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Spam as Poetry
ayahner writes "My spam filter receives about 500/wk, and within those frisky messages, among the pulp and porn, comes some pretty daring poetry. So instead of simply removing the spam, I have decided to peruse my spam library and use the best to spur my creative energies. Do any /. members have their own favorites? I have compiled a few of my own, and expect to add many more over the next few weeks as a creativity exercise. All of the verses are taken from actual spam, and copied directly without modification. Some of them are nonsense. Others are real text of spam, delivering their message. When combined, they tend to form semi-articulate sentences. I see a virtual e.e. cummings here, an occasional Shakespeare there."
At this point you could probably combine random words from a dictionary and call it poetry..
I actually believe that this is how Mr. David Bowie wrote a few of his songs.
Though I believe beat poets such as Bryon Gysin and William Burroughs were pioneers of the cut-up method, where they basically chopped up other texts and then arranged the words randomly to try and create a form of poetry.
Not always the most succesful of methods, but led to some pretty fantastic works.
This article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on May 1st. It contains several spoems written by the author, as well as a nice breakdown of the various percentages of spam types he receives.
I've seen these sorts of poems appearing alot on blogs recently. Even tried my hand at it when I had half an hour to spare. It's good fun. Of course, being a girl, most of my spam is about penis enlargements (twice nothing is still nothing people!), but some of the more random spams make for interesting poetry.
Well, I'm sorry, I haven't seen any poetic spam. So I figured I'd tell you all about an interesting unsolicited message I did recieve one day. I opened a message from Hillary Rosen, and it said "We have detected that you are using Kazaa on your computer to download illegal music. Your IP address and ISP account info have been forwarded to the FBI. You can expect a knock on your door within the next two weeks. ... We'll settle for $1,000 if you click on this link.."
Yeah, not poetry, sorry. (I won't whine if modded off-topic.) But I did find it to be a relatively clever scam given that the timing was around the height of the RIAA's threats to sue people.
Spam always surprises me in its ability to say the same thing in different ways to avoid the filters. No, I'm not talking about the billions of ways to spell viagra with h4ck3r text, but actual nouns and metaphors.
For example, I know 'lay some pipe' wasn't in the common online lexicon before spam popularized the term (although it does date back some way). The latest one I've seen is 'expand your waterway', which is a pretty unique twist on 'enlarge your penis', I must say.
Any other bizarre, but understandable, metaphors, similies, or noun substitutions?
Check out Darwinian Poetry.
It gives you two "poems" at a time to read and consider. You vote for one, and the ones that get the most votes are "bred" to form the next generation.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Actually, as far as I know, Dadaism and Tristan Tzara came up with the idea of cut-up poetry. Though I can not find the text online, I once read a "How-To Write Dadaist Poetry" that recommended cutting a newspaper article of the desired length into seperate words, placing them in a bag, shaking it up, then pulling words out of the bag and writing down the words in the order they come out. Using this technique, I wrote Egging.