying” then you “never know exactly when/or where or how fast/sex leaves” as it’s carried out on the tide. Later, in the lyrical ‘Inside the Movement’, the idea of death as process is expanded and it’s “as if the land itself had had a stroke”.

Against this quietly unsettled backdrop, there’s a deep sense of hope embedded in the heart of the work; if there are environmental imperatives humankind must attend to, then the fact that “we’re built for loss” (‘Inside the Movement’) is perhaps a more optimistic thought than it seems. A lesser poet might have rendered these ecological themes dull or clichéd; Wicks energises the subject through adroit and stylish handling that is confident but never showy.

The final section entitled ‘Nightwatchman’s Yard’ is set in Visby, a medieval city on the Swedish island of Gotland. Wicks builds a historical picture through a series of poems that give voice to the city’s saints, warriors, workers and villains. It opens with the monologue ‘Confession’; set in 1350 it’s the story of an embittered church organist who deliberately poisons the town’s wells with bubonic plague so that: “Now I can let my voice/howl in your pipework, echo to the town walls: how I spit on each upright soul/in this stinking city…” As in ‘House of Tongues’, sound – and specifically the voice – becomes a charged leitmotif through which both revenge and injustice are enacted.

At this point there is also a sense of release; as if the restraint of writing from the self is cast off, allowing the poet to run riot within the anarchy of embattled medieval society. Everything that was economically held back pours forth in these vigorous narratives, whether it’s the blithe sense of entitlement that infuses the utterances of the invading Dane Valdemar IV in ‘The Plundering of Visby’ or Little Ingeborg, “A woman alone/with her child and her child’s child” who is tried as a witch. What connects them to the other poems is emotional authenticity and the sense that the dystopia we experience now was ever thus.

Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetry chapbook The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2006. Her poetry also featured in the anthology, TEN New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010, ed. Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra).

House of Tongues is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95.

for blog review 5, see Dave Coates on Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’

This refreshing curiosity about the inner workings of the stellar bodies, magnetic fields, beehives and fossils is the fuel for his poems; richness, even in such mundane things, comes from being in a world in which life is precious and survival always possible. A few key poems lend the book a sense of cohesion and, with ideas so thoroughly connected, even a few lesser pieces gain in vitality.

‘The Summer I Mapped the World’, with its one word of Irish, éaligh: escape, is a poem of childhood in which (unlike many of his contemporaries) Duffy’s experience is viewed without a nostalgic filter. Once he éalighs the classroom, his solo project is to make a map of his town using only a notebook and his counted strides as a meter. The lines “At last the roads locked into place, joined up/ as they should across the barren spaces” are a fully-achieved expression of the feeling when a poem clicks in the reader’s mind, one that still makes sense within the boundaries of the poem’s conceit.

When the cogs mesh, Duffy crafts some brilliant set-pieces. ‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ is another poem that gets the dynamic between tenor and vehicle spot-on, fluctuating seamlessly between experience and instinct, scientific fact and anecdote, the art of beekeeping and the tradition of poetry:

You must understand from the beginning
that the hive is a mind and one
you will not comprehend.

And then (with the Queen Bee as subject):

Unknowingly she gives birth to her own successor
incubated in the brood and hidden from her.

This is a fantastic poem, and one I hope gets its fair share of exposure.

‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ also mentions Albert Einstein, who as a less-than-stellar pupil himself is something of a patron spirit. The poem he gets to himself, ‘Einstein’s Compass’, is an anthem to absent-mindedness, as the boy Albert is derided by an unnamed voice for his unbroken attention to his father’s compass and its steady needle:

when will the boy learn,
that it will never do otherwise,
that he breaks his mother’s heart
with his silent vigils?

Einstein once said “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” It is the book’s similarly modest, unwritten epigram.

‘Baltic Amber’ does the kind of stitch-work that most books only dream of having. So many threads find a common ground here it’s almost worth quoting in full, but to summarise: an ant caught in amber “in the afternoon heat of the Paleolithic” (wow), is an “emblem and lifeline/ of all that perishes, all that survives.” These lines shed sudden light on five or six other poems and position the preserved ant as the ideal symbol of poetry’s work of consecration, restoration and survival.

The closing poem, ‘Swallows’, draws a circle around a series of poems about Duffy’s late father; the swallows that appear “the day after I wrote your poem” are heavy with emotional and metaphorical freight. It’s not quite possible to tell what has been imagined and what has fallen serendipitously into place, but ‘Swallows’ is convincing enough for that not to matter. Duffy’s work is rooted in a deep study of his medium and, although not without occasional shortcomings, the poems in In the Library of Lost Objects work in concert in a way very few books achieve.

Dave Coates
Dave Coates grew up in Belfast and lives in Edinburgh. He writes about poetry on his blog, http://davepoems.wordpress.com. His new year’s resolution is to write on it more often.

In the Library of Lost Objects is published by Ward Wood, 2011, £7.99.

for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.

We were also fortunate to host a large number of contributors, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels and even California.

The uniqueness of the Magma launches is that everyone whose work is in the issue is invited to read, and one of the joys of being a Magma editor is that you have the opportunity to meet many of the contributors and hear them read their work, poems you have sifted and re-sifted out of many thousands: poems you love and have read deeply. It’s also a gratifying sight to watch an audience riffling through their copies of the magazine to find the page and read along.

During her reading, Selima Hill spoke of her pleasure at being ‘among poets’ and said something to the effect that rather than feeling separated from her audience at the reading, which is so often the case, she felt as if we were all in it together. Which seems a good place to end this little blog – thanks to everyone – contributors, subscribers, and audience for being ‘in it’ with us.

Pascale Petit

Alison Brackenbury

Alan Buckley

Mark Leech

The richest events occur in us long before the soul perceives them. And, when we begin to open our eyes to the visible, we have long since committed ourselves to the invisible.

Gabriele D’Annunzio

Poets are often advised to  ‘find a voice.’ This voice can only come,  I think, from the unique past and terroir of the poet.  In his essay, ‘Something to Write Home About’, Seamus Heaney describes growing up in Ireland between the Catholic and the Protestant communities, between a railway and a road, between the sound of a trotting horse and that of a shunting engine, between a variety of accents and dialects. One of the dialect words which lodged in his memory from that past was ‘hoke’.

‘The word means to root about and delve into and forage for and dig around, and that is precisely the kind of thing a poem does so well. A poem gets its nose to the ground and follows a trail and hokes its way by instinct to the real centre of what concerns it.’

Born in the middle of the Depression, money was short, but there was a freedom which now seems unthinkable, and I too grew up as an in-between: between two world wars; between a rural community and the chimneys of the nearby textile mills;  between the sounds of farm animals and shunting trains; between the speech patterns of my family and the rich Lancashire dialects of the neighbouring village and mill-towns; between a Catholic mother and a Protestant father and between their two gods: my father’s Our-Father-Which-Art, who had the  Power and the Glory, and my mother’s Our-Father-Who-Art, who did not.

Heaney (in his youth, a keen devourer of comics) proposes that the recitations of simple ballads and verses which children were, in the past, expected to perform at parties and to visiting relatives, gave verse, however humble, a place in the home, made it one of the ordinary rituals of everyday life.

We too learnt poems by heart and to recite them, learnt to sing hymns, folk songs and music-hall ballads. There were also prayers, the old fairy stores, Beatrix Potter, the Dandy and Beano comics, Churchill’s wartime speeches, English and Latin liturgies, the austere grandeurs of Gregorian chant; all of these fed me with an eclectic mix of words and rhythms to top-up the rhymes, singing-games and skipping  of the playground, and all became gloriously muddled in my head -

Bye, Baby Bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting  …  Introibo ad altare Dei, ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meum … Soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me, with your musket, fife and drum? … I  have loved, Oh Lord, the beauty of Thy house and the place where Thy glory dwelleth … as I were goin’ o’er Treacle Moor, I met me old sweet’eart, Mickey Plum; ‘e said, art tha goin’ t’funeral?  … one-pertater, two pertater, three pertater, four; five pertater, six pertater, seven pertater more … Vere dignum et justem est, equam et salutare… O. U .T  spells out, and out you must go  …

It is by ‘hoking’ about in this past that I grope my way into the future while stumbling through the present, where the reading of contemporary poetry has become a passion and a necessity, an essential  way to find a voice which, while still the product of the past, may also come to reflect my life and preoccupations now.

In this, poetry magazines are invaluable. For the price of a glass of wine in many London pubs, one can still buy excellent poetry magazines. Most of us have our favourites (usually those clear-sighted enough to publish us), but I have always had a particular affection for Magma.

reflecting every colour and none,
playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind

‘Caw Poem’ contains everything we might justifiably look for in the début work of a poet of promise. Darcy’s ear is pitch-perfect, as displayed in her deft imitation of the magpie’s movements:

I cocked my head,
hopped a little, hopped a little closer,
love become a scrum, a scuffle,
a ruffle of feathers

The opening is arresting, and cuts straight to the chase:

Not atriums and ventricles that cup and pour

Finally, imagistic and linguistic innovation is at a premium, both effortless and bang on the money:

a solitary magpie
beats cricked wings

“Cricked” is the mark of her ability as a wordsmith. Yet the poem offers much, much more, and it’s this that sets Darcy apart from the ranks of capable word-turners and puts her in that special place reserved for the very few – for poets who matter, have something to say that’s worth the hearing. You can’t matter as a poet if you don’t have style, but neither can you if it’s all you’re equipped with. Darcy’s poems have style and substance; indeed, in her work, they are one and the same.

‘Caw Poem’ enacts a kind of bricolage which recurs throughout the collection and recalls both MacNeice’s plea for “an impure poetry” and Muldoon’s baffled and baffling sense of random interconnection and segue. Early in his career (and, one suspects, with more than the tip of his tongue in his cheek), Muldoon said something to the tune that he’d love to be able to write simple poems, pure poems, ‘lovely little lyrics’, but couldn’t do it. ‘Caw Poem’ closes with the conditional urge to “plunder some bright thing, / learn to sing true”, but Darcy, like Muldoon, is astute enough to recognise that “truth” doesn’t come in pebbles of quartz, and that conviction is frequently culpable. Many of her poems are (in a good way) about poetry, the working through and questioning of her own aesthetic – ‘Terminus’, for example, which both yearns for and dismisses the knack of “lay[ing] it on the table”, or ‘Socks’, which toys hilariously with Terry Eagleton’s pronouncement on “the inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language…[which is] in a broad sense political”:

I wear my socks odd, queer
bags a couple of feet from my

knees…

…I believe
that’s right – the way you can’t tell
what colour my knickers will be.

The fun of this shouldn’t, however, (and doesn’t) obscure the underlying seriousness of poems which themselves invest in the concept of the “unfinished” and the “political” in language, but are justifiably sceptical as to its force. At the heart of Darcy’s writing is a desperate desire for poetry to measure up, have real value in a world of “parataxis” and “bodies degraded / in mixed media” (‘La rue est rentrée dans la chambre’); for it to function as a means by which, if not to make sense of such a world, at least to challenge it. One of the most likeable and convincing things about her, though, is her irrepressible tendency to self-question, revert to “doubting / [her] own innocence” (‘Terminus’) at every turn.

While ‘Stump’ gives a fair indication of what Darcy isn’t about – the organically whole poem that finishes with a resounding, self-satisfied “Whump” – ‘Panopticon’ and ‘Umheimlich’ explore the inevitable and ultimately necessary “anaesthetic” role of “an aesthetic”. Both are addressed to suicides – those who couldn’t or wouldn’t indulge in the lie of systems, “do the awful maths” – and who chose silence rather than the “the noise” which “circles us” “at the centre of a shrinking globe”. So vigilant is Darcy her vigilance extends to this painful understanding that the very means by which she hopes to rock the boat is the means by which ‘world’ is coped with – systematised – and thus made liveable to her. ‘Panopticon’, incidentally, performs a characteristically brilliant inversion on Bentham’s original application of the term – in Darcy’s hands it’s the watcher who’s imprisoned, not the watched. And from this dinning mélange are culled the poems.

The title of Imaginary Menagerie bespeaks diversity, the mixed bag of the first book in which the neophyte tries his or her hand at this and that without yet knowing where to go or why. In this sense it is impishly misleading, for Darcy has, as Kevin Higgins remarks, a clear sense of “purpose” and the book is utterly coherent. On the other hand, diversity’s the turf these poems tread, from metamorphoses to poly-linguistic stews. There are, in any case, few better collections to carry with you “at the eye of the panopticon”. The mix is daring, and never off the mark.

Miriam Gamble
Miriam Gamble’s first collection is ‘The Squirrels Are Dead’ (Bloodaxe 2010), which won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Imaginary Menagerie by Ailbhe Darcy is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95

for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.

I’ve been trying to think what makes a really short poem good and, at first, there seems no answer – great short poems are as varied as longer ones.  When the Magma team decided on the 10 line limit, we thought of some famous short poems – Blake’s The Sick Rose, Wordsworth’s A slumber did my spirit seal, Herrick’s Upon Julia’s Clothes which Eavan Boland had written brilliantly about in Magma 48.  And we could all think of very short poems in recent collections which we’d enjoyed, though they tended to be exceptions among longer poems or arranged in sequences.

But perhaps there’s someone we can learn from.  I’ve been reading Ezra Pound again and I’m struck how, as with everything else he touched, he used short poems differently.  He used them not only to break with 19^th century romantic style and with regular form, but above all he used them to teach himself to write more intensely.  His first collections have poems of various lengths but in Lustra (1915), the collection where Pound’s own voice really comes through, most of the 76 poems are short, between 2 and 20 lines, and not a sonnet among them.  He had created Imagism in 1912, apparently in the tea room of the British Museum, and his best imagist poems appear in this collection, most famously In a Station of the Metro:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

which had taken him months to cut and cut from a longer poem, and Alba:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

These took courage in a culture without a tradition of very short poems like the haiku and perhaps because of this they are carefully worked:  using Metro in the title to draw attention to the French meaning of “apparition” – “appearance” would be simpler and duller; the sudden use of images from nature (Pound said “the natural object is always an adequate symbol”); the sound values, especially the alliteration in Alba and its varying vowel lengths; and the “crowd”/”bough” near-rhyme and use of “dawn” repeating the title to give finality (“alba” means dawn as well as a poem of separation by the coming of dawn).

Not all the short poems in Lustra are serious.  There are epigrams like The New Cake of Soap:

Lo, how it gleams and glistens in the sun
Like the cheek of a Chesterton.

and parodies like Papyrus:

Spring…
Too long…
Gongula…

(in four words, the remnants of a 3000 year old poem by a young man in springtime missing, or being kept unsatisfied by, his girlfriend); and the mock meditation of Meditatio:

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man in the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.

These are written with a care that gradually became instinctive for Pound:  the alliteration in Soap, the sound repetitions in Papyrus, the latinate vocabulary of Meditatio (and its posh Latin title) tied together with insistent alliteration and contrasting with the Anglo-Saxon “dogs”, “man” and “puzzled” at the ends of lines.  Through all the many pages of the Cantos, the care for sound values that Pound learnt writing the short poems in Lustra never left him.

The best, like all Pound’s finest poetry, seem to be poised between a fierce appetite for the present and an equally fierce regret for the past; for example, Shop Girl:

For a moment she rested against me
Like a swallow half blown to the wall,
And they talk of Swinburne’s women,
And the shepherdess meeting with Guido.
And the harlots of Baudelaire.

Pound remembers erotic descriptions of women by other poets and dismisses them, but for me the poem lives by the sound qualities of the second line: “swallow”/“wall” rhyme visually, but “swallow”/”half blown” echo by sound, and “half” has a strange hiccup effect, perhaps mimicking the poet’s gasp as the girl rests against him.  With “blown” instead of “half blown” the poem would be far less worth reading.

Not all the poems are very short.  The Garden starts similarly to Shop Girl, becomes very different and can be said to have 10 lines.  Unfortunately none of the internet versions print it accurately, in three sections with the third and last lines broken.  But I’ll end with another very short poem.  Pound was the first poet to spend much of his time making versions of poems in other languages – French, Italian, Provençal, Anglo-Saxon among others – and by 1913 was developing an interest in Chinese poetry.  Fan-Piece, For Her Imperial Lord is original, not an imitation – an early attempt at a haiku without being hung up on numbers of syllables:

O fan of white silk,
clear as frost on the grass-blade,
You also are laid aside.

The speaker, it becomes clear, is a discarded concubine.  She is writing this poem on a fan, perhaps hoping her lord will read it if she leaves it lying about and know her regret at being passed over.  Like many great poems, this works by implications we only gradually become aware of:  the silk, the frost and the woman are all white (in Asia as in Europe, beautiful women were white-skinned, artificially if necessary); the silk, the grass and the woman are wild things that have been cultivated, but only the silk and the frost are cold.  In a poem almost wholly of monosyllables, regret is carried by the cadence of “aside” after the full rhyme of “blade” and “laid”.

Would poems like these win a competition?  They would deserve to, but judges’ reluctance to award prizes to very short poems is likely to continue.  Still, in Magma’s short poem competition, judged by five recent editors, poems of this kind of intensity, with sound values that help create the poem’s meaning, are likely to stand a good chance.

The editors for Magma 53 are both poets who’ve also been practising musicians: Rob played in an indie pop band for years, while Kona dipped into not one but two Music Degrees (in composition and violin respectively), and continues to write and perform music. How have our varying musical backgrounds affected our writing? What is it that makes us choose to listen to music instead of picking up a poetry book, or vice versa? Questions like these have led us to our Magma 53 theme of Music: The Universal Language.

Does language have its own music? Of course it does; “word-music” is what permits an English speaker to distinguish spoken Chinese from spoken Gaelic without understanding the meaning of either. The poet’s skilful application of word-music is one of the things that distinguishes poetry from workaday prose – and, arguably, makes poetry so much more difficult to translate.

Music may be “the universal language of mankind,” as Longfellow said, but it takes time to learn a complex language; Handel, John Coltrane, The Clash and Steve Reich have something in common, but not all ears will find it easy to detect. Music in poetry comes in equally diverse guises. Compare the full-on effects of As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow strung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

with this deceptively casual diction from Dean Young’s Blue Limbo (from Primitive Mentor, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008):

I couldn’t tell the snowflake that foretells
my death from the other lunkhead flakes
that couldn’t scare a chicken, dandruffy
weak blips in the big what huh…

For Magma 53, we’d like to see poems which are about music or inspired by music. We’d also be glad of poems that deploy word-music with brio, or which aspire in some other way to the condition of music. Can poetry do something that music cannot? If so, show us how!

Rob A. Mackenzie and Kona Macphee, Editors, Magma 53

The deadline is 29 February 2012. Off-theme poems will also be considered. Please see the Contributions page for details of how to submit your poems.

In June this year, in celebration of 50 issues of Magma Poetry magazine, and in anticipation of more to come, Magma Poetry launched a new competition.

The entry period for both the Judge’s Prize for poems of up to 80 lines, and the Magma Editors’ Prize for poems of up to 10 lines is NOW OPEN and runs until end November.

All the information about both contests as well as how to enter online or by post, plus the full Rules can be found here

Good luck!