The Art of Spam

"He had caught something from Buzzard, not some disgusting disease, but on
mirror-smooth mosquito mange, with many arms, like a starfish -- far away."

We've all seen these strange pieces of text at the bottom of an e-mail promising cheap Viagra or irresistible stocks. Designed to bypass spam filters, the text comes from random-word generators, lists of idioms, and sometimes classic literature -- I've traced some snippets back to Moby Dick. Most of us forget the nonsense as quickly as we delete it, but some on the Internet have gotten creative with it.

SpamPoetry.org offers "fine literature created by the world's spammers," hosting complete poems found in spam.

"Not only do these persistent individuals sell useful products like cable filters and international drivers' licenses, they also know how to combine words in a very powerful way."

Most are the avant-garde products of random word generators but can be quite moving: "Antiphonal, buffet will ever, resuscitate,/ I saw with, berglund,/ And i will, absorb,/announcing the beginning."

Others have taken to using spam as the raw material for their own compositions. Spam-Poetry.com has hundreds of poems made from spam subject lines, and with actual human involvement and craftsmanship, the poems are quite good.

The Register's "Spam Poetry Compendium" offers such subject-line gems as "Hydrogen atom living with necromancer" and "Dilettantes remain burly." The compendium even breaks down spam poetry into categories, and offers a large collection of works that are as often hilarious as they are surreal.

SpamRadio.com automatically sets spam to background music -- sometimes it creates the radio-ad effect that was probably intended, but often it sounds like something read in a dark coffeeshop in New York, especially when the random words are read more clearly than purposely mangled ad text.

The now-defunct SatireWire even hosted its own spam poetry competition, receiving over six hundred entries in the contest's second year.

Dozens of other, smaller websites and blogs have been built around using spam to create poetry. Inspired by their efforts I put my limited poetic ability to work. It probably won't win any future spam poem competitions, but I think it's satisfying:

I was all ready to go, but the stupid orderlies
interjected sympathetic noises and rhetorical questions.
They were up to their waists in fog,
Like burning alcohol
Neither living nor dead
That's the routine they have here.

What probably turns most spam victims into spam poets is a desire to find peace, humor, and even beauty in the aggressive, adaptive advertising that defines spam e-mail. A bloated junk mail folder becomes a literary goldmine; it's quite different psychologically from the dread -- or anger -- at having to delete it all.

The BBC says that spammers "exploit the hopes, fears and faiths of users to snare victims," with pills and other medical products comprising nearly half of junk e-mails. Pornography, once a spam mainstay, only accounts for seven percent of today's unsolicited e-mail. Finding ways to undermine the advertising that targets our self-esteem and insecurity is certainly healthy -- more healthy than buying grey-market Valium, to be sure.