iPad puts poetry in motion

A screen shot from 'The Waste Land' app. Photo / Supplied

TS Eliot's The Waste Land, which was first published in 1922, is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. And in case you're wondering what a technology writer is doing making pronouncements like that, I should explain that I'm just quoting Andrew Motion, who used to be Britain's poet laureate and knows about these things. But for mere mortals, or at any rate engineers like me, the complexity of the poem has always put it out of reach. I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to read it before concluding that it would have to be added to my list of futile aspirations.

Until now.

What has changed is that last week Touch Press, an innovative publishing outfit founded by Max Whitby, Theodore Gray and Stephen Wolfram, in partnership with the olde-worlde publisher Faber & Faber, launched a digital edition of the poem for the Apple iPad. It's available from the Apple app store for $17.99.

Touch Press's founders describe themselves as makers of "living books that define the future of publishing". I'd say that they are better described as makers of beautiful things for multimedia devices.

Their previous ventures - particularly The Elements, an app about the periodic table, and Solar System, an app that harnesses the computational power of the iPad with terrific graphics and animations - have been revelations of what can be done by combining programming virtuosity with visual creativity.

Excellent though they are, though, these apps have been in an area that was predictable given the scientific backgrounds of Touch Press's founders.

With The Waste Land, however, they have definitively shifted from science to the humanities.

The Eliot app provides the full text of the poem, plus a useful set of interactive notes to its many arcane references. But to these it adds: a vivid filmed performance of the entire poem by actress Fiona Shaw, which is synchronised to the text; complete audio recordings of readings of the poem (also synchronised to the text) by Eliot himself, Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes and Viggo Mortensen; more than 35 expert video perspectives on the poem, filmed in partnership with BBC Arena, including contributions from Seamus Heaney, Craig Raine and Jeanette Winterson; and a complete set of facsimiles of the manuscript pages, revealing how the poem took shape under Ezra Pound's editing.

For me, the really eye-opening experience was listening to the poem, and following the highlight as it moved through the text.

Eliot's own readings (there are two, from 1933 and 1947) seem terribly bombastic, as if he were addressing a public meeting, whereas Guinness's is exquisitely feline and revealing, and Shaw's performance is startlingly intimate and conversational. Sitting there, iPad on lap, it was as though the poem had suddenly burst into life.

Some of the other stuff is riveting too. There's the interview with Seamus Heaney, and the consolation of hearing him confess that The Waste Land had scared him stiff when he first encountered it. Or seeing Jim McCue explain how the poem came to be published. Or listening to Craig Raine expounding on the significance of nationality in Eliot's life.

But best of all, in a way, are the facsimile copies of Pound's annotations of the manuscript. For example, in the passage about the departing seducer who "Bestows one final patronising kiss/ And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit/ And at the corner where the stable is/ Delays only to urinate, and spit", Pound has highlighted the last two lines and written "probably over the mark" - which explains why in the published version they have been deleted and replaced with an ellipsis.

One lesson of this remarkable app is that these things can probably be done only as partnerships. In this case, the partners were Touch Press (which possesses the formidable software and creative skills required to do this stuff well), Faber & Faber (which owns the rights to Eliot's work) and the BBC (which knows how to film and dramatise).

A second thought is that this is not so much "the future of the book" as a demonstration of the potential of technology to add significant value to a work of art - in this case a written text of great importance but formidable difficulty.

And lastly, in the week on which Bloomsday (June 16) falls, there is the intriguing thought that there is another great modernist text - also published in 1922 - that cries out for the Touch Press treatment. James Joyce's Ulysses comes out of copyright next year.

Some coincidences are too powerful to ignore.

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