The Poetry Library - An Invitation

We'd like your help

We Want to Build the Best Poetry Resource on the Internet — and We’d Like Your Help

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Something has been taking shape on our website, and this week it crossed a threshold worth telling you about.

The Learn section at Ink & Ribbon Press — what we’ve started calling The Poetry Library — now contains seventy essays, guides, close readings, reviews, and lists covering poetry from almost every angle we could think of. How to read it. Who shaped it. How individual poems work, line by line. How to write a manuscript, where to send it, what the field actually looks like from the inside. The history of the sonnet. Mary Oliver. Ocean Vuong. The Waste Land, explained without defeating you. What makes a great ending.

Seventy pieces. Grown steadily, without much announcement, over the past year.

This week we formalized it’s home: inkandribbon.org/learn.

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The ambition, plainly stated

We want The Poetry Library to become the best resource for poetry education, criticism, and craft on the internet. Not one of the best. The best.

That is not a modest goal, and we know it. But we think it’s the right one. There is no single place online that does all of this well — that treats readers and students and working poets as intelligent adults, that offers genuine criticism alongside clear explainers, that covers the tradition and the living in the same breath, without a paywall, without advertising, without the particular flattening that happens when a site tries to please everyone at once.

We are a nonprofit press with a specific editorial sensibility. That is, for this purpose, an advantage. We are not trying to rank for everything — we are trying to be genuinely useful to people who care about poetry. Those are different projects, and we think ours is the more achievable one.

The library currently draws around 6,000 visits per month, and that number is growing. But seventy pieces, however good, is not a destination. A destination requires depth, range, and regularity — new thinking arriving often enough that a reader has a reason to return. That is what we are building toward, and it is why we are writing to you today.

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What the library covers

The library is organized into seven sections, each a distinct kind of writing:

Poets & Traditions — Introductions to the major figures and the movements that shaped them. From the Romantics through the modernists to the poets working right now. Currently 24 essays.

Close Reading — Individual poems taken apart line by line. Frost, Dickinson, Poe, Eliot, Angelou, Clifton, Thomas, Shakespeare, and more. Not summaries — readings. Currently 13 pieces.

Practical Guides — The honest version of how the poetry world works. Submitting, formatting manuscripts, prizes, MFA programmes, small press publishing. Currently 13 guides.

Foundations — The structures behind poetry publishing explained. What a press is, what a colophon is, what makes a limited edition worth collecting, why literary journals exist. Currently 10 pieces.

Reviews — Considered criticism of recent collections. Carl Phillips, Diane Seuss, Arthur Sze, Victoria Chang, Harryette Mullen. Currently 5 reviews.

Editorial — The essays where we argue for something. On first lines, on endings, on why poets should read the living as well as the dead. Currently 3 essays.

Lists — Curated recommendations, chosen for conviction rather than consensus. Currently 2 lists.

Seven sections. Room in all of them for more.

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An invitation to contribute

We are opening The Poetry Library to contributors, and we would like you to consider whether that might include you.

The Ink Well community contains some of the most serious poetry readers, writers, critics, and academics we know. Many of you are working poets, MFA students and graduates, teachers, editors, booksellers. Some of you have been reading poems carefully for decades. That knowledge and attention is exactly what this project needs.

Here is what we are offering: a published essay, guide, close reading, review, or list in The Poetry Library, under your own byline, with your own author profile on the site. Not a guest post buried in a blog archive — a permanent piece in a growing reference library, attributed to you, linked to your work and your bio, visible to every reader who finds the library through search or through us. As our traffic grows, so does the visibility of every piece in it.

The work is voluntary. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we cannot pay contributors at this stage. What we can offer is editorial attention, a serious platform, a growing audience, and the particular satisfaction of contributing to something built to last rather than to scroll.

What we’re looking for:

We are not prescriptive about topic, but we are prescriptive about quality. A piece for the library should be genuinely useful or genuinely argued — an essay that makes a case, a close reading that earns its conclusions, a guide that tells the honest version rather than the polished one. We are not looking for content. We are looking for thinking.

The seven sections above are the current map, but we are open to pieces that don’t fit neatly — if the work is strong and the argument is clear, we will find it a home.

The practical details:

We ask for a commitment of at least one piece per fortnight — ideally one per week — so that the library grows at a pace that justifies calling it a destination. We are not looking for occasional contributors; we are looking for people who want to build something over time.

All pieces are reviewed editorially before publication. We will work with you to get a piece to the standard the library requires. We will not publish something that isn’t ready, and we will tell you honestly if something isn’t working and why.

If you are interested, write to us at admin@inkandribbon.org with a brief note about who you are, what section of the library interests you, and — if you have one — a short pitch or an example of your critical writing. We will respond to every enquiry.

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The library is at inkandribbon.org/learn. We are glad it exists. We think it can become something worth pointing people to for years.

We hope some of you will want to help build it.

— G. K. Allum Founder & Editor, Ink & Ribbon Press