Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Is this the Future of Poetry Reading?

The Academy of American Poets recently opened Mobile Poets.org, the 2,500 poems on its site available for downloading to hand-held devices, particularly the iPhone. As with most digitial reading at the moment, the poems were written for print and the page, but it will be interesting to see poetry written for hand-held devices that can take advantage of the iPhone's multimedia capabilities. It seems to me that The Writer's Almanac, which supports podcasting, would be a natural for such a device, particularly if it were possible to pull the Almanac directly to a wireless device without going through a computer. It also seems that forward-looking poetry presses could market their books by sampling through hand-held devices, and a grant from a major foundation to a consortium of non-profit poetry presses would be a step in the right direction.

No comments: