Spam Poems
“HOMEOWNERS ARE IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE
CLICK YOUR STATE
Have you? that is it,
This Is The Secret Move I’m Talking About!
forget fresh the do,
Did but to the pile,
”should” is a economy.
Reserve’s a product, Canada-to-Texas,
The Child is father of the Man.
virtues are often only our vices in disguise,
careful Heroism is now restrained.
ensure that nothing jeopardizes my l ast wish on Earth
a man truly brutish and unnatural,
Murphy was unable to leave the pain.
He could not speak a word for full ten minutes.
lost,shaking,new,freedom,brother”
This is a project I've been working on for awhile. They are all poems written entirely using text from spam emails, arranged by me. It started with being inspired at an old job seeing the different styles and forms of spam emails. Strictly speaking they are not all emails, some other sources I use include hijacked blogspot accounts and google groups spam. One of the most important things I've gotten out of working on this is seeing how email clients and email filters understand humans vs nonhumans and intelligible language vs unintelligible language. It has made me think about how those value judgements came to be encoded and how they are passed on to us, the people that use email. This project has expanded to include some visual poetry also created using spam.