Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

This is a token list of internet magazines that are primarily focused on poetry or the new variant poetries found on the web. If you have a website you think may fit into this (non)category please email a link to andyj@noplace.screaming.net

BeeHive Hypertext/Hypermedia Journal Volume 5 : Issue 1 (quarterly, ISSN: 1528-8102)

http://beehive.temporalimage.com/bee_core

"BeeHive debuted on the World Wide Web in May of 1998. The intent of the Journal is to provide a venue for creative literary content that explores the potential of network-based creativity. The BeeHive collection is eclectic - made up of original fiction, poetry and critical theory titles, hypermedia works, visual poetry and other forms of creative network practice. Some work takes full advantage of applied technology and can only exist on the web, while other work is presented as pure writing. BeeHive is committed to publishing works that demonstrate the wide variety of styles, forms and interests pursued by online authors and artists."  In this hive creative bees find a haven for online art - explore this _][ad][Dressed in a Skin C.ode_ by Mez - subtle uses of JavaScript and Flash combine with well-crafted graphics and haunting text to make yr monitor into an extension of yr empathic capabilities. Inspiring stuff.

Great Works Peter Philpot

http://www.greatworks.org.uk

"Great Works is a site for innovative writing: modernist, postmodernist, archaic. Great Works carries on the name and traditions of a publishing venture between 1973 and 1979. Great Works published seven issues of a magazine, and a small number of books, aiming at surprise, innovation and delight in writing, especially poetry, hovering on that unstable cusp between modernism and postmodernism. greatworks.org.uk carries on this idea. It publishes on the Web material sent in and chosen by its editor, to give a deliberately transitory heterogeneous assemblage. It is a site in constant change, rather than a series of separate magazine-type issues." This is an easy to use site in terms of navigation, though the font size on Richard Makin's Remoire was so small that even with browser adjustments I could not read the bits in italic. I don't have poor eyesight, but I gave up trying to read the text. Good links page though. The quote below isn't a hyperlink, though it easily could be. It's by Kelvin Corcoran, from a poem called MacSweeney (happily, the font size means you can read it on the screen, rather than have to paste it into Word for reconfiguration):

Here's a jar of honey for you;
we stand the beehives in the fields of borage,
the pollen's rich, the yields are high
from the bright blue flowers you knew.

Mudlark An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics William Slaughter (ISSN 1081-3500)

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark

Mudlark is very cleanly designed, it's easy to navigate and the page layouts, font types and sizes and the array of hyperlinks make for an effortless internet literary experience. There are almost no graphics, so download times are fast. It feels like a site that is updated frequently, that knows its search protocols, the dos and don'ts of paperless etiquette. The 'How to Mudlark' pages puts it well - "We hope that you will take us up on the "slow read" part of our motto: "Fast load, slow read...." To keep our "fast load" promise, we have paid our "passionate attention" (Auden) to words not images. The poem's the thing." They continue, "MUDLARK publishes in three formats: "issues" of MUDLARK are the electronic equivalent of print chapbooks; "posters" are the electronic equivalent of print broadsides; and "flash" poems are poems that have news in them, poems that feel like current events." Calling these things 'flash' poems is a little confusing, as they aren't. The content is mostly American (USA) and the feel is of a university based culture that values university based culture. I'm not sure if they publish non-academics, though they are probably aware that such people exist.

Shampoo poetry magazine Del Ray Cross (ISSN 1081-3500)

http://www.shampoopoetry.com

"Shampoo is an online magazine that showcases darn-good poetry. It comes to you from somewhere in the San Francisco fog and is updated at the whim of its editor. New issues tend to be completed every couple of months or so, but the overly curious can check the Sneaky Previoos of upcoming issues that are always viewable works in progress."  It is user friendly in every sense - the layouts are well designed for screen, the content is divided into issues of the magazine, plus there is a 'Shampoo stars' page which lists the contributors alphabetically by name with links to their poems. Simple and effective, you can view this with the oldest browser.

I miss sweeping and the broom’s thick handle.
But sometimes I’m allowed out into the wintry yard
in a coat I like. The sleeves are too long.
My only burden now is the unbearable way
the air cools my empty hands. This is work, they tell me.

                                         Lisa Beskin from Prozac

Shampoo is my favourite out of this sample of internet based literary and hypermedia magazines (Beehive is a close second though).