All about us

The Poetry Archive’s mission is to acquire, record and preserve poetry for posterity.  It was started in 2001 by Andrew Motion and Richard Carrington.  Since then, it has become internationally acknowledged as the home for poetry preservation, dating back to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and looking forwards to ensure the voices of upcoming poets continue to be heard.  5 million people a year visit our websites, Poetry Archive and the Children’s Poetry Archive.

How do we work?

Poetry Archive is a charity funded by grants (some to support our work overall and others for specific projects), donations, memberships and subscriptions to our monthly newsletter – ‘Insider’.  A small team of dedicated, expert Trustees and staff work tirelessly to develop the Poetry Archive over time. Our remit extends to partnerships with key national and international organisations leading to wonderful collections, for example, our BBC 100 collection, the Obsidian Foundation Collection, T.S Eliot Prize winners, Foyle Young Poets, Mother Tongue Other Tongue participants and many more.  We have extended our offer to aspiring poets through our annual, Poetry Archive Now! Wordview competition, firmly established in the national poetry calendar of competitions (all entrants have their work published on our You Tube channel).

A measure of our success is in the number of poets who approach us hoping for a collection on Poetry Archive.  All published poets who write in English are eligible to be invited to make a recording for the Archive and we are always adding new names to the list of poets we would love to record. When funding becomes available, we collect a panel of experts in the field to discuss and prioritise the recordings we want to make in each six-month period.

Poets invited into Poetry Archive are supported with access to a recording studio and follow up editing.  We work closely with them on the choice of poems to appear on their page(s) on the website, secure permissions to play the recordings and display the text of the poems, commission a copywriter to provide a bibliography and provide an interpretation of the recordings available.  Individual web pages include a bibliography and links to publishers for audiences to purchase collections, a list of awards and prizes and links to, for example, poets’ own websites.  Where copyright permissions allow, recordings go into our Poetry Archive store for audiences to buy.  (Tracey, perhaps we could invite one or two of our poets recently commissioned to provide a collection to supply an endorsement of our work and process?)

Our ‘Insider’ newsletter, produced monthly, gives our members and subscribers an eclectic, wide ranging tour of all things poetry, new collections on our websites, interviews, workshops, teaching resources on the Children’s Poetry Archive including a range of Children’s Poetry Challenges, and insights to the Poetry Archive world more widely, what’s happening, when and where. We welcome suggestions from our audiences on the future of the Poetry Archive.  If you would like to get in touch please email info@poetryarchive.org.