One of my goals this year is to explore poetry apps on my iPhone. There are many many many. Some are helpful and fun. Some are annoyingly boring and pointless.
Poets & Writers (free) is one of the pointless ones. You can only manage your subscription with it, something it takes a simple website to do. Obviously P&W miss the point of why an app is worth having. No one will be using this non-tool (even subscribers) and so the advertising opportunity of luring in new subscribers with a free tool is missed. P&W should look to the business model of United Airlines and their app for an appreciation of how to make an app that is useful beyond your limited customer base but that will further your brand.
Poetry Daily (free)
is a very popular poetry-of-the-day site that has offered up a very easy to use app. I actually look forward to Poetry Daily's well-picked fare. My only issue with this app is that you cannot re-size the text to fit your screen. For poems with long lines you have to move your screen right then left for every single line. It's annoying. I give up on every poem wider than the size of my iPhone. This happens more than you'd think. User frustration is not what makers of apps want for their customers.
I've tried a few visual poetry apps for fun. They were of limited gaiety to be honest. The first was Visual Poet (free). Basically this poem just matches three photos of your choice with three lines of verse you enter. I can't see what use this would be beyond a haiku. To try it out, I created a visual poem from the first haiku in my 2004 book St. Lou Haiku. You can pick the photos from Tumblr, Flickr, Google or your camera and adjust the font size and positioning. Then you can email it.
Credits:
St. Lou Haiku
Mary Elizabeth Ladd & Julie Wiskirchen
2004
Timberline Press
ISBN 0-944048-32-3
29 pages: 107 haiku/4 illustrations by Clarence Wolfshohl
5.5×8.5/letterpress
The poem represented was composed by Julie Wiskirchen.
A similar program is called Visual Poetry (0.99). This app is slightly more fun in that it takes a line of poetry and creates some word art out of it. There are color and font choices and 18 art styles, which I felt was a limited amount. You can then email the art piece to your friends.
I tried something with the first line from my 2012 book Why Photographers Commit Suicide: "Imagine your life in a glass box."
Credits:
Why Photographers Commit Suicide
Mary McCray
2012
Trementina Books
ISBN 0985984503
87 pages/8 illustrations by Emi Villavicencio
9×6/paperback and eBook
Of all three apps reviewed so far, I would probably only recommend Poetry Daily for repeated use, although I will keep watching Virtual Poetry and the new art opportunities for one liners.
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