Kathy Pimlott

March 2025

​

Have retired from my day job, which, even though latterly, was only theoretically one day a week, took up a large amount of my thinking and gave me an all-pervasive feeling of guilt – that I wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t doing it well enough – that I’d stopped caring. I feel lighter already (and poorer), but I’ve also lost one of the main ways I defined myself. So now I’m looking to the always itchy definition of ‘poet’ to fill that gap.

What does that mean? Reading more, writing more, getting my act together. Being serious about it. Post-publication is typically a fallow time for many poets and certainly so for me. Now I’m looking to push myself back into writing with all the strategies I know – it doesn’t mean I’m writing well, but I am writing and, being a Pollyanna, I believe I will write better. I’m determined to make proper headway on the pile of books that’s been sitting there since the middle of last year. No more afternoon tv for me – no sir.

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. And we do want to be able to recognise the link to the theme without the additional explanations in the covering notes. 

It’s so interesting to be on the other side of the submission process (and of Submittable), to see the differences in approach to submitting from different countries. My main takeaway for my own submission practice is what you would think would be obvious but clearly isn’t – read the instructions, the call, especially if there’s a theme. Don’t rely on a long cover letter explaining how your poems fit the theme – this won’t be available to readers of the magazine – let your poems speak for themselves. Oh, and a short biog is up to 50 words – and yes, you can’t convey your complex, fascinating life in that or ten times that but you can in your poems. Leave out your manifesto.

I’m reading
The Apocalyptic Landscape ed. Steve Ely (Valley Press).