Terms
The agreement, in plain words.
Who can use this
You must be 18 or older to create an account. We don't ask for proof of age beyond this — an account we learn is run by someone younger is closed.
Your work stays yours
You keep the copyright in your poems. You grant Reverie a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce and publicly display your poem on Reverie, for as long as you choose to keep it posted. It ends when you delete the poem or your account, except that backup copies may persist briefly while they are purged. We claim no exclusive rights and no first publication rights, and we will not licence your work to anyone else.
The licence does not include the right to modify, adapt, sublicense or distribute your work, or to keep showing it after you take it down. Those words are in most platforms’ terms. They are not in ours, and adding them later would mean asking every poet again.
One exception: Reverie may generate a translation of your poem to show readers who don’t share its language. This does not modify, adapt or replace your poem — the original is what’s stored, is what renders first, and stays available any time a reader wants it back. You can turn translation off for any poem of yours, at any time, from that poem’s page.
Before you submit a poem elsewhere
Read this before posting anything you intend to send to a journal or a contest.
Most literary journals will not accept work that has already appeared somewhere publicly readable, and the line they draw is about public accessibility, not about whether the site is a magazine. Poetry Northwest counts personal blogs and social media. Poetry counts anything that has appeared online for any reason. First publication rights, once used, are gone — deleting the poem afterwards does not bring them back.
You choose this per poem. Only me never counts, because nobody but you can ever read it — as far as a journal's “has this appeared anywhere” question goes, it's the same as a poem you never posted. Members-only is the default, and it is the reversible one: a members-only poem is closer to a private reading group, which some journals explicitly allow, and you can open it up later. A public poem is readable by anyone and indexed by search engines, which most journals treat as prior publication — and deleting it afterwards does not give those rights back. Unlisted sits between: reachable by link, in no list, not indexed.
If you are holding a poem for submission, the safe course is not to post it here until it has been placed. This is the honest answer rather than a comfortable one.
A reading belongs to whoever wrote it
Responses are their authors’ own writing, under the same licence. They stay attached to the poem they are about; if the poem comes down, they come down with it.
What gets you removed
The guidelines are the substance, written by example. Enforcement is tiered — warn, hide, remove, ban — and every decision is logged with its reason and the moderator’s name. Accounts that repeatedly infringe copyright are terminated; that policy exists and is applied, not merely stated.
No warranty, and limited liability
Reverie is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be available, that backups will be complete, or that moderation will be correct. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
Ending it
You can delete your account at any time from your account page, and it takes effect immediately. We may suspend an account for breaking the guidelines, with the reason published.