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Oxford Poetry is now edited by Lavinia Singer and Aime Williams.
OP XIII.2, in memoriam Mick Imlah, is now sold out.
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What is Oxford Poetry ?
Oxford Poetry is over 100 years old. It is probably the oldest dedicated poetry magazine in the world today.
The magazine was started in 1910 by Oxford undergraduates and published by Basil Blackwell. Previous editors have included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Kingsley Amis, Geoffrey Hill, John Fuller, John Lanchester and Robert Macfarlane. In the 1980s, Mick Imlah, Nicholas Jenkins and Bernard O'Donoghue revived it as a more outward-looking journal - no longer restricted to publishing student poetry but maintaining a connection with the university.
The list of contributors throughout its history is as impressive as it is diverse. In recent years readers would have come across poems by Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion, Mario Petrucci, Wendy Cope, George Szirtes, Carol Ann Duffy, David Constantine and Glyn Maxwell.
Find out more about the magazine’s history or browse through the selection of online texts.
Read about how to submit work or subscribe.
Poetry Press
"These often messy lives were visionary, in terms of forging a counter-poetics to attenuated and restrictive doldrums. It’s like Ezra Pound. You can’t get around the Cantos—infuriated as you might feel at times—and why would you want to? You can go beyond him, possibly, or through him." Anne Waldman in conversation with Frances Richard • Bomb
"Virtue is never transmitted. When I journeyed across America, 15 years ago, making a nuisance of myself with the figures of my early reading, Ginsberg, Corso, Burroughs, I missed Gary Snyder. Thanksgiving was approaching and he didn’t want to disturb a family gathering. The writers I met, apart from Burroughs in his red clapboard Kansas bungalow, were in rooms in cities. They had answered too many questions, spent too many years in the echo chamber of old recordings. Snyder’s engagement was much more direct." Iain Sinclair on Gary Snyder • LRB
"Poem by poem, this is to say, what RF Langley presents are quite singular linguistic worlds in which quite different ways emerge of answering the poet’s abiding questions." David Herd • Edinburgh Review
"The problem, for Berlant, is the suburban fantasy 'of the endless weekend,' the 'consumer’s happy circulation in familiarity,' and the 'privilege of being bored with life' ... As a reading of Ashbery this might be right, but as an account of Marx, it isn’t. For Marx, of course, the problem is the privilege of private property, not the 'privilege of being bored.'" Todd Cronan on affect • Nonsite
"This volume’s title, like that of his earlier Adaptations (2006), makes clear that a poem of Rilke’s or Pushkin’s is for Mahon a resource to be mined by a later poet, with which to build another poem without worrying about the fallacy of perfect translation." George Potts on Derek Mahon • Literateur
"A translation is an x-ray, not a xerox. A poet translator is a xenophiliac." Willis Barnstone • Poets.org
"Talking too much about yourself is like wearing your clothes inside out." Anna Kamienksa, trans. Clare Cavanagh • Poetry
from ThePage
"One of the best small magazines in the country" Tom Paulin "Glad to be in such good company" Seamus Heaney