iPhone · free to download
One poem, full screen, unhurried. No algorithm deciding who gets read, and no counter running underneath.
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
— christina rossetti
One poem at a time. Swipe when you want the next one.
01 · Explore
Poema reads every poem as it arrives and sorts it by subject and by form, so you can ask for grief, or ask for a sonnet, and get one.
Themes
Forms
The globe chip filters by language. The library holds Bashō, Dickinson, and whoever published this morning, and the older poems stay in the language they were written in.
02 · Every morning
what you are almost ready to forgive
One line, chosen by the date, the same for every reader that day. It sits at the top of Explore with a link into the editor. Answer it, or skip it.
03 · Write
A title, a cursor, and nothing else. It saves as you go and keeps every earlier version, so you can go back if the first instinct was right. One button publishes it, or you keep the whole thing to yourself.
Drafts live inside it, because they were the same thing under another name. Nobody else can open it. Publish an entry as a poem later, or never.
Every version of a poem stays in its history, and any of them can be restored. Nothing you write is lost to an edit.
Respond to a poem with a poem. It publishes under your name and threads back to the one that started it.
Leave a note on a poem you love. The poet can reply. A short back-and-forth between two readers of the same page.
Your profile counts readers. No follower number appears anywhere, and a like count is visible only to the poet who wrote the poem.
After nine in the evening the background warms a shade, and settles back before five. The app keeps the same hours you do.
“Most apps treat a poem as something to scroll past, to like, to share before you have finished the last line. We wanted a place where you can read one poem with nothing else moving on the screen, and sit with it as long as you like.”
— The Poema team
Questions
The Journal
Haiku, sonnet, free verse, villanelle. The names get used a lot, but what does each one actually feel like to read and write? Seven of the most common forms, with a real example of each and a note on when the shape earns its keep.
There is a difference between skimming a poem and letting it land. Reading one poem a day, twice, without hurrying, is a small habit with real work behind it: Mar and Oatley found that regular readers of literary fiction score higher on empathy and theory of mind. Here is what that research found, and how to keep the habit past week one.
Most poets start in the Notes app, and most poems stay there, unseen, between grocery lists and half-remembered passwords. Here is what a space built for poems changes: the feel of the blank page, the decision about whether to share, and what happens once a poem can reach a reader.
Poetry did not stop after the Romantics. Ten poets working today, writing about grief, joy, migration, the body, and the ordinary. Each one comes with a poem to start on and a reason it might be the one that catches you.
