Spam becomes poetry
2004-01-13 08:16
Paris - Branded an irritation or even an evil of the modern age, spam is finding support from an unusual quarter: poets.
E-mails for Viagra, easy credit, weight loss and porn have emerged as surprising sources of inspiration for verse writers.
They are lured by spam's bleak prose, bad grammar and relentless pitch for sexual thrills and effortless reward, seeing in it the reflection of a society bent on instant gratification.
I know you like me -
I saw you at work today.
You'll really like this
badboy you
So runs Number 2, a poem by Kristin Thomas, which comprises phrases drawn entirely from authentic spam.
Other writers use a technique used by Sixties beat poet William Burroughs and popularised by David Bowie - the "slice and dice" method, in which random words are taken from a text, mixed up and randomly selected to make a new text.
The result rarely makes sense, but it succeeds in creating a cacophony of greed, lust and aggression that are all the hallmarks of spam marketing.
"I think it's an accurate image, a recognisable image of what anyone who has spent any time on a computer or with e-mails will recognise," said Jules Mann, director of the British organisation the Poetry Society in London.
In some cases, spammers accidentally create blank verse themselves - not in the message, but in the words that they throw into their rubbish in order to defeat spam filters.
Spam filters work by detecting keywords in incoming mail. The higher percentage of these words, the likelier it is to be junk.
So spammers try to thwart this by padding out the message with "normal" words in order to reduce the percentage.
"Sometimes they are quite interesting combinations," says Paulette Adell, who has a spam poetry webpage.
Sometimes spammers include phrases or sentences in the hope they will fool the filters into believing that a human being, rather than a machine, wrote the message.
New York writer Clive Thompson, who writes an authoritative "blog" (web log) on internet trends, discovered that some of these inserted words are taken from famous novels that are out of copyright, presumably plucked from the internet by robot software called spambots.
The crassness of spam has naturally spawned another kind of poetry, this time humorous.
For the past three years, Satirewire.com has had an annual spam poetry competition, whose winners include The 23rd Spam, by an author calling himself Sam the Psalmist, of which an extract follows:
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters,
He restoreth my credit and consolidateth my debts,
For as little as $1 750,
If I act now.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me,
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
And can now be 50 Percent Larger in Three Weeks.
Guaranteed.