Thursday, April 2, 2009

Spam Poetry

I am fascinated with spam poetry, by which I mean those bizzare snippets of random text cobbled together in a spam message. I'm not a big fan of poetry in general, though there are a few exceptions, but there's just something so cryptic and evocotive about spam poetry. It's so meaningless there could be meaning hiding in there someplace.

Who's putting these together? Is there some sort of software that generates it, or is there a high-tech sweatshop somehere in Lahore where hundreds of educated wage-slaves madly cut and paste public domain text for 15 hours a day? I imagine one of these wage slaves, a young, Kafka-like man or woman quietly cobbling together deep and soulful poems to send out into the world's spam. He or she feels misunderstood, but thinks maybe someone out there will understand. It's all very mystical.

Here's one I got the other day. It's like that Kafka wage slave is speaking to me.

SUBJ: Your Account Was Banned. This is a joke :)

Source of all the error, guilt and distractions what should
not, and a treader of unrighteous should have to builde
a fortresse, i would make thy troops, while thy troops,
also, all battled to go to a far, new country of which little
was.

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