Organizing your poems into Collections

Overview

A collection is a named group of your own poems on GS Poetry — a way to gather related work so readers can browse it together instead of scrolling your whole catalog. Think “Love poems,” “Winter 2026,” or “Spoken word.” A poem can live in more than one collection at once, and adding a poem to a collection never moves, changes, or re-publishes the original.

Public collections are free and unlimited. Two extras are GS Pro features: making a collection private (only you can see it), and drag-and-drop custom ordering of the poems inside. Everything else — creating, editing, adding and removing poems, and deleting — is free for everyone.

Where your collections live

Collections have two doors, and both show the same thing:

• Profile menu → My Collections. Click your avatar at the top-right and choose My Collections.
• The Collections tab on your profile. It sits alongside Poems and Photos. Anyone visiting your profile sees this tab too — but they only ever see your public collections, and only ones that already hold at least one poem.

Create a collection

1. Open My Collections and click New Collection.
2. Collection Name — required, up to 120 characters.
3. Description — optional, up to 2,000 characters: a sentence about what ties the poems together.
4. Who Can See It — choose Public — anyone can view (free) or Only me (private). Private is a GS Pro feature; on a free account that option is shown but grayed out.
5. Click Create Collection.

You can also spin one up on the fly — from the Add to collections section in the poem composer, or from the Add to Collection control on any of your published poems.

Add poems to a collection

There are four ways to put a poem into a collection:

• While writing a poem — in the composer, the Add to collections section lets you tick any of your collections (or create a new one). The poem drops into them the moment you publish.
• From a published poem — open your poem and use Add to Collection.
• From the collection itself — open the collection and click Add Poems. A picker lists all of your published poems (drafts aren’t shown, and poems already in the collection are left out); tick the ones you want and click Add.
• From the collection card — on the Collections tab of your profile, open the ··· menu on any collection’s card and choose Add Poems to open the same picker without leaving the tab.

The same poem can sit in as many collections as you like.

Edit a collection

You can rename a collection, rewrite its description, or switch it between public and private at any time:

1. On the collection’s card in My Collections, open the ··· menu and choose Edit — or open the collection and use the ··· menu → Edit Collection at the top-right.
2. Change the name, description, or who can see it.
3. Click Save Changes.

Reorder poems by dragging (GS Pro)

By default the poems in a collection show newest first. With GS Pro you can arrange them however you like:

• Open the collection. Once it holds more than one poem, a Drag poems to reorder them hint appears and each poem card shows a grip handle.
• Drag a poem card and drop it where you want it. The card you’re moving fades slightly, and a dashed outline shows where it will land.
• The new order saves automatically — there’s no Save button. If a save ever fails, the order snaps back and you’ll see a brief error.

On a free account the poems simply stay newest-first, and you’ll see a note that custom drag-order is a GS Pro feature.

Remove a poem vs. delete the collection

These are two different actions, and neither one deletes a poem:

• Remove a poem from a collection — open the collection and click the trash icon on that poem’s card. It leaves the collection but stays published; you’ll still find it under My Poems, and it stays in any other collections it belongs to.
• Delete the whole collection — removes the collection (the grouping), not the poems in it. See below.

Delete a collection

1. On the collection’s card, open the ··· menu and choose Delete — or open the collection and use the ··· menu → Delete Collection.
2. Confirm in the dialog. It reminds you that your poems are not deleted — they’re just removed from this collection.

Deleting a collection only removes the grouping. Every poem that was in it stays published and untouched.

Who can see your collections

• Public collections appear on your profile’s Collections tab for anyone who can see your profile, and each has its own shareable page.
• Private collections (GS Pro) are visible to you alone.
• Empty collections are hidden from visitors — a collection needs at least one poem before it shows to others. You still see your own empty ones (marked “0 poems”) so you can fill, edit, or delete them.
• A poem’s own visibility still applies inside a collection: a public collection can contain a Followers-Only or Private poem, and only the people allowed to see that poem will see it there.

If something goes wrong

• I can’t choose “Only me.” Private collections are a GS Pro feature; public collections are free and unlimited.
• I can’t drag to reorder. Custom ordering is a GS Pro feature, and it only turns on once a collection holds more than one poem. Free collections show newest first.
• My new collection isn’t on my profile for others. It’s either private or empty — add a poem and make it public and it’ll appear.
• A poem I removed is gone from the list. Removing only takes it out of that collection; the poem is still published under My Poems.

Where to go next

Learn how poem visibility decides who can see each poem, or see what else GS Pro adds. Still stuck? Contact support.