Poet Website Essentials: 5 Pages You Actually Need
A contest judge lists the five pages every poet's website needs, what belongs on each, what to leave off entirely, and the one-weekend build that keeps editors from losing your name.
Before I invite any poet to read at an event, judge beside me, or contribute to an anthology, I do what every editor I know does: I search their name. Last spring I wanted to solicit a poet whose contest entry had stayed with me for weeks, a quiet piece about her father's hands and a bowl of walnuts. What I found was a blog abandoned in 2019, a dead link to a journal that no longer exists, and no address anywhere. The invitation went to somebody else. That is the entire argument for learning the poet website essentials: not vanity, not self-promotion, just a door left open.
A Website Is Not Marketing. It Is Infrastructure.
Poets tend to treat a website like a brochure, something you build when you have a book to sell. Editors treat it like a phone directory. When your poem appears in a journal or wins a prize, a small wave of readers searches your name within about forty-eight hours, and then the wave is gone. If they find nothing, the moment dies quietly and you never even know it happened. Your website's job is not persuasion. Your poems do the persuading. The website's only job is availability.
The good news is that you need far less than the internet keeps telling you. No shop. No blog you will resent by March. No mailing list pop-up. Five pages, one honest weekend of work, and it will serve you for years with an hour of maintenance a season.
Poet Website Essentials: The Five Pages That Earn Their Keep
1. A home page with one whole poem on it
Not a headshot the size of a bus. Not a carousel of quotes. One short, complete poem you hold the rights to, sitting right there where a stranger lands. A visitor decides in seconds whether you are a poet or a person who talks about being a poet, and only a poem can settle that. Choose something under twelve lines. If you want a model for the register that works, here is the kind of small, plain-spoken piece I mean, written for this purpose:
My mother kept the phone book after the phones went smart,
spine cracked open at the letter H,
half its names now names on stones.
Some doors you keep because they knew your hand.
Nothing clever about that. It simply proves a sensibility in four lines, which is all a home page has to do.
2. An about page that sounds like a person
The standard poet bio is a small tragedy of hedging. Watch what happens when you trade abstraction for fact.
Before: Jane Okafor is an emerging poet whose evocative work explores themes of nature, memory, and the human condition.
After: Jane Okafor writes about the Enugu farm she left and keeps not leaving. Her poems appear in Rattle and One Art. She works nights as a hospital dispatcher, which is where most of the poems start.
The first bio could belong to forty thousand people. The second belongs to one, and an editor reading it already half wants the poems. Every phrase in your bio should be something no other poet could truthfully claim. Cut "emerging," cut "evocative," cut "the human condition," which is the condition of every poem ever written and therefore says nothing.
3. A poems and publications page
This is a simple list, newest first: poem title, journal, year, and a link if the journal is online. Add three to five full poems only where you control the rights, clearly marked with where they first appeared. If you have a chapbook, it gets two sentences and a link to buy, not its own shrine. The page answers one question for a curious editor: is there a body of work here, and where does it live?
4. A news or events page, even when it is quiet
Poets skip this page because they fear the emptiness of it. Keep it anyway. "Reading at Verse Open Mic, Manchester, March 12" followed by two quiet months looks like a working poet. A site with no events page looks like a poet who never leaves the house. When there is truly nothing, list the last thing: past readings count, contest placements count, a workshop you taught counts. Curators booking readings check this page first, because it tells them you have stood in front of a room before.
5. A contact page with a naked email address
This is the page most poets get wrong, and it is the page the whole site exists for. Not a contact form that routes to a folder you never check. Not "DM me on Instagram." An email address, written out, on its own page. Forms fail silently, get eaten by spam filters, and signal that you would rather not be reached. The poet I could not find last spring had a form. I filled it in. Nothing ever came back, and I will never know if she saw it.
What to Leave Off Entirely
Restraint is most of the job. A short list of things that actively cost you invitations:
- A blog you will abandon. A last post dated three years ago reads as a small failure on every visit. No blog beats a dead blog.
- Every poem you have ever written. Sixty poems is a filing cabinet, not a website. Five strong ones is a case.
- Music, animation, anything that moves. Editors visit between tasks. Do not make sound come out of their laptop in a quiet office.
- Quill pens, parchment textures, candle photography. These say hobbyist louder than any bio can say otherwise.
- Testimonials from friends. Praise you arranged is worth less than one plainly listed publication.
Posting unpublished poems needs one caution: many journals treat work on a public website as previously published, so keep poems you plan to submit off the site until they have found their first home. When in doubt, list the title and hold the text.
The One-Weekend Build, Hour by Hour
You do not need to hire anyone or learn anything hard. Here is the sequence I give poets who ask, and it fits inside two mornings:
- Buy your own name as a domain, or the closest clean variant. Ten pounds a year, and it outlasts every platform trend.
- Pick the most boring site builder you already half know. The template matters less than the poem you put on it.
- Choose one typeface, dark text, pale background. Poems need silence around them, and so do websites.
- Write the after-style bio from the exercise above. Read it aloud. Cut anything you would be embarrassed to say to a stranger at a bus stop.
- Select one home-page poem and three to five for the poems page, rights checked.
- List every publication and placement you have, honestly and completely. Small journals count. Contest shortlists count.
- Put your email on the contact page, then send yourself a test message from a friend's account.
Do that and stop. The urge to add is the enemy. A five-page site maintained is worth more than a fifteen-page site apologized for.
What Happens When Someone Comes Looking
A poem I scored last winter, a sonnet about a grandmother's sewing machine that took the machine's own stitching rhythm into its meter, earned one of the highest structure marks I gave all season. Our contest runs monthly, entries open the 1st through the 25th with results on the 30th, and every entrant receives a score across five criteria, so I see hundreds of names a month. This one I searched. Her site was almost embarrassing in its plainness: one page of poems, a two-line bio, an email address. Within a minute I had written to her, and within a season her work was in front of three editors I know personally. The site did none of the artistic work. It just failed to lose the moment.
A website never made anyone love a poem. But a missing one has cost plenty of poets a reader who was already reaching for the handle.
Browse any list of past contest winners and search a few names. You will find the same pattern I do: the poets whose careers moved after the win were, almost without exception, the findable ones.
Build It Boring, Keep It True
There is a romance in being hard to find, and I understand its pull. Dickinson in the upstairs room, poems in a drawer. But Dickinson had a sister-in-law carrying her work to editors, and you probably do not. The working substitute is five plain pages with your name on the door.
So take the weekend. Build the boring site. Put your truest short poem on the front of it and your real address at the back of it. Then return to the actual work, which is the poems, and if you want a reader's report on where a new one stands, send it to a contest that scores every entry and read the breakdown honestly. The site is not the career. It is the door the career walks through, and all it ever has to be is open.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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