Library rules for authors

An editor reads every poem submitted. It joins the library only if all the conditions below are met.

1. Authorship

  • You wrote the poem.
  • No AI was used, for the whole text or any part of it.
  • It is not someone else's poem or song lyrics, even credited.

2. The text

  • The poem is complete. An excerpt from a longer poem is not accepted.
  • It is a poem, not a text of another kind: not an essay, a story in paragraphs, an advert, song lyrics, a manifesto or a call to action, a list of notes or garbled text. A prose poem counts as a poem.
  • The text holds only the poem: no sign-offs, links, hashtags, requests to vote or follow, or decorations.
  • The epigraph and its author, the dedication, notes and the date written go in their own fields of the form, not in the poem's text.
  • No emoji or text abbreviations (u, ur, idk) in the text.
  • A picture drawn with characters is not accepted.

The title does not affect the decision. A poem may have no title.

Please do set the poem's mood and keywords (up to five) in the categories of the form. Readers find poems by them, in the mood and topic sections and in search.

3. Subjects the library does not take

Whatever the poem's quality:

  • Occasional verse: birthday, anniversary and other greetings, dedications with no poem of their own in them.

  • Religion, spirituality, esoterica, mysticism of any tradition. Not accepted is a poem that prays, praises, preaches, or whose meaning depends on faith: prayers, hymns, devotional verse, poems to God, gods, angels or saints, poems built on scripture, karma, chakras, astrology or the occult, the afterlife in a religious sense. Fine: a religious word or image in a secular poem, "O God" as an exclamation, a mock prayer, a sacred place or a conversion as an image in a dream or a grief poem.

  • Party politics: poems whose point is a country, party, politician, election, nationalism or patriotism, and poems glorifying war.

  • National or communal identity as the subject: poems whose meaning rests on belonging to a people, caste, tribe or diaspora.

  • Hate: poems that express racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, colonial condescension or ethnic stereotypes. Poems against them, or about living with them, are accepted.

  • Explicit sex: a sexual act described. Sensual and tender is fine.

  • Graphic violence: killing, torture or broken bodies shown in detail.

  • Suicide and self-harm as the way out. Not accepted is a poem where:

    • the speaker says in plain words that they want to die or to hurt themselves now, and nothing in the poem turns from it: a plea to die, a suicide note, the act or the moment before it, dying as the right choice, a relief or the way out, a call to the reader
    • death or self-harm is shown as beautiful, desirable, a reward or a lover
    • a method is described in detail (what to use, how much, how). Naming it is fine.

    Fine: dark thoughts of death in grief, doubt or despair, wanting to sleep, rest, disappear or feel nothing when dying is not named, death as an image, a tale or a figure who is not the speaker, a poem that turns from it or warns against it, even without a hopeful ending, pain, urges or scars told from survival or recovery.

  • Alcohol and drugs made glamorous: drinking or drugs shown as glamorous, desirable, a reward or the answer. Fine: a mention, a hangover, addiction, recovery, a trip seen plainly, a warning. A poem may be about them when it does not make them glamorous.

  • Poems about poetry: poems whose point is writing poems or being a poet. A poem about keeping a journal, or a portrait of a poet that works as a poem, is not one of them.

All other subjects are fine, including queer love and identity, sexuality and gender, mental health, anger, grief and despair with no hopeful ending, family conflict, body image, social justice, the environment, animal rights, the surreal, the absurd and dreams. Strong language and real people in a poem are not by themselves a reason to decline.

4. Quality

When conditions 1–3 are met, the editor judges the poem as a poem. The library needs three things: that it is poetry, that its language is alive for readers today, and that the poem brings something of its own to poetry.

  • Poetry, not a message in lines. A poem says more than it states: through an image, a detail, a scene, a comparison, rhythm, an unexpected turn of thought. So, as a rule, we don't accept plain texts that only report what the author feels or what happened ("I am sad", "you left and I'm in pain"), even when they are broken into lines and rhymed. Naming a feeling is fine when the poem holds something more.
  • Living language. Library readers are people of today. Lofty, archaic wording ("O Moon!", Love and Fate with a capital letter, 'tis, ere, behold) sounds to them like an imitation of the past and keeps the poem at a distance. One lofty word for contrast or irony, or a high style kept up on purpose, is fine.
  • Something of its own. A poem built mostly on worn-out phrases and clichés (a broken heart, tears like rain, an aching soul, love and dove) repeats what readers have read many times and adds nothing to poetry. Plain everyday words ("I miss you"), one familiar phrase or a cliché played with are fine.

When a decline comes with notes, they point to the lines and say what could make them stronger.

Not reasons to decline: form, length, rhyme or its absence, short or chopped lines, ellipses, lists, repetition, an open ending, a moral ending, plain speech, lowercase, missing punctuation, unusual syntax, lost blank lines between stanzas, a broken line or a stray character. We point out spelling and grammar mistakes but never decline for them alone.

5. Review

  • You can have up to three poems waiting for review at once. While a poem waits, you can withdraw it.
  • An accepted poem appears in the library and is public. You keep your rights. You can take it out of the library at any time.
  • A declined poem can be submitted again once you have changed its text, title or epigraph. You can add a note for us. If a poem cannot be submitted again, its page says so.
  • If you edit a poem that is in the library, it leaves the library until it is checked again. Exception: mood and keywords can be changed freely.

What happens to a poem after acceptance: see For authors.