Tuesday, November 04, 2008

New Magma Website and Blog

The new Magma website has been launched. You may know that Magma is one of the best literary magazines in the UK, one of the few magazines that’s worth subscribing to. It publishes terrific poetry alongside stimulating prose pieces, and is (genuinely) always open to talented unknown writers as well as famous ones (In the interests of transparency, I am an associate editor with Magma, but I was a subscriber before that came about). Buy a copy to check it out if you haven’t read it before – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. You can also read a small selection of poems and articles from the latest issue at the website.

Part of the website includes a new blog. There will be three main writers – Mark McGuinness, who, in addition to being a Magma editor, also writes the Lateral Action blog for creative professionals (interesting even if you’re not a ‘professional’), Jacqueline Saphra, an excellent poet (winner of the Ledbury Poetry prize 2007 and author of new pamphlet, Rock’n’Roll Mamma, published by Flarestack), and… me.

The blog will bring news from the magazine but will also cover many other poetry-related issues and controversies. We’ll have guest writers on a variety of topics. It will be terrific, I promise you. In other words, I hope you’ll click those buttons at the Magma blog and subscribe either to the RSS feed or to the email update notification.

I’d be very grateful if those of you who have blogs and websites could consider adding it to your links. We’ve kicked off with some Magma news, to get things moving.