University of Warwick English undergraduate Alex Freer started his own online poetry magazine just six months ago and is now ready to publish his first printed anthology.

Alex set up the magazine, Angelic Dynamo, after meeting his co-editor John Clegg at a poetry reading in Manchester. The pair decided to start a website which allowed budding poets from all over the world to submit their work.

Three poems are displayed on the website each week and readers vote for the one they like the most. The winning poems are then published in the online poetry magazine and will now also be considered for the annual printed version.

Alex secured funding for his project from the Lord Rootes Memorial Fund, a fund set up to encourage student enterprise at the University of Warwick.

He said: “Traditionally a small number of editors have decided what kind of poetry gets published. I wanted to experiment to see if we could create a more democratic model. The poems included in Angelic Dynamo have been chosen by the readers.”

The print magazine will be sold on campus at the University of Warwick, Durham University and selected bookshops in Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester.

Alex said: “We are only charging enough to cover the production costs of the magazine. We are hoping the print version will serve as a ‘best of’ annual. The website has been quite successful so far and a lot of the submissions we have are from students, typically from English and American university towns.”

Alex is also planning to use some of the Lord Rootes funding to conduct research into the concept of poetry as democracy.

He said: “What we will have, hopefully, will be an editorship like no other, and are looking for the relationship between this public editor and the poetry it selects.”

The first issue of the printed magazine will be available this week, to find out more, visit www.angelicdynamo.com

Notes to editors
For more information contact Kelly Parkes-Harrison, Communications Officer, 02476 150483, 07824 540863