Spam poetry, sometimes called spoetry, is poetic verse composed primarily from the subject lines or content of

spam Spam most often refers to: * Spam (food), a consumer brand product of canned processed pork of the Hormel Foods Corporation * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ...

e-mail messages.

History

Several writers have claimed to have created spam poetry, and consensus has not emerged about a single origin. Some early examples come from a spam poetry competition held in 2000 by the website ''Satire Wire''. Canadian poet Rob Read began writing and sending out spam poems to a group of 'subscribers' through his Daily Treated Spam email series in September, 2003. A selection from the first two years were published as ''O Spam, Poams: Selected Daily Treated Spam'' in 2005 by BookThug. Daily Treated Spam continued until 2011, and a new series, subtitled Spamdemic, began in August 2020. Animator

Don Hertzfeldt Don Hertzfeldt (born August 1, 1976) is an American animator, writer, and independent filmmaker. He is a two-time Academy Award nominee who is best known for the animated films ''It's Such a Beautiful Day (film), It's Such a Beautiful Day'', the ...

began writing spam poems in his production journal in 2004. Translator Jorge Candeias wrote Portuguese "spoems" daily, between 5 May 2003 and 5 May 2004, using spam subject lines as title and inspiration. A book entitled ''Machine Language'' by endwar was published in 2005 by IZEN and was followed by ''Machine Language, Version 2.1'' also by endwar in 2006. The latter edition includes a CD of spoetry read by Microsoft Sam and set to ambient musical sounds by Michael Truman who also tweaked the automated readings. Each edition indicates endwar as editor, but in the second edition he has admitted to using cut-up technique and having combined shorter pieces from the first edition, which lends more authorship to him in his creation. These pieces were also read at the opening of ''Blends & Bridges'', a concrete and visual poetry show at Gallery 324 in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 1, 2006, by endwar with the sounds by Truman backing. The experimental poet, endwar, cites his own collaboration with Ficus Strangulensis, the experimental poet, in 1995, ''The Further Last Words of Dutch Schultz'' published by IZEN as an earlier experiment in generating random text poetry, in this case, the software altered text of the bizarre last words of

Dutch Schultz Dutch Schultz (born Arthur Simon Flegenheimer; August 6, 1901October 24, 1935) was an American mobster based in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. He made his fortune in organized crime-related activities, including bootlegging and the n ...

as published in

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

in 1935, as well as the cut-up influences of

Brion Gysin Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...

and

William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist. He is widely considered a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major Postmodern literature, postmodern author who influen ...

and even the musicians

Throbbing Gristle Throbbing Gristle were an English music and visual arts group formed in Kingston upon Hull by Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti, later joined by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter. They are widely regarded as pioneers of in ...

and

David Bowie David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer, songwriter and actor. Regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Bowie was acclaimed by critics and musicians, pa ...

. The useful bits of spam for purposes of endwar's variation of spoetry, i.e., the part that is not the advertisement, but the random words assigned to trick spam filters, endwar calls "paratext". Endwar indicates that, in his view, "the effect of the evolution of paratext is that computers are learning to talk to each other by in some sense imitating human texts." The advertisements are the human-to-human conversation in the same email sources. A book entitled ''Spam: E-mail Inspired Poems'' by Ben Myers was published in 2008 by Blackheath Books. Myers said he had been writing spam poems since 1999. In August 2006, David Kestenbaum of NPR's ''

Morning Edition ''Morning Edition'' is an American radio news program produced and distributed by NPR. It airs weekday mornings (Monday through Friday) and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 5:00 to 9:00 a ...

'' broadcast a story on "Literary Spam". Kestenbaum notes that Paul Graham, a programmer, "wrote a program to find out how to best separate spam from real e-mail. To train it, he fed it a good helping of spam and a separate sample of real e-mail." Soon, spammers discovered the works of long-dead poets and writers as one way to circumvent Graham's

anti-spam Various anti-spam techniques are used to prevent email spam (unsolicited bulk email). No technique is a complete solution to the spam problem, and each has trade-offs between incorrectly rejecting legitimate email ( false positives) as opposed ...

code.

Similarities to other poetry

The creation of spoetry is similar to Gysin and Burroughs's cut-up technique in that individual subject lines of messages are pieced together in poetic form; making the creation of spoetry an exercise not in creativity as much as in having an eye for the unexpected. The end result can be crafted into any literary form the author desires:

haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct mea ...

limerick Limerick ( ; ) is a city in western Ireland, in County Limerick. It is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Munster and is in the Mid-West Region, Ireland, Mid-West which comprises part of the Southern Region, Ireland, Southern Region. W ...

dada Dada () or Dadaism was an anti-establishment art movement that developed in 1915 in the context of the Great War and the earlier anti-art movement. Early centers for dadaism included Zürich and Berlin. Within a few years, the movement had s ...

, and so on. Thus, spoetry is not a literary form but rather a means of creating poetry. A related concept is spam lit, where snippets of nonsensical verse and prose are embedded in

e-mail messages. Some of the snippets are original content, others are passages or conglomerations from

public-domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds the exclusive ri ...

works. The term was coined by a member of the Poetics

listserv The term Listserv (styled by the registered trademark licensee, L-Soft International, Inc., as LISTSERV) has been used to refer to electronic mailing list software applications in general, but is more properly applied to a few early instances of ...

in 2002.

References

{{Schools of poetry Schools of poetry Neo-Dada Literary concepts Random text generation Genres of poetry

History

Similarities to other poetry

See also

References