Colorado Poets Center E-Words Issue #13

Poetry APP Available

The Poetry Foundation, published of Poetry magazine, has announced an update to its “award-winning” POETRY iPHONE app. Nearly 400 contemporary poems have been added so it now offers more than 1,700 poems. You may search by keyword, subject or title on the “Find Poetry” interface, or use the “Discovery Poetry” interface to read poems through an app described as “a virtual slot machine.”

To “discover poetry” one shakes the iPhone or presses the Spin button, and the device spins through pairs of emotions and subjects such as “insecurity and love” or “nostalgia and youth” settling on a list of poems characterized by one of these combinations. The improvement to this application is that the results from the Discover Poetry” interface are always fresh, presented in a randomized order so commonly searched categories--like “love” and “frustration”--always look different.

The POETRY app is available in the Apple iTunes Store. For more information or to download the app, visit poetryfoundation.org/iphone.

Not noted in the Poetry Foundation’s publicity material is the effect such an application might have, in our opinion, by causing a noticeable increase in the writing of satiric poems about poetry applications.