Dear Poetry Archive Friends, thank you so much for your continued support of the Poetry Archive! I’m delighted to report that the poetry recordings we share through our website have been visited over 5 million times a year since 2021, a 40% growth in visitor numbers. Our free education resources are visited more than 80,000 times a year, and we are seeing increased visitors to our Children’s Poetry Archive, with more than 1 million children enjoying unrestricted access to poetry.

Our priority remains to ensure that the Poetry Archive continues to be available to everyone free of charge, particularly our Children’s Poetry Archive, which sees more than a million children each year enjoying free access to poetry in their schools and homes. Sadly, the Arts Council has made many cuts to organisations this year, as I’m sure you have read about, and sadly, we are one of them. But we believe strongly that there are profound benefits to free access to poetry, our education resources and our unique collections.

We don’t want to lose the Poetry Archive or have it stored away without the full access we can provide through our websites. If you can help us keep the Archive FREE, please sign up for our Insider at £10 per year, or perhaps upgrade to an Explorer membership at £35 a year, or please consider making a one-off donation to our work. We will fight hard to save the Poetry Archive, and we thank you for everything you can do to help us.

We’d also like to thank Foyle Foundation and National Heritage Lottery Fund for new funding enabling us to create a new collection of British Sign Language poetry and explore contemporary poets from India and the sub-continent!