Monday 25 July 2011

Poetry Apps

First posted on writing.ie.

Inspired by this piece by the poet and fiction author, Nick Laird in the Guardian (can't be doing without my Saturday Guardian) I've had a look at some of the online poetry tools he mentions.

Wattpad - a website to share your stories and poems. You can perhaps read the most popular (What's Hot) but having a quick scan through showed nothing of interest to me. 1 millions reads? Romance gets a lot of reads here; poetry doesn't. There's an app to read on your mobile too. Wiki here tells you how it all works. I've uploaded an old short story of mine up here and will see what happens.

Portapoet for
  • Easily writing and sharing rhyming poems
  • Finding rhymes for words
  •  
Available as an app on iPad etc. Not a huge fan of rhymes for rhyming sake myself.

Another is Erotic Poems where you can, for 99c, once you successfully complete the structured poems in this program, create more complex work, learning to:
-excite all five of your lover's senses
-identify formulas for creating structured forms of poetry
-enjoy the fruits of prewriting and revision
-use figurative language to entice someone special
-create a sustained image to captivate the person of your desires

Right, so.

The Poetry Foundation in America has some apps. It is said to turn your phone into a mobile poetry library. But only if it's an iPhone. I have an HTC. I love my HTC.
Poetry Ireland take note. A great way to promote Irish Poetry. Also the Poetry Society in the UK. Get over yourselves and get out there.

Prose with Bros again for the iPhone, competitive poetry with random words. Each player is given the same 50 words to construct their prose, and after submitting the results, other players vote on which is best over the course of the next 24 hours. As described here, pretty smutty.

On my HTC, if I search Marketplace for Poetry I get 1,046 results, mostly other people's poems for free, people I haven't heard of as well as Bill Shakespeare and his buddy, Goethe.

Refrigerator Poetry is there as an android app and there are rhyming dictionaries too.

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