March 2009

If I were a derivatives man, I’d go to the Chicago Board of Trade and buy up some poetry futures. Sell frozen orange juice and pork bellies; buy poetry. Why? Because it is the perfect product for small screen reading. People are reading more and more stuff on smaller and smaller screens, everyone knows this, duh. War and Peace is available for the Kindle, but who wants to wrestle that monster through a keyhole? Anyway, last night, I downloaded the awkwardly named Kindle for the iPhone. I had tried to become a Kindle user (of the device — confusing, yes?). I failed at this, but I had some Kindle-ized books left over — Leaves of Grass and the Modern Library’s Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson — and I downloaded those. I didn’t really expect much.

Twice today, I found myself reading through sections of Leaves of Grass: “A PROMISE to California, / Also to the great Pastoral Plains, and for Oregon: / Sojourning east a while longer, soon I travel toward you, to remain, to teach robust American love.” Good reading as I watched the lunch crowd at Mixt Greens. The entire Leaves of Grass is available on Bartleby, by the way. Then, as I was waiting for a conference call to start, I read Emerson’s poem “Self-Reliance.” Hard to conduct a conference call with a mind thus expanded by poetry, but I think I can get used to it. Poetry on the iPhone! It makes a lot of sense, and Amazon did a nice job with the interface. Simple, to the point, no BS, just like reading should be.