Everybody gets spam, and a surprising number of people are spending time breaking it into lines and posting it as “spam poetry.” In fact, a Google search of “spam poetry” brings up approximately a jillion pages (all right, only 759,000, which is considerably less than a jillion).

There seem to be two types of spam poetry. One is poetry that’s assembled from the sales messages found in spam. Blogger and spam poet Kristin Thomas is, arguably, the Spam Poetry Queen, cobbling together poems from the subject lines of spam she receives. Here’s one of my favorites:

Crazy Advice ...
Candyland, old times, new times, good times
Colon cleaner, sluts will love you,
Thou must medicate thyself.

Genitian, titian, titans, tits
indoctrination, doctinaire,
Getith thou prescription hereth.

Maggie Thomas, your xanax refill is ready.

It’s worth noting that “Maggie” is Kristin Thomas’s dog. Even her dog receives spam!

There’s even a book of spam-inspired poetry, I Am Spam by Larry O. Dean, a Chicago poet. It’s unclear from the news article whether Dean’s poems are 100% pure spam, or if just the titles are spam.

The other kind of “spam poetry” involves the blocks of nonsense words that often appear in spam. You know, the strings and strings of often intriguing words like lagniappe azure baboon hurling crustacean xenophobe rickettsia plangent. Yes, there’s a whole bunch of people out there who have begun to actually read that stuff, and either find poetic language and quasi-thought in it, or who are willing to consider the whole chunk “poetry.”

As this interesting article from the BBC notes, some spammers are even quoting chunks of public-domain literature in their e-mails, in an attempt to thwart spam filters by including sentences that lack words that would set off a filter (Viagra, penis, larger, longer, etc.) but still sound “human.”

Another hilarious article from across the pond (this one’s from The Register) breaks down spam poetry into several types, including pedigree dog names, fortune cookie-esque messages, and news headlines. Brilliant!

--B