PoeticÁI: Write a Poem

A poem for the wedding, the eulogy, the birthday card. Forty poets in five languages, seventeen forms, and every poem kept on your device.

Poetry isn't a test you can fail.

It's the oldest way people have of saying the things that are hard to say, and PoeticÁI is a quiet place to try it. Pick an occasion, pick a poet to write in the manner of, pick a form and a mood, and a poem is written for you to keep, change your mind about, or give to someone.

NO SUBSCRIPTION. NOT NOW, NOT EVER.

Poetry apps have discovered the weekly subscription. This one hasn't. Everything here is either free or a one-off purchase that never expires and never renews. No trial that quietly becomes a bill, no account, no email address.

FOR THE OCCASION

A wedding. A eulogy. A fortieth birthday. A new baby, a retirement, a leaving card, an apology long overdue. Twenty-one occasions, and you can name who the poem is for so it's written to them rather than about the subject in general.

Poems for a funeral are handled with the care they deserve: no whimsy, no forced comfort, and an illustration drawn in black on grey rather than something cheerful.

WRITE IN THE MANNER OF

Shakespeare, Dickinson, Poe, Keats, Whitman, Chaucer, Blake, Yeats and twelve more in English. Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Ronsard. Goethe, Rilke, Schiller, Heine and Hölderlin. Lorca, Neruda, Machado, Bécquer and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi, Ungaretti and Montale. Or nobody in particular.

Forty poets, and the shelf is no longer only English. Set your phone to French, German, Spanish or Italian and those poets are simply there, alongside the English ones rather than instead of them. Any other shelf you add yourself in Settings. For the purist version, ask for each poem in its poet's own language: Rilke will answer you in German.

Tap a poet's portrait and you get a short life: when they lived, what they wrote, what they were doing to the language.

KNOW THE FORMS

Free verse, haiku, ballad, acrostic, ode, blank verse, limerick, prose poem, sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal, sestina, elegy, epic, concrete poetry, rubaiyat.

Seventeen forms, each explained in a line (three lines, 5-7-5, a single held moment) so you learn a little about how poems are built rather than just receiving one. Pick a villanelle and you'll see what a refrain does to a poem. That's the point.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Any poem can be given an illustration drawn in the manner of a 19th-century engraving: ink line work, cross-hatching, and a palette that changes with the mood of the poem. Poem and picture together make a card you can share, print, or keep in your library.

KEEP IT, OR SEND IT

Copy the poem as text. Share it as a picture. Export it as a PDF that prints properly on A4. Every poem you write is saved to your device: favourite the ones you like, swipe away the ones you don't. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is public, and there's no feed to perform for.

WHAT COSTS SOMETHING

Illustrations are sold as credits: a small one-off purchase, never a subscription, and they don't expire.

Patron is a single payment that unlocks the whole catalogue for good: every poet, every form, your own subjects in your own words, and illustrations without counting credits.

The free version is a real app, not a demo: thirteen poets, thirty-one subjects, eight forms and six moods, and as many poems as you like. Every language shelf has poets you can use without paying.

HONEST ABOUT WHAT THIS IS

The poems are written by an AI model. It's very good at form and often surprising, but it isn't a poet and it doesn't know what it means. Treat what comes back as a first draft, a prompt, or a curiosity. The interesting part is usually what you do with it next.

WHAT THE APP DOESN'T DO

No advertising. No account, no sign-in, no email address. Nothing you write leaves your device except when you choose to share it.

Made in the UK by Itch Studio.