Spam as literature – turning junk email into poetry

They are pesky, unwanted emails that can overflow our inboxes. They are so annoying and "invasive" that laws have been created to try and stop their spread, but to little avail. If you’ve done anything on the internet over the last decade or so, especially send and receive email, then you know what I’m talking about – spam!

Now it appears there is a new movement in poetry (probably not all that new, but this is the first I’m hearing about it) that turns those annoying, unwanted messages into works of art. It’s called "spoetry". Pretty clever, huh?

According to a blog post in the Guardian Unlimited Arts section, spoetry very could well be the next big thing in poetry:

Here is the future language of poetry: part machine, part human, all good. Just as pre-pen and ink societies produced narrative poetry, the industrial revolution gave birth to the Romantics, and the post-war American economic boom begat the Beats, so too – if the rash of blogs devoted to it over the past year or two are anything to go by – the technological age in which are living gives us spam poetry.

Computers and the internet have become so intertwined with our daily lives that I guess it’s no wonder that a phenomenon like spam will works its way into our artistic culture as well. The whole movement, at first glance, is surprising, but on a deeper level it’s one of those "ah-ha" moments when spoetry is something we should have been engaged in for a long time now. It’s that obvious.

But don’t think that spoetry is just taking a spam message, reworking the lines a little and then calling it a poem. No, it’s much more than that:

Since I first started publishing my own spam-inspired works online and in the odd anthology people have been forwarding me spam-mails offering Viagra, Nigerian bank transfers and the promise of "a penis like a Giant Redwood" and calling them poems. This isn’t good enough. Real spam poems require human input; they need a sense of order, otherwise they end up as unreadable gibberish reminiscent of artist Jake Chapman’s Metaphysics. This is typing not poetry.

Any type of poetry requires hard work to produce. It’s a craft. After fairly extensive study of poetry in college, the good ones really do make it look easy. But then try to write a poem that is even close to being comparable to one of the masters (fill in your favorite poet here), and you’ll realize that writing a poem involves a lot more than just slapping a few lines together. Spoetry is no different.

So what makes a good poem crafted from spam?

No: the best spam poems are those that twist the bastardised language into something new, something readable. Frequently, spam-mails are filled with incongruous yet titillating combinations of words or excerpts from science fiction or westerns. Spam poetry is therefore the literary equivalent of recycling; it takes off-cuts and lets them ferment into something new and occasionally exotic. A spam poet is as much an editor as a bard, someone who knows which pieces of fat need trimming, who can use a spam-mail as a spring-board into his or her own imagination. And though there are no rules, I happen to believe that the best spoems are those that can be crafted in a matter of minutes.

The bold highlighting above is my own emphasis. The key word in that passage is "new". All poems, whether directly from the poet’s imagination or taken from spam emails, should offer the reader something new and something fresh. Otherwise you’re just rehashing what has already been said a million times by a million other poets. People want to be enlightened by poetry.

With all that said, give it a try! After reading Guardian Unlimited blog post, I’ll never look at spam quite the same way again. Perhaps I’ll even try my hand at writing a few spoems – but I make no promises about that I definitely don’t promise to publish them here. I don’t write a lot of poetry as it is, so don’t hold your breath.

If you do write a spoem, and you think it’s pretty good, let us read it. Leave a comment with the spoem for all the world to see!

Check out the Guardian Unlimited blog post for the entire article and to read a few examples of spoetry in action:
Spoetry, please

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