A quick post to link to “The iPhone app that puts poetry at your fingertips.” Here’s what said application does for you:
City Poems is the brainchild/retirement project of Victor Keegan, who was a Guardian journalist for 47 years. Keegan, himself a published poet, long ago recognised the potential relationship between poetry and technology—for many years he ran this newspaper’s text-message poetry competition, and his own second collection of poems was published in Second Life. His latest project allows iPhone users to source poems inspired by locations in central London via satellite location; so you could in effect conduct your own poetic tour of the city, following the streets, buildings, statues, buried remains and taverns that inspired the verse.
This seems like the sort of thing that could be done well in Japan. My office is a short walk from the birthplace of Yosano Akiko, for instance; the application could show you some of her verse when you approach the historical plaque on that corner. The whole nation is crisscrossed with travel routes of classical and medieval poets, and dotted with locations boasting rich histories of literary allusion, that could be presented nicely in an app like this.
The big problem is that Softbank’s network coverage is so crappy that if, say, you ride the shinkansen north through Shirakawa, you’ll probably be nearly to Kōriyama by the time your iPhone shows you:
都をば霞とともに立ちしかど秋風ぞ吹く白河の関
