A poetry archive stays readable only if the texts inside it share a shape. What follows is not a list of prohibitions but a handful of habits we have agreed on so that more than a hundred thousand poems can stand side by side.
Title
Write the title the way you would write any sentence: neither all caps nor all lower case. Capitalise Each Word — just like this. Capitals read as shouting, and a poem already has its own voice.
The voice of the text
Do not set the body of the poem in capitals either. Emphasis comes from the line, not from letter size.
No need to sign
Do not put your name or the title inside the poem, and do not add a date at the end. The archive adds all of that itself — repeat the title and readers see the same name twice.
The lines
Press Enter at the end of a line to start the next one; do not separate lines with "/", "---" or "…". Leave no space before the poem, and a single blank line between stanzas is enough.
Offline
A poem carries no web addresses; any links are stripped when it is saved.
No markup
Copying from an editor can drag HTML tags along with the text. A poem is stored as plain text: the tags are stripped when it is saved and the lines themselves are left exactly as they are.
Poems outside these rules
Poems outside this pattern are neither deleted nor published straight away: they wait for an editor, and appear on the site once approved.
A short reminder
- Capitalise Each Word in the title; avoid all caps and all lower case.
- Do not write the whole poem in capitals.
- Do not put the title or the poet's name in the text, and do not add a date at the end.
- Separate lines with Enter; do not use marks like "/", "---" or "…".
- Leave a single blank line between stanzas.
- Do not add links; any you enter are stripped.
- Don't paste HTML tags; a poem is stored as plain text.
To add your poem, use the My poems screen in your member area.