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slash baby. It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strange Champs. Today, very new poems.

Somewhere along the way, we ruined poetry. I mean, poetry used to be fun. It used to be made up in bars by people who were drunk on words.

People used to memorize poems and say them out loud to their lovers. But then somehow poetry got academic and elitist and really hard to understand.

Today though, poetry, popular poetry, is back, and we can blame technology.

For example, I'm not much of a gamer, but I skipped work this week to play Elegie for

a dead world. It's a new game, based on some very old-school romantic poets, Shelley, Keats,

and Byron. And it was created by some serious gamers, the guys behind hits like the first-person

shooter, drunken robot pornography, and the base jumping game,

A!

I asked designer Ichiro Lamb, where they got the idea for a poetry writing video game?

You know, when you eat sushi and you have this pickled ginger between courses,

it sort of started as a small side project between courses, you know, larger games.

And I got together with a few colleagues at another company called Pop Cannibal, and we said,

we want to create this game where you explore.

And my colleague, Ziba Scott, said to me, what would be perfect for this would be to draw from

inspiration from the British romance

era poets. And I said, wow, this is amazing.

Do you like romantic poetry? Or was that his thing?

That was his? Let's say that I like romantic poetry now.

And wait, tell me about the poems you found. You know, our game is essentially about exploring these long-dead civilizations.

...