Submissions
We welcome submissions year-round responding to works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection and select past special exhibits - all areas, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, costume, musical instruments, and the Met building itself. All styles are welcome from poets around the world. We are unable to pay at this time, but we’re working toward it.
Please send up to three poems with a note about the work they reference to metphrastics@gmail.com. Please include a 2-3 line 3rd person bio.
Please note: we get a number of submissions about works in other museums, and we get many that are simply not ekphrastic poems. Only ekphrastic poems about artwork at the Met will be considered. Please note the piece(s) in your cover letter. Thank you!
Current Calls
Summer 2025 (No Theme, Open) - window will close June 15
Please note, due to our work on the Spring 2025 theme call, we’re currently behind on our usual response time to general submissions. We will get back to each poet starting in mid-June.
Tips
Please make sure your poems are about artwork at the Met
While we consider the quality of the poems first, we do try to include a variety of source artworks. As you can see on our By Artwork page, most poems we receive are about Modern & Contemporary, as well as European Painting. If you see a region or genre we haven’t covered as widely, you might take that as a prompt. For instance, we don’t yet have any pieces on Arms & Armor, Costume, Musical Instruments, Latin America, Ancient Near East, Ancient America, Africa, or Ancient Egypt, and we’re always looking for more Asian, Islamic, Greek & Roman, American, and Medieval.