News & updates

The stars have aligned – today, on #NationalPoetryDay, the official launch of SoPoet is here. Happy National Poetry Day!

Over the past few months, we've been tinkering and tuning every aspect of SoPoet – from the introduction of titles, sparks and glosses, to dedicated newsreels and weekly themes – and all while staving off the hundreds of bugs that find new ways to scuttle through our system. Your feedback has steered us through each revolution – spinning together our corner of the internet with a tapestry of art and meaning.

Over 300 unique poetgraphs have been posted in that time – responding to themes of family, happiness, science, and even that holy manna from heaven itself: beer. You've managed nothing short of holding a mirror up to human existence. In a time when A.I. has become a major talking point, it's reassuring to see human creativity stake its claim.

While we'll continue to keep refining SoPoet, we feel we're now at a point where the platform is ready to fully emerge from its chrysalis. National Poetry Day is a celebration of the power behind all that is compact, quiet and understated – an ethos we share.

Thank you so much for – quite literally – helping visualise our dream. Whether you download our app from the Google Play store, or visit us the old school way on sopoet.co.uk, we look forward to inviting you to celebrate!

– Team SoPoet

Thank you for every suggestion you have sent us. Here are three things you asked for, now live on SoPoet:

Keep the feedback coming on the feedback page. It is anonymous and it lands straight with us.

Faced with a blank poem box and not sure where to begin? We've written a short guide to getting your first poetgraph down, including the four poem forms SoPoet recognises and rewards: the haiku, tanka, cinquain, and Fib.

Each one comes with its syllable pattern and a famous example to borrow a little courage from.

Thank you to everyone who has sent us anonymous feedback. We read every word of it before meeting as a team to reflect. Often you'll see changes turn up directly on SoPoet, which means we listened and adapted. Other times a suggestion needs a longer conversation first.

A lot of that feedback has been about the Word of the Day. Some of you had ideas for improving it, others just wanted to know how the words are chosen. We want to be as open as we can about that, and to share what we're trying to do with it.

How the words are chosen

There are lots of ways to build a big word list. We could go as far as writing a year's worth by hand, and in the very early days we did exactly that, with some success. Right now we use a randomised database that pulls from the wide span of the Oxford English Dictionary, then sets aside the most common fifth of words so what's left has more room to surprise you.

What makes a good Word of the Day?

The wonderful thing about poetry is that it welcomes language in every form, from the domestic and everyday to the far reaches of comprehensibility (we're looking at you, James Joyce). At its heart poetry stands against gatekeeping, and it's in that spirit that we welcome the wonderful weirdness of the words that come up.

Many of you have told us you enjoy SoPoet as a way to flex your artistic muscles, using the form and structure we offer to guide you. We hear you, and we want the Word of the Day to feed that sense of meeting new and sometimes out of the ordinary language.

Take the day the gods of poetry gifted us Kroner. It was a joy to watch so many of you carry us off to Scandinavian landscapes in your poetgraphs. Could that have happened without the prompt? Not in any posts we'd ever seen before.

Could we stick to common, photographable nouns?

We could, but that would suggest there are right and wrong words in poetry, and it might even nudge people to play it safe. Our whole ethos is about taking your time to make something original, and we've already been thrilled by how often a difficult or rare word becomes a way of seeing the world anew.

Keep it coming on the feedback page. It's anonymous and it lands straight with us.

Here are a few brand new features:

New to titles? They are milestones you earn as you write. Post often, try a haiku or the new forms, use the word of the day, collect sparks, and follow other poets. All titles earned can be worn before your name from the Titles tab on your profile.