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Poetry Submissions
Poetry submissions to the magazine.
Read more about our competitions and enter here
"What news on the Rialto?"
Blogs, featured poems, news and events, issues, and submission calls.
IN THE RIALTO
An undesirable garden by Janet Rogerson
Most people are used to cement being delivered in ready-mix lorries, but it’s possible to mix your own. I spent a certain amount of time staring at cement mixers as a child, so, although one of our readers didn’t get the opening three lines, I got them entirely.
The Seagull now eating my sandwich by Emily Wills
I’m usually wary of poems where the title runs straight into the first line, but this works, enlarging the immediacy of the ‘NOW’, the shock of the event. There’s such a lot going on in this poem (and here’s one of the whys of my liking poetry, its ability to layer so much together in short spaces).
Quiet road home by Dean Parkin
This is an intense poem, much bigger than it looks, very neatly bracketed by its opening, ‘We haven’t spoken for miles’ and closing ‘It’s the talking I miss’. The whole content, the ‘where exactly is this relationship at?’
Rialto 84 Editorial: Aldeburgh, and some poems in the magazine
What you left out by Laura Scott
I’ve been pre-occupied recently with the gap between my experience of poetry and what I perceive (partly through the unwillingness of readers to buy poetry) to be most people’s experience of it.
Lorraine Mariner Poetry Dreams
News
The Rialto Newsletter, February 2020
93 The Rialto No.93 is out in the world. Storm Ciara is bustling about making working in the garden unattractive, so here I am sat down to celebrate the new issue. It is actually just a rather wet and windy day here but the weather forecasters seem to have been...
Rialto news – November/December 2019
Dodo Provocateur Anita Pati’s prize winner pamphlet, which we published in the first week in September, had it’s London launch on September 24th at The Poet an aptly chosen pub in Baring Street (N1 3DS). I put the post code in because I must have been one of the last...
The Rialto Pamphlet Competition Result
The following, in no particular order, are the shortlisted poets and pamphlets William Stephenson ‘The Butterfly Factory’ Rachael Matthews ‘Naming Boats’ Anita Pati ‘Dodo Provocateur’ Kat Dixon ‘Letters to Ex-Lovers I Will Never Send’ Patrick Davidson Roberts ‘The...
BLOGS
Kate Wakeling on Writing
It’s taken me ages to find my way with writing, to feel that I was allowed, internally, to get on with it. From there, it’s been a brilliant and slightly terrifying experience to put a first pamphlet together, and I’ve maybe not yet quite caught up with the idea of it...
What are they looking for?
Shall I let you into a secret? Despite writing poetry seriously since 2010, despite my MA in Creative Writing and despite running a poetry magazine since 2012, I often think I have no idea what I’m doing. Sometimes it’s true. The nagging suspicion that I’m winging it...
The Tempest at the Hippodrome
If you can get to Great Yarmouth this week please do so and go to the Hippodrome. They've got the most astonishing production of The Tempest that I've ever seen. The Hippodome is an old indoor circus space, it's a bit like being inside a work by Peter Blake. When you...
Laura Scott goes to Greece
My Rialto pamphlet won the Michael Marks prize, and part of the prize is that you get to go to Greece for two weeks to be the poet in residence for Harvard University’s Hellenic summer school. I think if someone were to ask me what was the best single thing about this experience, I would say that it showed me how to write about big things without fear.
‘Lessons from Press Gang and other submissions’
Rishi Dastidar and I are working closely with The Rialto editor Michael Mackmin on a programme designed to teach us about the process and philosophy of poetry editing…
The Cab Rank Principle
I’ve been thinking about the law over the last couple of weeks. Not that I’m in any trouble I hasten to add – apart from the usual one that I’m sure some of you have also been quizzed on by other members of the family…
About the rialto
WELCOME
Welcome to the website for The Rialto, where you can find out who we are and what we do, read poems from the magazine, and connect up with our social media pages. You can buy subscriptions, single copies, pamphlets and books. You can learn how to submit your poetry for possible publication, and you can read articles and blogs by the editors, poets and guest writers.
The Rialto magazine is edited by Michael Mackmin working with Rishi Dastidar, Edward Doegar, Will Harris and Degna Stone, who are graduates of our Editor Development Programme.
We’d like to say thank you to our loyal subscribers and to the Arts Council of England whose support and encouragement over years have made possible The Rialto. We invite you, reader, to join the team: help make poetry happen by subscribing now.
THE MAGAZINE
The founding editors, Michael among them, believed in a ‘Republic of Poetry’, an inclusive and diverse world of poetry, one that was open to experiment in form and content. We strive to keep this vision alive.
The magazine appears three times a year and each issue, with its spacious A4 pages, has fifty or so poems, an editorial and occasional, commissioned, prose pieces. Most of the space is occupied by the best new poems we can find, all wrapped up in our famously vibrant beautiful covers.
The Rialto has been called ‘Simply the best’ by Carol Ann Duffy and ‘A terrific magazine’ by Seamus Heaney.
BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS
At the start of the new millennium The Rialto published a short run of first collections. In 2005 we turned our energy to publishing pamphlets and began our Bridge Pamphlets list. These have so far been by poets who we’ve asked to submit work. We also run a poetry pamphlet competition which has become a fixture of how we discover new work. Oh, and we haven’t forgotten about first collections – we launched Dean Parkin’s The Swan Machine at last autumn’s Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, and published Matt Howard’s award winning Gall in 2018.
Laura Scott’s pamphlet What I Saw won the Michael Marks Award in 2014, and several of our first collections are winners of major awards.
“The Rialto is the poetry magazine to read – publishing poems that are formally inventive and alive to the ‘here and now’ of the world, but always with a commitment to the humane and compassionate qualities I believe the best poetry has. It has led the way in nurturing new talent.”
“The magazine is consistently one of, if not the best spotter of emerging talent in the UK – as a writer you know that you have arrived if one of your poems goes in. It’s more than an imprimatur of quality – it’s a rite of passage.”
