Spam Poetry

I started collecting spam emails in college. There's this incredible incidental poetry that happens when a spam generator tries to emulate your other emails enough to sneak into your inbox. Gmail's spam filter is pretty good, but sometimes one program outsmarts the other, and a weird, poetic email manages to squeak through.

The surprising thing is how beautiful some of them can be - a line like "could blue the day cry" shows up in a blanket of text to promote a new online pharmacy - and you wonder what the hell you're doing trying to write poetry.

But there's something even weirder here - that the spam filters recognize certain jumbles of words as your actual messages, and it recognizes other meaningless umbles of words as artificial messages that have no real human sender behind them. And then a few manage to slip through this conversation between machines - one program judges the other one's output to be just nearly human enough to pass.



I considered turning in a collection of these as a senior project in poetry. I figured my review board would probably really like it and congratulate me on my experimental use of syntax and imagery and my commentary on the inane jumble of information and language that we are presented with on a daily basis in contemporary culture.


I think it would have gone over really well.



Girls drinking booze
Magnifico Aloysius

sky
for I've not afternoon
Every Rocket it
But himself done family voice,
hear with home.
Sands was always there-
I started there-
to see Santa using closed days, slapped around,
he said,
Look, instead
and smiled swiftly

and off the porch we all stay to see.
He went
time up hand
Come were they
green his The Rocket
only there were good things.

-with they're soiled.
on and the last hands,
blue we Saturday
Dad go a-twitching,

as never be forests jump,
holding him behind
could blue the day cry.



You Need to Know This

Cried fisher
suddenly the prime minister.
Possibly be necessary
to accept this.
Distribution
under the horse
and yet more.
Well
you
what if with.



This is not a myth

Distance and given her dishpan is true. Never seen and exclusions may often heard... Polychrome was near the ends of course. Body and exclaimed ojo in much. Suddenly appeared to help the money; Dishpan is coming here in return. Well, to remove the passage. Demanded the glass cat was another.

Everyone in the red wagon.



Described below: Apply to sleep in jinxland.

Close together with both the foot. Presently came running to have.
Asked scraps had fallen into plain... Frank Baum the hollow tube.