If our in-boxes are ‘an index of contemporary anxieties’, might they also yield a uniquely 21st century found art form? Welcome to the era of ‘spam poetry’, or ‘spoetry’, as it’s been dubbed.
The phenomenon began with the success of spam filters – programs designed to pick out emails with phrases like “enlarge your penis”, and prevent them from reaching your screen. In an effort to slip through the system, spammers have turned to their dictionaries, inserting random words like “pyrophosphate”, “necromancer” and “pine cone” with weird and occasionally wonderful results.
Could this entirely accidental prose be poetry? “There’s no doubt that ‘random’ word combination can be fantastic,” Dr Philip West of Oxford University told The Guardian earlier this year. “The ungrammatical use of nouns as verbs is something Shakespeare was very fond of, as, famously, in King Lear when Edgar says ‘He childed as I fathered’.”
Type “spam poetry” into Google and you’ll find nearly a million hits. Salesman cognate, is a poem from one Ralf Stephen, translucent gibbon comes courtesy of Chris Murrey. All around the globe, poets are scanning spam for phrases that take their fancy, and tacking them together in the name of art. Anthologies have manifest online, contests have proliferated, even visual artists have found inspiration in cut and paste haiku (such as Romanian artist Alex Dragulescu, who turned senseless verse into three-dimensional, high-concpet art).
Of course, this kind of thing has been done before – with more primitive technology. Beat poet William Burroughs, for one, liked to cut up passages of prose and then paste them together at random. “Consciousness is a cut up,” he argued. “Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments.”
Arguably, the real founder of the technique was the Dadaist Tristan Tzara, who nearly caused a riot in the 1920s by offering to create a poem by pulling words out of a hat. Tzara’s work was ferociously, nihilistically anti-art. It ignored beauty. It avoided meaning. It sought, in the words of Breton, “thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”
Clearly, many ‘spoets’ don’t pull words out of a hat – they painstakingly choose which nonsense phrases to use. But what about the spam poems that, in the finest Dadaist tradition, are a grab-bag of data? Can you construct art without the aid of reason or aesthetic?
Some think not. “Poetry begins with an emotion and develops into a thought,” said Robert Frost, while for Paul Valéry it “expresses a certain state of mind.” For Shelley, poems were supposed to be the “direct representation of the actions and passions of our internal being.”
But on the other hand, as Archibald MacLeish put it, perhaps “a poem should not mean, but be.” Keats, for one, was happy to revel “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
From epic narratives to haikus, nursery rhymes to elegies, history has packed vastly different styles of writing in the “poetry” basket. So who’s to say ‘spoetry’ shouldn’t join them?
Blogger Jon Casimir (aka. ‘Dr Spamlove’) isn’t. He, along with fellow blogger Kristin Thomas, claim to have “authored” the form he also calls “Frankenverse”.
“It occurred to me that, in a way, spam can be seen as an index of contemporary anxieties,” Casimir wrote. “It arrives not in our quasi-public letterboxes, but in our very private Inboxes, and so its content tends to be intimate. Because it has this access to our personal space, successful spam is able to play on personal fears, on our vulnerabilities. It hunts for psychological buttons and presses them. Spam attacks our inner selves in ways that other, more public advertising can’t.”
“There is also a Darwinian aspect to its nature. The more you get about a certain subject, the more it suggests that subject embodies a particularly robust anxiety. If there weren’t people out there responding to the weight loss offers, those deals would surely slow down or stop.”
Jules Mann, director of the Poetry Society in London, offers further explaination of the spoetry (re) evolution.
“I think it’s an accurate image, a recognisable image of what anyone who has spent any time on a computer or with emails will recognise,” she said.
“But I don’t know if it will have merit 75 years from now, if someone will read a spam poem then, and say, ‘Oh, that’s deep'”.
No one can know. But most would agree that the form has hit its stride. As Eva Wiseman observed in The Guardian: “Some spam emails are filled with nonsense. Others simply fill the heart…spoetry transcends its mundane commercial aim and becomes, yes, art.” As long as it continues to fill the occasional heart along with an inbox, spam will be more than the sum of its scams.
