dogmatika
SPAMalot
13 July 2006
"Ditch your anti-virus software and let the poems write themselves."
Poetry, Ben Myers-style.
It's unprecedented and exciting that some of the best poetry and wordplay currently being created is not to be found in the pages of traditional poets or writers, but in the randomly generated unwanted SPAM messages that fill our e-mail 'In' boxes daily. Perhaps for the first time it is the online marketing men and technologically sussed code-writers that are inadvertently creating a new poetic voice that is born out of and inextricably intertwined with the mechanics of the technological age. It is they who are articulating the disembodies voice that exists in the hinterland of this current economic and informational revolution.
In the simplest terms, spamming "the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages". It is marketing and advertising at its most immediate and intrusive, yet for reasons beyond my limited understanding, some of its anonymous creators see necessary to fill their messages with nonsensical copy. Spam is not, as expected, an acronym, but a reference to the Monty Python sketch which repeated the word to excessive levels and was adopted by the back-room boys of the 80s computer industry boom who were prone to filling their early unsolicited commercial e-mails showers with Monty Python quotes. These fella's truly were the snickering geeks we imagined them to be.
Advertising viagra, penis extension programmes and all manner of other shady ventures, these e-mails that survive in-built Spam filters are often crammed with poetry and prose that is wholly abstract, yet strangely effecting. What does it all mean, these post-Burroughs technologically-driven visions of the early twenty-first century? Who knows. Who compiles these little slices of nightmarish landscapes of conjoined adjectives and hybrid scenarios spewed froth form the amorphous and democratic brain that the internet has become? Maybe we'll never know - and that perhaps is the beauty of SPAM. It's anonymous, disjointed, detached; the soul of the writer stripped away to leave only words to be unearthed like scriptures form the future.
Myers' SPAM poetry can be read on his site; it has also infected Laura Hird's site.
In the simplest terms, spamming "the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, bulk messages". It is marketing and advertising at its most immediate and intrusive, yet for reasons beyond my limited understanding, some of its anonymous creators see necessary to fill their messages with nonsensical copy. Spam is not, as expected, an acronym, but a reference to the Monty Python sketch which repeated the word to excessive levels and was adopted by the back-room boys of the 80s computer industry boom who were prone to filling their early unsolicited commercial e-mails showers with Monty Python quotes. These fella's truly were the snickering geeks we imagined them to be.
Advertising viagra, penis extension programmes and all manner of other shady ventures, these e-mails that survive in-built Spam filters are often crammed with poetry and prose that is wholly abstract, yet strangely effecting. What does it all mean, these post-Burroughs technologically-driven visions of the early twenty-first century? Who knows. Who compiles these little slices of nightmarish landscapes of conjoined adjectives and hybrid scenarios spewed froth form the amorphous and democratic brain that the internet has become? Maybe we'll never know - and that perhaps is the beauty of SPAM. It's anonymous, disjointed, detached; the soul of the writer stripped away to leave only words to be unearthed like scriptures form the future.
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