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Louise Brooks.
No connection to the post, just a fascinating image! |
Magma Poetry Magazine has a different editor for every issue, and is well worth checking out. There are two prizes and a few weeks to the deadline...
Magma Judge’s Prize
For a poem of 11 to 80 lines. All poem entries of 11 to 80 lines
will be entered for the Judge’s Prize which this year will be judged by
award-winning poet Gillian Clarke. First Prize £500, Second £200, Third £100
Magma Editors’ Prize
This celebrates the
short poem and is open to poems of up to 10
lines. First prize £500, Second £200, Plus 10 Special Mentions £10 each. All 15 winners will have their poems published
in our Spring Issue 2013 and be invited to read alongside Gillian
Clarke at Magma’s prize-giving event early next year.
Competition Entry Period: 16 October 2012 to 16 December 2012
Your poem(s) will need to be
attached in a Word document. Once you have completed the entry form
and attached your poems you will be directed to make your secure online
payment via PayPal or by credit card. Click here to complete
online entry form Entries are also welcome by post until 16 December
Postal entry forms can be downloaded
here.
Fees: £5 per poem or £15 for four poems
Full Rules for the Competition are found
here.
Some words from the judge:
'I will read the poems in the shortening days, light fading as it
does this November afternoon until I must switch on the light to
continue. As always, the poems will drift into three piles on the
table: Yes, No, and Maybe. The ‘No’s form by far the biggest pile.
‘Maybe’ makes the medium pile. A quiet ‘maybe’ can sometimes move at
subsequent readings to the ‘yes’ pile, and even win. A ‘no’ never wins.
In the ‘yes’ pile, smallest of all, every poem rings true and sings
with a distinct voice. Any one of them might win. The ‘no’ category is
the easiest to decide. Something in the language from the very first
line fails to convince, the use of a cliché, an archaism, a false note,
an over-elaboration, an abstraction, is the instant decider. It is
often clear that this is the first poem the author has ever written.
Sometimes, possessed by powerful emotion, the writer imagines that is
enough. However sad the autobiography or passionate the love, a poem
without the music and truth of a real poet’s voice is strangely
un-moving. It is not its author’s pain or passion that moves us, but
the language that carries it, the cadence. We are moved by the way
language itself moves.
I was recently called upon to respond briefly to a comparison
between the poetry of Wilfred Owen and a new anthology of verse by
soldiers and their families written today. Although I believe that we
all have something to say, and that poetry is for everyone, I must
admit the verse in the anthology was rarely close to being poetry.
Sincerity is not enough. Although the soldiers’ pain was real, not a
line remained to sing in the mind. Owen’s words, read once, are
unforgettable almost a century after he wrote them. He was to die days
before the war ended, but it is not his tragedy that endures but his
poetry. Like soldiers today, his experience of war was real and raw,
but his rage, his pain, his pity and his love live in the voice of his
poetry.
In a competition judge’s ‘yes’ pile are poems with that special
quality, the poet’s ‘voice’. They ring true and the reader is at once
convinced. It’s like taste, where sweet, savoury, salt or sour create
an instant, physical response. You don’t have to be a poet to recognise
it. Your mind knows it for the real thing, and will not let it go.'
