Friday 04th of July 2008
Author's Note
It's unprecedented and exciting that some of the best poetry and wordplay currently being created is not to be
found in the pages of traditional poets or writers, but in the randomly generated unwanted
SPAM messages that fill our e-mail 'In' boxes daily. Perhaps for the first time it is the
online marketing men and technologically sussed code-writers that are inadvertently creating
a new poetic voice that is born out of and inextricably intertwined with the mechanics of the
technological age. It is they who are articulating the disembodied voice that exists in the
hinterland of this current economic and informational revolution.
In the simplest terms, spamming "the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages". It is marketing and advertising at its most immediate and intrusive, yet for reasons beyond my limited understanding, some of its anonymous creators see necessary to fill their messages with nonsensical copy. Spam is not, as expected, an acronym, but a reference to the Monty Python sketch which repeated the word to excessive levels and was adopted by the back-room boys of the 80s computer industry boom who were prone to filling their early unsolicited commercial e-mails showers with Monty Python quotes. These fella's truly were the snickering geeks we imagined them to be.
Advertising viagra, penis extension programmes and all manner of other shady ventures, these e-mails that survive in-built Spam filters are often crammed with poetry and prose that is wholly abstract, yet strangely effecting. What does it all mean, these post-Burroughs technologically-driven visions of the early twenty-first century? Who knows. Who compiles these little slices of nightmarish landscapes of conjoined adjectives and hybrid scenarios spewed froth form the amorphous and democratic brain that the internet has become? Maybe we'll never know - and that perhaps is the beauty of SPAM. It's anonymous, disjointed, detached; the soul of the writer stripped away to leave only words to be unearthed like scriptures form the future.
In an attempt to make some sense or order of these cryptic daily missives I began to compile the best messages, occasionally doctoring them slightly to make them a little more readable, yet spending only a matter of minutes on each in order to retain their original feel. Each title comes from either the subject line of the original e-mail, or a particularly memorable line within it.
Applied here the self-explanatory name 'Spam Poetry' is a nod towards the 'Slam Poetry' scene that has grown steadily since its inception in the US in the mid 90s, a new movement that applied the hip-hop tradition of live microphones battles to the stuffy world of poetry and which removed the boundary between performer and audience. If, as Slam Poet Bob Holman of the Nuyorican Poets Café said, this scene was "the democratization of verse", then Spam Poetry is a celebration of the anonymously doctored "randomisation of verse" a by-product of the informational and technological revolution in which we find ourselves.
SPAM Poetry starts here then, with a selection of the most interesting, evocative image-laden SPAM messages which greet me each morning. It is recognition of the fact that poetry can be found in the most unlikeliest of places and that the Technological Age is as relevant a muse or backdrop today as the Industrial Age was to the Romantic poets or the social shift of a post-War American dystopia was to the Beat generation. SPAM Poetry does sound pretty clumsy though. Maybe Viral Poems would be better?
Whatever. In the meantime, log on, tune in and read on. Ditch your anti-virus software and let the poems write themselves.
Ben Myers - July 2006