Build Your Poetry Apps Without Breaking a Sweat!

Hi, my name is Patty and I'm addicted to Apps....

I love me some apps, but when it comes to poetry apps it's pretty slim picking. I downloaded Instant Poetry HD last night. It's only different from magnetic poetry in that it won't stick to a fridge. Oh, and you can change the background by using a photo. It basically gives you words on tiles that you can arrange to your heart's content. I made this gem:




I suppose it's possible to write some keepers with this, but unless Paper Toss and Angry Birds disappear from the App world, I probably won't be spending too much time with this one.

Poetry Daily has an App. It opens right to the poem-of-the-day, and you can move forward or back one day at a time. It doesn't seem to offer access to searching or browsing the archives though, and that's kind of a bummer. Two nice features are that you can move poems to a favorite list, and you can email poems.

Poetry has an App that lets you browse by mood or subject. The moods are pre-set: joy, grief, etc., so I couldn't enter "predatory recumbent," or "exanimate irate." Shame. If you're curious, "Advent" by Donald Hall is, according to Poetry, in the insecurity mood category. The most dynamic feature of this app is that if you shake your Iphone or Ipad (I have it on Ipad) it will spin through all the poems and then stop at a selection of poems by theme. I'm not sure what purpose this serves, but I suppose you could use the Poetry App as a Poetry 8-Ball. Dear Poetry 8-Ball, will I be rich and famous? Shake, shake, shake. Poetry 8-Ball gave me 11 poems on Pessimism. So, yes! I will be rich and famous! (It's all about the interpretation.) I had to shake the Ipad pretty hard to get it to spin, hard enough that visions of the Ipad sailing across the room came to mind. How would I feel if my Ipad went sailing across the room? Shake, shake, shake. Poetry 8-Ball offered me 19 poems on Frustration & Work and Play. So there you go.



The American Poetry App is pretty good, and since the description of it from itunes does the trick I'll copy it here:

American Poetry is a fully searchable compendium of 5,000 poems by 50 of America's greatest poets, each poem is displayed in its entirety. The collection contains poems of Robert Frost, e.e. cummings, Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Stephen Crane and many other famous poets.

Feature Highlights:
* Collection of 5,000 poems by 50 well-known American poets
* Fully searchable by title and first line
* Type size is continuously adjustable
* World famous poems by Frost, Thoreau, Dickinson, Sandburg, Emerson, and more
* Email poems from within the app
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All the poets are good and dead, but there's a nice mix from Gertrude Stein and Slyvia Plath to Weldon Kees and Hart Crane. It's an incredible bargain at .99 cents.

There are a few other poetry apps out there, but they didn't look download worthy.

Back to important work: Glee App!