Whatever Happened to Cell Phone Poetry?

Do you remember a brief time in history when mobile phone poetry became popular? People were penning poems on their cell phones and sharing their words around the world with the people they were connected to via their mobile networks. Some of these people went on to get rather famous (at least in Japan) when they published their mobile phone poetry. But this phenomenon seemed to fade as quickly as it hit the public eye, never really taking off in the mainstream among average creative cell phone users. What exactly happened to cell phone poetry and could it make a revival today?

What Exactly Is Cell Phone Poetry?

In the strictest sense of the phrase, cell phone poetry refers to poetry which is crafted using the mobile phone as the device on which to write the poetry. The most common method of doing this is to create a text message which is actually a poem. Because of this, the format of cell phone poetry tends to be short. The haiku is a very popular style for people who are interested in applying the art of cell phone writing to the world of structured poetry. Poets who write on both paper and mobile phone say that the main difference between the two formats is that it can take days, weeks or even months to perfect a poem on paper but that the process of writing out a poem on a cell phone is much quicker due to the nature of the technology.

The Mobile Art of Keitai Tanka

News about the creation of mobile phone poetry hit the media in 2005. It was at this same time that people in Japan were starting to get attention for releasing books that were written entirely on their mobile phones. A subsection of Japanese mobile phone writers focused on the art of writing poetry on their cell phones. This type of cell phone poetry was called Keitai Tanka.

Tanka is a formal type of poem which is structured in a specific way. It requires exactly 31 syllables written across five lines and is compared to an extended haiku. Keitai refers to the fact that this type of poem is being written on cell phones. In 2005, textually.org reported on a young female poet named Chie Kato who not only wrote her own keitai tanka poems but also published a keitai tanka web magazine.

That same year the Wall Street Journal reported on the growing popularity of Keitai Tanka. It was noted that dozens of websites popped up to celebrate the art of cell phone poetry. Additionally, a national radio program in Japan began airing a weekly show to highlight these poems and reportedly received approximately 3000 poems weekly from people (mostly adolescent girls, but people of all ages) who were busy writing Keitai Tanka in their free time.

How Popular Did Cell Phone Poetry Become?

There was a lot of news media about Keitai Tanka back in 2005 and early 2006. However, the act of writing poetry on cell phones seemed to go underground after that. Although there are probably still Japanese websites promoting and sharing the work of cellphone poets, this isn’t something that we see or hear a lot about today. There’s been a recent revival of people throughout the world writing full novels on their mobile phones so perhaps we’ll see a corresponding revival in the art of cell phone poetry but so far things are pretty quiet on that front.

What Could Happen With Cell Phone Poetry Today and in the Future?

Although we don’t hear a lot about cell phone poetry today there is definitely a lot of potential for it to make a comeback – and to make one that is more widespread around the world than the original launch of Keitai Tanka a few years ago. There are even a few people who are exploring the potential of this art today. For example, there was a call for entries for mobile phone poetry at the Melbourne Writers Festival earlier this year. The way that this worked was that the poems (which had to be 140 characters or less) would be sent via Bluetooth to the mobile phones of the people who were attending the event.

This recent call for entries suggests that the mobile phone is of more interest today as a place to download and read or listen to poetry than as a medium for creating poetry. Today’s phones are definitely highly capable of being a mobile delivery device for poetry content. You can use any smartphone to download YouTube videos of slam poetry readings or to browse the mobile websites of your favorite poets. The creation of poetry-specific phone apps must be in the future somewhere.

But are people using their mobile phones to write poetry anymore? They may be but it’s not something that we’re noticing as much these days because of the fact that the cell phone has become so entirely blended with the mobile web. For example, there are more than a few people out there who are writing Twitter poems (which aren’t that different from cell phone poems given the 140 character limit on Twitter). Many of these people are probably using their mobile phones to write and upload their poems to Twitter but we don’t realize that this is a cell phone poetry phenomenon because we don’t actually know if the poet is using the phone or their home computer to complete their creative act.

Cell phones back in 2005 were devices that were primarily used for making voice calls and sending text messages. It made sense then that any creative writing act that took place on the phones was basic text which was sent between people via SMS. These days the phone is used to share information in so many other ways that it’s not nearly so easy to define cell phone poetry as it was just a few short years ago. Nevertheless, the mobile phone is definitely a device which has the potential to be used to write poetry wherever you are.