Phoning it in – wonderment and dismay in the age of the small screen

September 11, 2023

A few years ago, I was eating lunch at an outdoor café. Halfway through my club sandwich, a thought darted across my mental palate – not just any thought but a terrific first line for a poem. I needed to jot it down fast, but I had no pen and paper. Who carries a pen and paper these days. I repeated the words over and over thinking I would note it when I got back to the office. Of course, by the time I returned to my desk, the words to the epic poem I had hoped to remember were long gone. I tried to compose the line, and I came close, but it wasn’t the line that I had thought of an hour earlier. When I told my wife about this later, she said, “Why didn’t you just make a note on your phone?” Embarrassed for overlooking something so obvious, I muttered that I hadn’t thought of it.

A few days later, I had not only an idea for a poem, but the first half dozen lines for one, ready to be set to paper. This time, I opened the Notes app on my Samsung Galaxy phone. After tapping a few keys, my Pulitzer Prize winning poem was committed to the cloud for eternal safekeeping.

At the time, I intended to use my Android Notes app to only store a few raw poem ‘materials’ and not to be used to complete a piece of work. Soon, however, I discovered just how easy writing a poem can be when using only the simple Notes app on my phone.

The first poem that I wrote was not nearly as good as I had originally thought. In fact, I was disappointed in my product (yes, I consider poems a ‘product’). But I had mastered a new technique for capturing my ideas on-the-go. Over the next few months, I would find my Android phone a most convenient tool for writing poetry. I found myself composing poems in restaurants, motel rooms, on airplanes and just about anywhere else that inspiration found me.

Of course, I came to the game far too late for this to be real news. After doing some internet research, I found out that poets are composing on their phones every day and there are now a number of poetry apps for both Android and iPhone that are quite popular. These apps allow you to share your poems with other users. I have installed two of these more popular apps, Poetizer and Miraquill. I’ll let you know how it goes as I familiarize myself with them.

In the meantime, what would a blog about telephone poetry be without a poem that I wrote on a phone? This poem I wrote while sitting on a Florida beach one afternoon. When considering a topic for a new poem, sand came immediately to mind:

Sand
Crushed quartz –
metamorphosized granite
muscovite and feldspar
washed
across half a continent,
remnants of runoff from
a West Virginia
coal company wash plant,
still
catch lazy afternoon sun.
Distant visions of a hard glacial
tide slowly rising for the
first time in ten millenniums,
swept clean in a thousand
Rivers; down The Kanawa,
down the Potomac, force fed into
the Ohio and the Savanna
and the ambling blackwater Edisto.
A million years before Sherman
and Sumter,
and the white washed porches
that face The Swanee.
Crushing, rushing
to the great Atlantic;
pulsing pulverized
pieces of the
Great Sassafras Mountain
and Mount Pinnacle
now churned beneath the toes
of a hundred fifty thousand toes
(on any given day)..
oh the great continental grind
pepper of the eons.

Like the poem, or hate it, you must admit it’s not every day you see the word ‘metamorphosized’ used in a poem. Thanks for reading. Mahalo – Ed.