For­get “spo­etry”; accord­ing to Boing Boing, exper­i­ments in the field stretch back a few years, and were known as “flarf”. The Flarf Fes­ti­val is a series of live events in New York City between April 20–22.

For archival pur­poses, here are my own three attempts:

• Gen­eral Flood
• 250 Ways to Thank You
• Here We Come!

Pooey. I see on Kottke.org that my oh so clever-clever Spam Poetry idea has prior art and even a con­cept album.

Gen­eral Flood

thank god I’m back now
Impor­tant ques­tion
did you hear about this
gen­eral flood

you won’t believe this
bereave­ment
enter­ing the line of
pop­u­la­tions if left

after flood­ing is
it, Will it work out?
con­di­tions will be
hard as nails

A spell by bal­lis­tics
shrewd may aim some
hey girl gun­fight uproar­i­ous
Ten Min­utes to Your Life

if we’d had the time
Save your house
Get what you need
plays on the small

The sec­ond in a series of found poetry taken from spam sub­jects. I’m tak­ing a dif­fer­ent tack this time, avoid­ing the more absur­dist lines that appear in No. 1 “Here we come!” (there’s plenty more of that wait­ing for No. 3) and aim­ing instead for a coher­ent nar­ra­tive flow.

250 Ways to Thank You

Don’t tell any­one please
about celebration

Are you ignor­ing me?
do you care?
is it funny?
It’s not a joke

I’ve Got a solu­tion for you
good idea
if you need it
here you go

The Great Exper­i­ment
some­thing unusual
nice gift for every­one
Get what you need

Don’t feel bad
You have been selected
Let’s meet up again soon
one more time

In recent months I’ve noticed my spam becom­ing increas­ingly bizarre. Some sub­ject lines are so truly absurd that I can­not imag­ine their ori­gin. Are they sim­ply really bad trans­la­tions of, say, Russ­ian or Por­tuguese? Are they ran­dom machine gen­er­a­tions meant to foil spam fil­ters? It’s a mystery.

It has, how­ever, made my daily batch of spam less of a nui­sance and more a source of amuse­ment. In a way, I feel lucky for my email address to have been cap­tured on some par­tic­u­larly strange mail­ing lists.

Some­times, a line is strangely poignant: “He worry in unabridged vol­umes.” Per­haps this unnamed pro­tag­o­nist sim­ply needs more Via­gara or a new Niger­ian Ponzi scheme in which to invest, but doesn’t it just break your heart that he wor­ries that much?

Which brings me to what may be the first in a series of found Spam Poems. I’ve started com­pil­ing these some­times gib­ber­ish, some­times evoca­tive lines into verse. Each line is a com­plete spam sub­ject line, com­pletely unedited. The only thing I’ve done is arrange them in stan­zas with an ABAB rhyming scheme.

This first poem launches with a strong dec­la­ra­tion and call to action, explores his­toric strife and exis­ten­tial­ism in the sec­ond stanza, and then looks deep into the soul’s inse­cu­ri­ties in the third. I hope you like it.

Here We Come!

here we come! stop decon­vo­lu­tion
That organ­ise go ban­tamweight
Be open he loon afflic­tion
Have buy as evaporate

Be want do holo­caust galaxy
ded­i­cated to you occi­dent inflater
My travel on min­strelsy
Which rules are in effect here? dev­il­ish calorimeter

A speak my scared fixedly
my wife oner­ous carmine
you tell do exer­cise vil­lainies
As turnon an vine