Smartphones
The whole world in a pocket, and a pocket-sized wall between two people at one table.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about smartphones: imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, exercises and prompts, in this free theme guide by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
The smartphone is the most intimate object most people own. It sleeps beside us, knows our searches at 3 a.m., holds the last message from someone we lost, and is the first thing many hands reach for in joy, boredom and disaster. A poem about a smartphone is therefore never really about a device; it is about attention, where we place it, who we owe it to, what it costs to give it away a glance at a time.
The theme divides naturally into the phone as window and the phone as wall. Window: the video call that lets a soldier watch her child blow out candles. Wall: two people in one bed, each lit by a separate small screen. Most strong poems in this territory choose one and let the other haunt it.
Why poets return to it
Poets take up the phone because the lyric has always been a technology of address, one voice reaching another across distance, and the phone is that impulse made hardware. Frank O'Hara joked that his poetics amounted to putting the poem between two people like a telephone, and the smartphone raises his stakes: now the beloved, the news, the dead person's voicemail and the weather in another hemisphere all arrive through the same slab of glass. An object that concentrated cannot stay out of poems for long.
Where it comes from
Poetry has courted each communication device in turn: the letter fed centuries of epistolary verse, the telegram brought its clipped dooms into war poetry, and the landline gave the twentieth century its anxious waiting-by-the-phone lyric. Each time, poets learned the new object's gestures and made them carry feeling.
The smartphone's poets are still naming its rituals: the read receipt, the typing bubble that appears and vanishes, the voicemail kept for years because a voice lives in it. Contemporary poems increasingly treat these as the era's shared images, understood from London to Lagos without footnotes, which is exactly what poets once trusted the moon to be.
The elements that carry it
- The lit screen in darkness, the era's candle, illuminating one face at a time.
- Typing bubbles, read receipts and ellipses: tiny dramas of hesitation and silence made visible.
- The kept voicemail or message thread from someone who has died, grief stored at 2 per cent battery.
- Cracked glass, dying batteries and chargers, the object's fragile body, mirroring our own dependence.
- The face lowered over the palm, a posture as recognisable to this century as prayer was to others.
Techniques that work
- Treat the phone as a place where scenes happen, not a topic to opine about: set the poem inside one call, one thread, one unsent draft.
- Use the interface's silences, the vanished typing bubble, the unread message, as your line breaks and white space; form can enact the waiting.
- Write the phone's contents as inheritance: what the photos, notes and voicemails will mean to whoever opens the device last.
- Put the device in tension with a body in the room; attention divided between screen and person is instant, familiar drama.
- Date your details deliberately, since phone rituals change fast; a precisely observed 2026 gesture will become documentary, which is a strength if chosen knowingly.
Mistakes to avoid
- The anti-phone sermon. Poems announcing that people should look up from their screens have been written; yours must find the ache, not the slogan.
- Ignoring the tenderness stored in the device: the last voicemail, the video of a first step. Contempt for the object misses half its truth.
- Technical name-dropping, model numbers and app names, that dates the poem without deepening it.
- Leaving out the body. A phone poem with no thumb, no lowered neck, no lit face is an essay in disguise.
An exercise
Open your own phone and find the oldest message you have kept on purpose. Write a poem about why it survives every clear-out, without quoting more than four of its words.
A challenge
Write two companion poems: one where a phone is a window, connecting two people across real distance, and one where it is a wall between two people in the same room. Use the same couple in both.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about someone listening to a saved voicemail from a person who has died, and the moment their thumb hovers over delete.
Before you submit
- The poem inhabits one scene: a call, a thread, a search, a saved message.
- Interface details serve feeling, not decoration.
- A human body shares the frame with the device.
- Neither sermon nor advertisement: the poem holds both window and wall.
- The ending turns on an action, send, delete, look up, power off, rather than a verdict.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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