Poetry--as Close as Your Mobile Phone

SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 3/11/2008 10:05:00 AM

Today's high school kids might not be as eager as their grandparents were to tote around leather-bound editions of Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. But how about "mobile" poems? How about access, from the palm of your hand, to such teen-friendly poets as Naomi Shihab Nye and Charles Simic, the United States poet-laureate?

This week, the Academy of American Poets and its web site Poets.org announced the launch of a mobile archive providing free access to a collection of more than 2,500 poems. For students in English courses, the site also provides such handy tools as biographies of poets and essays about their work. For secondary school educators, there's a curriculum section. Soon, poems posted on the site that are in the public domain will be available for downloading and printing.

The Academy notes that the site's design employs Web. 2.0 Internet Standards and Apple's Developers Guidelines, and is optimized for cross-platform use, including the iPhone and most mobile devices.

"I have always believed that poetry has a necessary place in daily life," says Tree Swenson, the academy's executive director. "Now you can find poems while on the go, as easily as you can read the news, find a map, or check the weather report." Poems can be browsed on the site by author name, title, the "occasion" that the poem describes, the poetry form, or by keywords.

Just in time for National Poetry Month in April, mobile users, on April 17, can join in a Poem in Your Pocket Day. Kids are encouraged that day to select a poem they love, then share it with friends and family, via a public reading, a poetry "give-away," or as the Academy suggests, a commitment to "put poems in unexpected places"—such as, well, a wirelesss message.