Open Poetics is a digital publication project created in partnership with CUNY’s Manifold Scholarship, an open-access web and e-book publishing platform built for collaborative reading. Open Poetics titles accommodate in-text links to images, videos and external literary materials. These serve as contextual coordinates to inspire and assist users’ own active reading responses while not overwhelming them with a sense that the texts have already been figured out by scholars. Editions include a collaborative annotation feature, which facilitates dynamic line-by-line conversation, allowing readers to puzzle out the text via their own marginalia, or in discussion and collaboration within private reading groups.

Open Poetics Series 1 provides critical editions of lesser-known and out-of-print works of contemporary poetry that were originally published by O Books and The Post-Apollo Press. Titles in this series incorporate external materials—critical essays, alternate versions, reviews, translations, and archival images—that have been curated by a board of poets and teachers. This project offers a living archival solution to the challenges of visibility and accessibility faced by avant-garde and experimental writing championed by small presses.

Open Poetics Series 2 is currently in development. It will include titles from the Litmus Press catalogue that have been digitized for our open-access platform. The books we have chosen for this series are hybrid texts, visual-verbal collaborations, works in conversation with digital media, or other projects that are especially suited to the multimedia possibilities of online publishing.