Poetry App tracks literary geography

Longtime Guardian editor Victor Keegan attempts to marry poetry and technology with his Geo Poems iPhone app:

To talk about poetry and technology in the same breath is enough to send most traditionalists running for a cold shower. Poetry, after all, is about romanticism and nostalgia while technology is, well, strictly for the geeks.

Or is it? There are two literary challenges here. The first is to write creatively about the revolution in social networking that we are living through in a way that can survive the lifespan of a tweet (about 15 minutes). It is not easy. The second is to exploit new media as a way of creating and delivering today’s poetry.  We are so used to reading poems from a book that there is a danger of thinking there is no alternative. It is still the most pleasurable way of doing it but it is not without drawbacks . . .