Poetrix

Special note: Sadly, Issue 40 will be our last issue. The closing date for submission to this issue will be 28 February 2013. All women poets welcome to submit - see our usual guidelines.

Poetrix began in 1992 when our writing group, Western Women Writers, decided to start a poetry magazine just for women poets. It was at a time when the NSW Poets’ Union had completed a survey showing that women were still not being published as much as men, and there was evidence that male poetry editors were being discriminatory in their selections – one was quoted as saying he wasn’t interested in publishing “domestic suburban vignettes”. Well, we were! And we were also interested in all the other kinds of poems women wrote that never seemed to see the light of day.

Many in our group had worked on their own successful self-publishing projects, from poetry collections to picture books. We worked out a format and came up with a name for the magazine (a female flier used to be called an aviatrix, so we thought a female poet might well be a poetrix). On the covers of our first ten issues, we featured females who had excelled in what was often considered “male pursuits”. These included an astronaut, an aviatrix, a racing car driver and a sculptor.

We also had the famous pink cover – who said pink was a wussy colour?
Issues 11-20 have had a variety of bright colours and have featured lines from poems by well-known Australian women poets. Other changes have included accepting poems from women poets in New Zealand and, just for Issue 20, increasing to 44 pages.

From the beginning, we have been very aware of finances. We cooked for lunches, book launches and parties to “seed” Poetrix, and have kept the magazine thrifty by sticking with serviceable covers and collating and hand binding each issue by ourselves. With the GST we had to increase our prices slightly, but we don’t want to lose readers by putting our prices up to unreasonable levels just so we can have a glossy cover. After all, it’s the contents that count!

If you would like to subscribe to Poetrix, you would be supporting a vital, exciting magazine. Our readers often write to us, saying how much they enjoy the selection of poems (while we do publish poems we think male editors would refuse because of subject matter, we also look for poems about every kind of experience).

You can write to us at P.O. Box 532, Altona North Vic 3025, Australia. See our guidelines for further information (they will come up either as a page or in Word, or both!).