A Community for Poetry Nerds
Introducing you to what The Formal Poetry Directorate is all about.
It has been two weeks since we launched this publication, so it is time to actually tell you what our agenda is. We are poets, we are nerds, and we have a plan: to gather our friends in a space where we can all grow together. My name is Brooklyn Crane, and, together with Narcisse Tardif, I give you The Formal Poetry Directorate.
REMINDER: Enter our “250 Years of America” formal poetry contest for a chance to win up to $100 USD HERE!
The Origin Story
Formal poetry is severely underrepresented in today’s industry, and it is not due to a general lack of interest in literature. Writers do abound in the digital age of reading, with incredibly successful authors making waves on platforms like Instagram or TikTok. While not as loudly as with Starbucks mugs, people buy books by the dozen, with a large chunk of young adult social media presence dedicated to craving or showing off a personal library, even if it’s full of the same stories regurgitated by a content machine built to profit off of passing interests. Formal poetry simply isn’t trendy. It requires too much care, too much observation or appreciation to even give a damn about how it’s written. Worst of all, formal poetry isn’t raw enough for general audiences, so the world does with it what it does best with anything at all: trade it for something bound to make more cash. My part in this? I sucked at instapoetry enough to give up.
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When I jumped ship to Substack, after bearing the burden of stagnation for far too long, I realized that I had not been alone in feeling that way. I came across many stories of despondency and self-ruin undertaken for the sake of attempting to be popular. Though, as much as we related as writers, I was dead set on finding poets like myself—that is, absolute nerds about poetry. On a platform purely dedicated to writing, surely I would find other formal poetry authors. Well, I was right, and when I’d finally gathered enough of us, I put out the very first issue of the Formal Poetry Directory: a short digest of formal poets’ work, aimed at getting a community started.
The Directorate
After a few issues of the aforementioned digest, we started doing collabs and making plans. Narcisse Tardif, whom I’d found while searching for more people to get involved, eventually became the other mastermind behind some of these, and together we realized that we could do more. We needed a space to:
find and be found by other formal poetry authors;
coordinate team work;
promote our content; and
interact with each other freely.
The Formal Poetry Directory had to evolve into an entity advocating for our kind of work. To me personally, it had to become a beacon for the rest of us in the Substack sea to immediately find a safe harbor and share their wares. So, out of ideas and looking to give this thing some continuity, the Directory became the Directorate, and here we are.
The Identity
Though we are keeping many plans for the future of this collaborative publication close to our chests, we want to make sure that you know who we are and what we are after.
We are a community wholly centered around formal poetry—by formal poets, for formal poets.
We seek to reach out to, collaborate with and promote authors whose skill and passion for our craft deserves to be shared.
We celebrate human ingenuity and look down on AI-generated work.
We respect stylistic differences and have no quarrel with people who write free verse or whose composition preferences differ from ours.
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The Invitation
This project is about you! We want to feature and get you involved, as well as anyone else who practices the traditional cornerstones of poetry. Please be sure to reach out and share so that your friends and Substack acquaintances may find a community to belong to. Stay tuned for what’s coming!
Good on you guys for all you do to promote poets. Substack would be a shallow sea without you.
Will you be my friend?