Kindle on the iPhone / Buy futures in poetry

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.