Spam Poetry

I’m interested in the strange syntax sometimes found in spam emails. Occasionally in the babel, the words rub together in a way that suggests embryonic consciousness. Or perhaps it’s pattern seeking wishful thinking on my part. Regardless, as an appreciator of language and how ideas are built and communicated, I have at times been struck by the random beauty of spam. I am not alone in this, but had no idea there was an entire website dedicated to curating Spam Poetry until MetaFilter made me aware of The Spam Poetry Institute in a January post. Ah, MetaFilter, you contain multitudes!

Inspired by the post and the Institute, I submitted a spam poem to the Institute exactly as I’d cut it out of an email (reprinted just below) as well as a poem inspired by spam I’d written a few years back entitled “Fetal Horses.” I’ve included the poem at the end of the post.

Here’s the actual text from the spam email I sent them:

Thu October 28, 2010 12:11pm

Because is predestined friends, Designer Shoes we meet by chance in the space, because is sincere, we become the friend who separates the screen, a blessing, worries, Wholesale designer shoes our invariable subject stays behind in your space belongs to my footprint to remain the regard your space to wish your joyful happy each day!

I didn’t hear anything back so I checked back a couple of times, and never saw anything I’d submitted posted. I hadn’t thought it if for a while until yesterday, when I did a vanity search of my name and the word poetry. The first result of the search was :                       http://www.spampoetry.org/2012/02/07/because-is-predestined-friends/

It seems they published the actual spam poem and not Fetal Horses, but failed to tell me. So thanks and that’s kinda crappy, but all is well and vanity paid off again, because the search revealed the spam poem I’d submitted had been published at the institute in February. Yea Vanity! Come on, don’t pretend you’ve never Googled your own name.

So it seems so far this year I will be “published” at least twice. Do you think I’m going to add The Spam Poetry Institute to the list of place I’ve published? You bet your cute patoot.

Now I’m gonna do something very bloggy and ask if anyone else has spam poetry to share. Actual or inspired by spam, you know like based on a true spam email. If so please post them as a reply, I love this stuff.

Just for fun here’s another one I collected:

Grow tusk, quit your job and be a star

*

Fetal Horses

Fetal horses may gallop in the womb

My heart may undergo cardiac unemployment

are things I gleaned online today.

One sourced from a semi-scholarly work,
another from an imperfect
Babelfish Spanish to English translation-
you decide which.

And what of the poetry of spam?
not the overt nastiness of most

but the other oblique style of
gasping, grasping non-perfect language
seemingly generated by a senile digital intelligence
at times almost prophetic or hilarious
somehow subtly connecting the dots
of your internal constellations

a pre-syntactical Rorschach

groping to pass
its only purpose to decoy
its inauthentic-personhood designed to fool
to fish
to trick

a human into opening the trap
to discover the lovely offer of
penis pills, pornography
or arcane, insane stock tips

or just some lovely word salad,
digital glossolalia

sometimes the accidental explosion between words,
the random synergy of the
bot-prosody-algorithmic-alphabet-soup
feels like an infant god
shaking a rattle
in desperate, inarticulate expression
crying at the birth of a tooth.

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~ by 15wattLasVegas on September 28, 2012.