Tag: Agenda

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On poetry magazines: Stand, Agenda, The Dark Horse

This is the second in my mini-series on UK & Irish poetry magazines. The three featured today are all long-standing publications.

Stand magazine

Stand started up in 1954, when, according to the website,  “Jon Silkin used his £5 redundancy money, received after trying to organise some of his fellow manual workers, to found a magazine which would ‘stand’ against injustice and oppression, and ‘stand’ for the role that the arts, poetry and fiction in particular, could and should play in that fight.”

What a brilliant story. Jon Silkin died in 1997 and the magazine has had a number of editors over the years, and a long association with the University of Leeds that continues to this day. John Whale is the current managing editor, and each edition seems to include a nice mix of both well-established and newer poets. It runs to around 150 pages and the landscape layout, while interesting, offers I suspect some challenges. The name of every contributor since 1999 appears on the website!

Agenda magazine

Another small magazine with a big reputation is Agenda, founded by William Cookson in 1959, with a big input from Ezra Pound, no less. Cookson’s recollection of how the journal came into being appears on the website, and is a fascinating read. I particularly liked the detail that Pound thought the fifth issue was ‘particularly boring’ and he suggested Cookson should stop, “but he soon relented, sending £5 towards the printer’s bill to help me to continue, writing, ’Oke Hay / Fluctuat. But get some GUTS into the next issue, and something that isn’t watered down E.P.'” Priceless.

The current editor Patricia McCarthy does much to promote young poets in the ‘broadsheet’ section, and the magazine (again more of a book really, at 160 pages) is a blend of poetry, reviews and editorial (and GUTS of course). Most issues are themed, and its ‘retrospectives’ are particularly interesting.

The Dark Horse journal

And finally for now, The Dark Horse. This is a journal I’ve been aware of for a while but only recently sent for a copy. Billing itself as ‘Scotland’s Transatlantic Poetry Magazine’, it clearly has gravitas –  there is work in this recent issue by heavyweights including Michael Longley and Dana Gioia.  I also really enjoyed the essays, including a harrowing tale of ‘cancel culture’ by Jenny Lindsay and an extract from Hamish Whyte’s memoir of his thirty-year friendship with Edwin Morgan.

The Dark Horse was founded in 1995 by Gerry Cambridge, who is still its editor, and clearly also the driving force behind its design and impressive production values. Incidentally he wrote this interesting piece entitled Why we do it – on editing a poetry magazine.

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A birthday post and on magazines

poetry wall

Ooh. Lots of interesting discussion & comment around my last post. Thank you to everyone who engaged! (Feels a bit of a sham/shame to use that 21st century term but you know what I mean: commented, shared, liked/disliked etc).

Meanwhile, on another blog (when I update it that is) I’m telling the story of our new sheds. Yes, plural! I’m talking about the replacement structure for two sheds, a tool shed and and ‘summerhouse’ which we inherited, and loved, but which ultimately wasn’t really doing the job we needed of it. To cut a long story short, the old tool shed and summerhouse have been relocated 150 yards up to the communal garden, and they look perfectly at home up there. Meanwhile to replace them we’ve had built for us a wooden structure which incorporates two ‘rooms’ – a tool shed (yeah OK a ‘mancave’) and a potting shed/half greenhouse/she-shed. It’s exciting, but it’s more for garden stuff than anything else.

I can’t rival anything like Abegail Morley’s iconic Poetry Shed, alas, BUT I couldn’t help but insert a poetry element: a wall of poems! I’ve often wailed about the number of poetry magazines I have and how they take up an inordinate amount of space on the bookshelves. SO how about tearing out a bunch of poems from various mags, and use them to paper a wall in the ‘pottery’ (as we’re calling it – don’t ask!)? First of all I thought I’d look for ‘garden’ or outdoor-related poems. But it expanded to other topics too – basically poems I just liked and wanted to be able to read and enjoy anytime I’m pottering in my pottery! Also, we do have two very small grandchildren, and part of my vision is to welcome them into the pottery as they get older, to do some gardening fun and get them interested in gardening (the older one is already getting into it) – so how about poetry too??

So out came the mags – I started with the earliest and worked from there – so actually ended up with a lot of poems from 2010 – 2017 and maybe not many more recent, but hey. I took out all the Rattles, Agendas, Proles, Frogmore Papers, Poetry Reviews, Poetry, Rialtos, Tears in the Fence, Obsessed with Pipework and so forth, got out a sharp knife and started excising…

And a funny thing happened. (I should use that as the title for this post, in true Clickbait style!) I read. And read, and realised I’d either not  read these magazines properly or it was so long ago I’d forgotten all the great poems. I took several days over it, but really enjoyed the process, because I discovered/rediscovered some wonderful poems. (In the comments on my last post, Claire Booker noted that many poets don’t actually read the magazines in which their poems appear, or even subscribe to... and I had a twinge of guilt when I read that. I thought I had read these magazines but clearly a cursory lookie didn’t really cut it.)

So I ended up with more poems than I needed to paper the wall. Plus a few air bubbles that I tried to ‘mend’, some more successfully than others. I was careful to place poems with ‘swearage’ (a term I’ve learned from a poet friend – although autocorrect wants to change it to ‘sewerage’ – how appropriate!) further up the wall so that four-year-olds don’t read it and do the classic “nana what does X$%!@ mean?” The photo shows it in progress, I’ve since finished but need to varnish the wall to protect it a bit from the vagaries of shed-dom (damp, condensation etc). I may be putting a mirror on the wall, so I tried to place my faves on the outer fringes so they’re not hidden. A confession: I included 3 of my own poems, although more for fun – I like the idea of someone who maybe doesn’t know I write poetry ‘happening’ on them – ha ha.

PS:  Today is my birthday. In the 1980s I would have bought you all a cream cake. Honestly. Today I just say I hope you have a lovely, lovely day, and let’s all go outside, take a deep breath, and thank whoever or whatever you’d like for being alive. XX

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New – List of UK poetry magazine submission windows

window at chichester station

It’s been a while since I updated my last year’s post on this topic and I decided it was worth starting from scratch, as a few web addresses and/or submissions policies had changed, plus it’s given me a chance to review them all. As a result I’ve now got a list of 48 UK (well, one or two Europe/non-UK) poetry journals (some also include fiction, reviews, artwork etc in their pages, but I’ve tried to focus on poetry-led publications.) The list includes:

  • a link to their poetry submissions page
  • regular windows/ dates when you can submit, and/or next ‘open window’ (where available). I’ve also included a couple of mags that I’ve mentioned before but that now appear to be closed.
  • how many poems to send
  • whether they accept simultaneous submissions
  • submissions method (eg email, Submittable, post)
  • notes of anything unusual, eg no responses sent

You still need to visit the submissions pages as some of them are VERY long and specific!

Caveat

There’s an element of recommendation here; it’s not a comprehensive list of magazines. The majority of them I’ve either read, submitted to, or both. There are a few that have been recommended, and which look good. I’m always happy to hear of others – I’m sure there are tons more, please feel free to tell us in the comments if you want to mention any – and if it’s a publication I’d consider submitting to myself then I’ll add it to the list when I update it.

Beat ‘overwhelm’ with a system that suits you

This may look like a daunting list. More and more magazines have submissions windows, and some give little notice of openings, so you may need to follow them on social media or by email in order to be ‘in the know’. As I’m sure I’ve said before, I recommend having a system for keeping track of submissions – I use a good old-fashioned spreadsheets but there are other tools, some more user-friendly than others.

Submitting to magazines: workshop in Lewes, East Sussex

One more thing I’d like to mention – if you’re within travelling distance of Lewes, there’s a workshop coming up called ‘Poetry Submissions Without Tears’ being led by Janet Sutherland and Maria Jastrzębska. They say it’s a ‘hands-on workshop for beginning and more experienced poets on submitting to poetry magazines and anthologies’. It’s on October 21st and full details are here. Janet and Maria are experienced poets who walk the talk, as well as being all-round nice and generous people, so if you’re even slightly unsure about the whole submissions process then this is for you.

List of UK poetry magazines and their submissions windows, etc

There are a few European (non-UK) journals on the list, mainly because they seem to take poems from UK poets, or they just happen to be on my radar.

I’ve done the complete list as a free PDF download. Here are some example listings:

The North – currently open, but closing September 1st. Submit up to 6 poems by post only (so be quick!). No stated policy on simultaneous submissions.

Agenda – currently open, but could close any time. Submit up to 5 poems, by email only. No stated policy on simultaneous submissions.

The Rialto – submit any time, via Submittable or by post. Send up to 5 poems. Simultaneous submissions – OK.

Ink, Sweat & Tears – recently moved to submissions windows – the next opens 2nd October. Send 4 – 6 poems (‘no more, no less’) by email only. No simultaneous submissions.

Get the full list

I’ve created this as a spreadsheet and saved it as a PDF with live links, which I hope makes it easier to work from. It’s also a lot less work for me than to reproduce the whole list on a blog post! I’d be happy to share it with you – please email me if you’d like a copy (I’d rather you didn’t just ask in the comments as that’s harder for me to monitor. Thanks!)