Directions for the visitor
How to Use This House
Nine steps from the front door to your first finished poem or essay. Take them in order the first time; afterwards, wander as you please.
- I
Enter without ceremony
Most of the house is open to anyone: the poets, the ages, the craft, the library, criticism, world literature and the poem forge. Nothing to sign, nothing to pay.
Start at the Threshold → - II
Tap the brass automaton
The small oracle in the bottom corner answers instantly, on any page, without an account. Ask it where something is, or ask it what a volta is — it will do both.
It is already beside you → - III
Search the Library by dials, not by luck
Type a name, a theme or a form into the search bar, then narrow by tradition, era, genre, theme and role. Filters combine: 'Russian' + 'Grief' + 'Poet' returns Akhmatova in one turn of the wheel.
Open the Library → - IV
Place your writer in time
The Ages runs from Beowulf's mead-hall to the present. Read the era before you read the author; half of what looks like personality is period.
Walk the Ages → - V
Learn the instruments
The Craft holds the forms — sonnet, villanelle, ghazal, blank verse — and the devices that make a line stay in the mind. Read this before you write, and again after.
Enter the Craft → - VI
Cross the border
The Wing of Nations gives each tradition — Chinese, French, Russian, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Greek, Persian, Arabic, Indian, African — a temperament and a first book.
Visit the Nations → - VII
Learn to criticise properly
The Reading Room explains every critical school and gives a ten-movement method for writing criticism of any work, from a lyric to a novel.
Study Criticism → - VIII
Forge a draft
Choose a subject, a form, a tone and a tradition, and the Forge writes an original poem with a note explaining how it was built. Take the note; discard the poem if you like.
Use the Poem Forge → - IX
Sit with the Oracle for the long work
The full Oracle keeps your conversation between visits, so a reading list or a poem in progress survives the night. Create an account and you are in at once — no confirmation email, no waiting.
Consult the Oracle →
Five Habits of the Serious Reader
- Read aloud
- You will hear a false line long before you can see it.
- Keep a commonplace book
- Copy out lines that strike you. Within a year it becomes your own anthology.
- Read two translations
- The differences between them are the poem's pressure points.
- Ask the psychological question
- Not only what is said, but what is being avoided.
- Finish badly
- A finished bad poem teaches more than an unfinished good one.