Contribute

It's great to see you here! Here you will find all the necessary information to improve Poesis, whether you want to submit new poems or improve the website itself.

Submit poems

The poems featured on Poesis are collected by the community. The goal is not to try and collect entire collections but rather have those that have touched your soles and hearts (though if you are moved by an entire collection, you can submit it in its entirety 🙂). Please read below to check if the poem or poems you have in mind can be included.

Checking eligibility

Currently only poems published in a book, magazine, or other publications are accepted (i.e. amateur poems are not accepted unless they have been awarded in a public competition). You should not generally submit your own poems but if someone else wants to submit your poem and you are fine with that, your assistance will be greatly appreciated.

Since data on Poesis is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, poems submitted must be compatible with its terms. As the license grants anyone the permission to copy, redistribute, and build upon the work even for commercial purposes (provided that they, among others, give attribution and release their modified versions under the same license), the poems concerned are practically limited to those in the public domain, meaning whose exclusive intellectual property rights have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived or are inapplicable. As copyright laws vary by country and jurisdiction, a guide cannot unfortunately be provided to determine if a poem has entered the public domain or not. However, these rights are in most countries valid X-years after death of the author, so a quick search regarding the country of the author will answer your question to some extent. Another option is to simply search if the particular poem is in the public domain or not.

Unfortunately, even if a poem is in the public domain in one jurisdiction, it might not be in another. The server for Poesis is located in Finland, meaning Finnish copyright laws apply and under which protection expires 70 years after the death of the author. If the term in the jurisdiction applying to the author your wish to submit the poem of is shorter, it is still very likely that the poem is eligible due to the Rule of Shorter Term under the Berne Convention. If it is longer, it could technically be incorporated as the Finnish term applies, but to avoid possible problems, such poems will by choice not be included.

When submitting the poem, you should state why you think the poem is in the public domain and include some references. However, if you are in doubt, you do not have to worry as the protection status will be checked before inclusion anyway.

If the poem is still protected and you happen to be know the copyright holder, you can get them in touch with us if they are interested. However, these poems would also have to be donated to the public under the CC BY-SA 4.0, so you they would not be giving exclusive use on just Poesis.

Sending the poems

Once you have checked (or at least tried) to determine if a poem is eligible, you can send its name, author, and a link to a public digital copy of it to hello@poesis.io. Your submission will be reviewed and if everything is alright, it will be included on the site. This might take a very long time, so your patience is kindly thanked in advance.

Contribute to the development of the website

If you would like to contribute to the development of the website, you can open a pull request on GitHub, but before you make any significant changes, discuss them beforehand so you don't work uselessly. If you have found a bug or would like to propose a new feature, you can open an issue.