City Poems: Location Based Poetry

Poet and journalist Vicor Keegan writes in the Guardian about his adventures in publishing his first app for the iPhone. His app., City Poems, is an inventive use of location based data and will provide a whole new experience to the streets of London. His description of City Poems:

City Poems - published today - ... uses satellite navigation to guide culture vultures and tourists alike through the streets of central London poem by poem. After weeks of researching poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and histories. Wherever you are standing in London (or New York for that matter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been written about.

They include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay's The Beggar's Opera), public burnings in Smithfield ("His guts filled a barrel") or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square, which I had passed by in ignorance for many decades...

City Poems is available on iTunes. Via Openculture.

City Poems: Location Based Poetry

Poet and journalist Vicor Keegan writes in the Guardian about his adventures in publishing his first app for the iPhone. His app., City Poems, is an inventive use of location based data and will provide a whole new experience to the streets of London. His description of City Poems:

City Poems - published today - ... uses satellite navigation to guide culture vultures and tourists alike through the streets of central London poem by poem. After weeks of researching poems about the city, I realised that you can learn more about the past life of a city from poems than from most guide books and histories. Wherever you are standing in London (or New York for that matter) with an iPhone (or iPod Touch or iPad) in your hand it will tell you how many metres you are away from places and events that poems have been written about. They include the execution of the criminal Jonathan Wild (one of the inspirations for John Gay's The Beggar's Opera), public burnings in Smithfield ("His guts filled a barrel") or the curious stories behind the statues in Trafalgar Square, which I had passed by in ignorance for many decades...

City Poems is available on iTunes. Via Openculture.