Read excerpts or complete text of poetry books & chapbooks by some of the nation’s most exciting contemporary poets. The Poet’s Press has a distinct leaning toward powerful, neo-Romantic writing with clear meanings, powerful emotions and humanistic values. In other words, poetry worth reading!
This press, now based in Providence, Rhode Island, was founded by Brett Rutherford in 1971 in New York City, and has now published more than 183 titles. We are in the midst of reorganizing as a not-for-profit based in Providence, including the addition of a new editorial board. Our involvement with Rhode Island arts groups has resulted in four anthologies to date, as well as the first republication of Providence poet Sarah Helen Whitman's poetry since 1916.
The Poet's Press also operates two additional imprints: Grim Reaper Books, specializing in the Gothic and supernatural; and the new Yogh & Thorn Press, which will specialize in scholarly books and reprints of rare and wonderful "lost" texts. Expect an eclectic mix of books in the years ahead, including a four-volume set of Emilie Glen, lost literature of the World War I era, a landmark anthology of supernatural poems from the early 19th century, an "Egyptian Reader, " and Victor Hugo on The Siege of Paris.
The reading list from our archives includes full text and/or excerpts from some books which are still currently available in print. Other books which are out of print are presented here to help promulgate the work of these important poets. You may read these texts for your enjoyment, or even save the HTML or Acrobat files and print out poems. But please respect the copyrights of the authors and do not republish, perform or otherwise use these works without our knowledge.
A large part of our energies are also devoted to preserving and promulgating no-longer-living Poet's Press authors, most notably Emilie Glen, Barbara Holland and Annette Hayn. Contributions to the archives for these poets are welcome, in the form of undocumented poems, photographs, and personal reminiscences.
The press is now located at 279-1/2 Thayer Street/ Providence, RI 02906
Our Publishing Policy
The Poet's Press is not a vanity publisher and we do not charge authors to have their books published. We select poets and titles that we believe fit our mission. Since our founding in 1971 we have produced books in many ways: as hand-bound chapbooks, as commercially printed books, as on-line e-books, and, most recently, back into print using on-demand printing. We now use two on-demand printing companies, lulu.com and Amazon's createspace.com to print and fulfill most of our book orders. Like many other small presses, we use on demand services as commercial printer and fulfilment operation, retaining our own identity, catalog, and ISBN number.
Using print-on-demand for the physical book makes sense. Because we do not have to invest in a warehouse full on unsold dead-tree books, we can concentrate on designing and producing more books. Poet's Press books are sold directly from publisher to reader via our online bookstore. Because we are not using distributors and bricks-and-mortar bookstores, we can keep our prices reasonable and pay our authors a decent royalty for every copy sold. We encourage readers to buy Poet's Press books from this website's link or from the authors. (We have noticed that some book dealers are offering our titles on the internet at double the selling price or more -- another good reason to buy from the publisher.)
All publishers, large and small, are dealing with the realities of the new digital world. The age of the printed book is now coming to an end, and this is good news for poets. The text is liberated from the medium of the paper book at last. We intend to make as much poetry as possible available at the most reasonable cost — free where authors are willing to publish their work on-line. A recent book from our press sold a few hundred copies in ink-on-paper, while the e-book version had 10,000+ free reader downloads. We are more interested in live, responsive readers than in transporting, storing and selling little assemblages of paper, ink and glue. So yes, we print books, but we now regard the printed book as a by-product, available for those who want them.
A number of our books are available for sale as PDFs from our print-on-demand supplier. Others are now available for purchase and instant download on iTunes. Still others are posted on our website for FREE download. We are also adding interesting and important public domain texts and PDFs to the website, such as the new pages on Greek and Latin Poetry. We are searching for the best available public domain texts for major poets, and will add more as we find them. We plan to open some texts for WIKI-style annotation.
The real act of making books is to write, to edit, to design and to publish them, publish in its original sense of "to send abroad." For our roster of dead poets, publishing online in PDF format is making their work available to posterity. For our living poets, it establishes connections with new readers and may lead to other publications, live readings and teaching opportunities.
Guidelines for Submissions
Right now we have about 6 books in the pipeline, so we are rather backlogged through the summer of 2012. We are always interested in seeing samples of writing via e-mail, and we are especially interested in anthologies or "collected works" projects suited to our publishing model. Please read the text above and examine the materials on this site before submitting. If you write to make money and get invited to writers' conferences and be a "big name," then by all means go to other publishers who are part of that arcane business. If you write poetry with the goal of reaching readers and perhaps being remembered 100 years from now, you might be our kind of poet.
For poets writing supernatural poetry, our anthology, The Supernatural Poem Since 1800, is open to submissions. We will be posting this as a "work in progress" soon.
Poetry Frauds and Scams
Please make note of our new URL. We were formerly at thepoetspress.org,
but we are now simply www.poetspress.org. If you have made links to our
old site, please update them!
PLEASE NOTE: Our former website has been taken over by "squatters." We do not endorse or authorize any advertising that occurs on that site. During our attempts to transfer from one service provider to another, the previous provider (Yahoo), sold our domain name to these unspeakable persons, who have populated it with noxious advertising, including links to poetry contests and dubious presses.
