Labours of love……….and a Polished gem [12] Martin Malone

Five years ago, or thereabouts, I had no real idea that poetry magazines existed….or at the most, the kind of awareness you might have of magazine for computer buffs, or amateur photographers, or rockclimbers, or for people who breed whippets, or walk around the countryside with broken up-and-over shotguns. I certainly had no idea just how many there were, and how important they were in the lives of people who wrote poems, and with whom I gradually became friends.

Gradually, it has been borne in on me, not least via my addiction to Facebook, that for so many poets out there, submitting to, and being accepted by, these journals and magazines is a pretty big deal. I’m embarassed to recall that the first poems of mine to appear in one of these magazines, was in The North. Embarassed, because I didn’t formally submit them. I’d written one of them very…