One might argue that both poetry and the iPhone rank among the zeniths of human invention. Why keep these expressions of genius separate? 

The Poem Flow app will send a new poem to your iPhone every day. And it doesn't just copy and paste from Project Gutenberg. Flow seeks to tread the space between reading a poem as written and hearing it aloud by rendering each work as an animated sequence. You tap your phone's screen to begin, and then the words of the poem unfold in motion. Like a reader, the app choses which words to linger over, which to savor, which to speed through. It's something of an intermediary agent between you and the original text. It delivers the work according to its own rules. 

Of course, every reader of every poem automatically does something similar to what Poem Flow does. Part of the beauty of a written work is that it becomes something slightly different every single time it is read. It cannot impress identical meanings or experiences upon any two people. Each reading may be similar, but everybody brings their own association and methods of interpreting language to an individual reading. 

Flow seems to temper this disconnect by removing a few variables from the act of reading a poem: individual pacing and original line breaks. Just as one cannot see the shape of a poem at a reading and must infer it from where the reader pauses, Flow renders its poems without the breaks the poet constructed. Though one is still reading when using Flow, the experience is more like sitting in the audience of a coffeehouse hearing someone parse Wordsworth. In a way, the user hears the affect of the programmer in the reading. It's a reading separated by time and distance, but a reading nonetheless.

Poem Flow also allows the reader to view the full, inanimate text of a poem as written--so the original experience is not entirely erased. The developers claim that their application is a new medium of poetry. I'm not convinced--these animations seem more like transcriptions of readings than an entirely new medium. But if you enjoy reading poems on your space-age tools, Poem Flow is certainly a pleasant escape.