Kathy Pimlott

April 2025

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At the time of writing I and my fellow editors of Magma issue 92, Paul Stephenson and Danne Jobin,  have read over 2000 poems and are now engaged in the very difficult task of fining the list of possibles down to 50 or 60. This means letting go of many excellent poems in order to strike a balance. The theme is 'Ownership' - but we don't want a magazine full of poems about owning or, more often, not owning a house - a clear preoccupation.  Then there's the admin - checking poems are still available, extracting biographies, getting everything together for typesetting, including ordering, etc etc. The process has made me more understanding of the delays in hearing back from editors of poetry magazines - the time and effort required. I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product.

Next on the agenda is a collaborative project, Poetry Plays with the arts magazine Pomegranate, the author Louis de Bernières, Théâtre Volière and poets Jill Abram, Ellen McAteer, Clarissa Aykroyd and Mary Mulholland, which will be ​staged at London's Cockpit Theatre in early May. My small role is to write a poem in the voice of spoons. I will admit that it's all a bit of a mystery to me but something new, why not?

I’m reading
The Apocalyptic Landscape ed. Steve Ely (Valley Press) and Rachel Spence's Daughter of the Sun (The Emma Press).