| Every morning, I wake up to dozens of emails. Some are work-related, but the bulk are just the equivalent of junk mail: credit card offers, notices about various things I don’t need that are now on sale. But then, there’s Pome. |
| Pome is an email newsletter that Matthew Ogle has been sending regularly for the past four years. The idea is simple: Every day, subscribers receive a poem in their inbox. |
| It all began in 2014. Ogle was in a bad way. Not a dark place, as such — he described it to me as “One of those ‘oh woe is me type moods.’” Browsing social media, Ogle came across an image from a book by Richard Brautigan, a poem called “We Stopped at Perfect Days.” “It did that thing that poems can do,” Ogle said. “The right words, at the right time, to the right person. I thought, ‘Wow, this feels really meaningful and magical.’” |
| Ogle grew up in a house full of books, and studied literature in college. Reconnecting with poetry on the phone in his hand helped rekindle his love of the form. And undertaking a personal creative project helped shake him out of his funk. Thus, Pome was born. |
| Readers have long been harnessing technology (from blogs to Tumblr, personal websites to YouTube) to share the writing they love. Pome is a natural outgrowth of Ogle’s professional life; at the time, his work involved recommending new music to subscribers of a streaming service, and he’s now employed by Instagram, where he’s tasked with helping users discover what’s new on the platform. Ogle’s newsletter’s mission is similar: to direct its readers to something he thinks is special. |
| Pome has a decidedly homespun feel. Ogle chooses every poem featured — they tend to be brief, but beyond that, there are a range of style represented — and sends it without the aid of a scheduling software, or any visual bells and whistles. Receiving Pome feels less like being on a mailing list than like getting a note from a friend. “I am definitely coming at it as a fan,” says Ogle. “I am an amateur. This is not at all a professional and curatorial project.” His subscriber base, which once numbered 50, mostly friends, is now near 4,000. |
| Ogle’s project stands out for its simplicity. It may not command the audience of the more successful social media poets (some of whom speak to millions daily) but Pome is a daily reminder of poetry’s vitality, not merely that it endures, as an art, but that it’s perhaps never been healthier. |
| “We've never had better or more effective ways of transmitting short amounts of text,” says Ogle. “I think it’s good, and right, and amazing that people are scribbling something down in their notes app and sharing it, and hundreds of thousands of people are reading it a few hours later. If that means that people who would never have thought that they were into poetry are now reading it every day, I think that’s great.” |
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