Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation has an app for ipods. I have to say I enjoy having the random anthology at hand.

To navigate you shake the machine and it reels the combination of subject and mood. I like the concept better than being parsed out one feature poem a day. I haven’t had as much luck with Poetry Daily.

Ah, but the makers of Poetry Foundation have a sense of humour. Under a spin that lands on “passion” & “love”, a result of Robbie Burns, “How can I keep my maidenhead”. For those nights that need that special wooing verse. lol.

Also in that spin, A Man’s Requirements by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Again humour. A touch of poetry, a touch of brutal standup smackdown.

Aphorisms and Spells by Alda Merini which has the stanza

I am completely
asexual
not counting errors
and omissions.

To give it another shake is only fair and lands me in “Nature” (subject) & “Optimism” (mood) and e.e. cummings in Just— which gifted the world with “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful”. And lands me at a poems by John Kinsella, Eagle Affirmation,

counteracts
bitterness against all the damage I see and hear
around me on an exclusively crisp blue morning,
when clarity is pain and even one small missing
wattle tree, entirely vanquished since I was last here
at home—I still find this hard to say—is agony;

I’m not sold on the idea of books in a handheld digital device but this is ok.

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