Spam Poetry, Part II

Unlike the previous installment—in which I transformed an entire "work" of spam into a single poem—this time I've culled single lines from a multitude of spam in an attempt to create eerily impersonal poetry. 

I've a file in which I store spam-text, so creating these poems consisted of finding just the right line to develop each to what I, in the spirit of the originals, will call its "most maximal potential."  I played by the rules this time—each line is rendered as it arrived in my inbox, with no change in tense or pronomial shifts—but in the future I may fiddle with the formula until "I can deliver it superbly every time the way she likes it."

For now, the rules are the rules "even though most people don't know they exist yet."  I think most of the lines will be recognized "easily and instantly, without you having to do anything."  I that think contributes to a charm "which will certainly be  increasing over time, especially in the next year."  So yes, the "poems":

Mostly Urgent*

The great prognosis is drawn up.
The achievements of our highly capable partnership will exceed all expectations.

The key is getting in early.
We have a place for you.
Can you confirm your interest in our mutual respect?
We will remember your notification number.

The transaction is without risk.
You should not entertain any fear at all.
There will be no stopping this one.

Right now we wait for it triple.
Increases are not down lately.
We advise you to buy today.

*Our target is a modular fish system.

Race War

The race war will come.
You will likely be a winner.

Chief John's Plan

My name is Chief John.
I have a very sensitive
Plan which may interest you if
You are not the man you once were.

If you have ever wanted
To reclaim the virile potency of your youth,
Give my plan a thought and get back to me soon,
As a demonstration of your interest
In recapturing your masculinty
With rapid short term growth.

Bad Timing

You can live a longer and fuller life unless
The cause of death is suspicious.
(By then it will be too late.)

Real Men Hear Voices

Imagine being able to have:
Died in a boat accident when returning from a business trip—
With your entire family in a tragic plane crash—
From an unexpected cancer of the breast—
At the hands of unpatriotic rebels—
Or suddenly.

You would surely take advantage of the opportunity
To see your loved ones taken care of.
But do not tell them them when you start communicating with them.
(Except for the brother of the President:
No one can scare a real alpha male.)

 We Aim to Articulate

We seek history.
We are casting our net widely.
Spectacles and speculations frame us.
They are made of history.

Guaranteed.

Unnecessary Risk

We will reclaim necessity.
It will help us navigate
The many dangers out there
For people just like you.
With our help you will avoid them—
Including those most painful years—
If only you can act out of necessity
Before we can reclaim it.

Secret Jew

The courier does not know
You'll be reading Hebrew by Chanukah.

Comments

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, are you familiar with the Flarf poets? Brilliant, stupid poetry made up from Google searches and spam. Here are some links for the interested:

--Village Voice article on flarf:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0434,essay,56171,1.html

--Wikipedia entry on flarf:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

--Mike Magee on flarf (from a Charles Bernstein syllabus):
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/syllabi/readings/flarf.html

--Mike Magee's "My Angie Dickinson" project:
http://myangiedickinson.blogspot.com/

--Mainstream Poetry homepage:
http://mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com/

********
And here's some flarf. This is one of my favorite poems ever. It's got a great beat and you can dance to it. It's by K. Silem Mohammad:

Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true
big birds make
big doo! I got fire inside
my "huppa"-chimp(TM)
gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god
wanna DOOT! DOOT!
Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!
oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take
AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee)
uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah
hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get
off the paddy field and git
me some chocolate Quik
put a Q-tip in it and stir it up sick
pocka-mocka-chocka-locka-DING DONG
fuck! shit! piss! oh it's so sad that
syndrome what's it called tourette's
make me HAI-EE! shout out loud
Cuz I love thee. Thank you God, for listening!

[Rich Puchalsky]

LB, I always end up saying soem varient of the same thing, and you always end up taking me too literally, or something. But isn't this more evidence for the coming "Every Poetry Reader A Poet"?

I mean, Scott wants to write poetry, so he cleverly puts together lines from spam, and you want to write poetry, so you do occasional parodies -- I haven't forgotten your three cats. These provide plausible deniability -- you're "not really a poet", especially in that horrible, way-uncool lyrical style; you don't take yourself too seriously, the crowning hipster sin. But I don't really know why anyone who likes to read or hear poetry wouldn't want to also write or speak it.

And everyone can. That's really the message of flarf, among so many other recent poetic styles, isn't it? It's total democritization. Which is not to say that aesthetics doesn't exist, or that poems are not good or bad, but that finally that isn't of primary importance to most people anymore.

[Luther Blissett]

Rich, sure, there's a democratizing movement going on in the poetry world from a variety of directions: (1) slam poetry; (2) creative writing courses; (3) flarf; (4) hip-hop and spoken word. But I think the motivation behind each is quite different, and we have to take that into account. Flarf, for instance, is a deliberate attempt to parasite onto the "mainstream poetry" world -- which is why Mike Magee calls this aleatory trash poetry "mainstream poetry." The not so hidden secret of the lyric/new-formal poetry scene is that, while the poets lash out against obscure or intellectual verse as anti-democratic, their scene itself is based on connections, glad-handing, favoritism, and so on.

In the end, I don't think Flarf is great poetry. It's basically a new form of dada, a big F-You to the New Yorker drivel that passes for poetry these days.

But where the experimental poets do right is in the way they've tried to democratize poetry. They attack the whole "genius" discourse that's still rampant in a variety of forms: "the poems write themselves," "the poems are true to experience," "I am not in control of my characters," and so on. Instead, in the writing of folks like Perelman, Bernstein, Silliman, and others, we get an almost neo-classical attention to the poem as a made thing. But unlike the poetry-workshop craft-as-therapy baloney, the avant folk are all about pushing craft into newer and newer territories.

Of course, there are exceptions. Jack Spicer articulated a notion of the poem coming from "Outside," with the poet as antenna for language. This returns in Nate Mackey's religious poetry. But for the most part, the experimental poets have returned to language as stuff, as material, to be manipulated. Even when a poet like Jackson Mac Lowe abdicates authorship by using computers to randomly deform language, the technology isn't seen as magical. it's all about fumbling with language and finding new form. That's why I hate the term "new formalists" for those idiots out there writing novels in sestinas or whatever. That's retro nonsense, worse than The White Stripes. The true new formalists are the Language and post-Language poets who have constructed new forms -- like Ron Silliman's "new sentence."

But you should read Ron Silliman's blog if you think poets no longer care about good or bad poetry. The experimental poetry scene is one of the few places anymore where writers bring a deep and informed sense of the history of poetics to bear on poetry. Flarf, true, is not about quality; it's about challenging the mainstream ideas of quality.

Even with something like Flarf, though, there can be good and bad. Just as there's good or bad free jazz or noise music. Flarf poets might not be interested in the aesthetics of their flarf, but I can definitely decide between good and bad Bruce Andrews or Mac Lowe poetry.

So I don't think the audience of poetry is simply the producers of poetry (or vice versa). If anything, it's "creative nonfiction" that has become the "anyone can do it" genre of today. You might be right that consumers of poetry are more likely to try their hand at producing poetry than, say, consumers of novels. But I think that's more about the difference between poetry and fiction: people who like poetry are generally those who enjoy playing with language. (Of course, storytellers love language too, but the demands of narrative basically define the extent to which you can play with language. The more the storyteller distorts language, the more it comes off as poetry: *Finnegan's Wake* or passages of Burroughs and Kathy Acker, etc.)

[Luther Blissett]

Rich: Here's a recent Charles Bernstein poem that at times sounds like Flarf, but that is apparently remarkable poetry. The mixture of silly and prophetic registers reminds me of Blake, and I wouldn't be surprised if Blake's Songs were behind this one:

***********
The Ballad of the Girlie Man (by Charles Bernstein)
—For Felix

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
A democracy once proposed
Is slimmed and grimed again
By men with brute design
Who prefer hate to rime

Complexity's a four-letter word
For those who count by nots and haves
Who revile the facts of Darwin
To worship the truth according to Halliburton

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store
The rich get richer, the poor die quicker
& the only god that sanctions that
Is no god at all but rhetorical crap

So be a girly man
& take a gurly stand
Sing a gurly song
& dance with a girly sarong

Poetry will never win the war on terror
But neither will error abetted by error

We girly men are not afraid
Of uncertainty or reason or interdependence
We think before we fight, then think some more
Proclaim our faith in listening, in art, in compromise

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The girly men killed christ
So the platinum DVD says
The Jews & blacks & gays
Are still standing in the way

We're sorry we killed your god
A long, long time ago
But each dead solider in Iraq
Kills the god inside, the god that's still not dead.

The truth is hidden in a veil of tears
The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear

So be a girly man
& sing a gurly song
Take a gurly stand
& dance with a girly sarong

Thugs from hell have taken freedom's store
The rich get richer, the poor die quicker
& the only god that sanctions that
Is no god at all but rhetorical crap

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies & proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The scabs of the mourners grow thick with fear
The truth is hidden in a veil of tears

[Rich Puchalsky]

"But you should read Ron Silliman's blog if you think poets no longer care about good or bad poetry."

Well, I didn't say that "poets no longer care", because that isn't true. I think that my original phrasing, "that isn't of primary importance to most people anymore", is better. Most people, I think, give most of their attention to their acquaintances, even though these community poets are manifestly not as good as those they could read more "distantly" either in time or in space. Thus I still remember your three cats attack, or Scott's ode to his faux-tee, better than I remember many of the aesthetically better poems that I've read in the interim.

I come out of the spoken word subculture mostly, though, so that of course colors my perception of what's going on.

As for Silliman, I admire his objectives, but I'm still not quite ready for direct engagement with langpo. There's something about the self-conscious avant-garde that isn't really what I want -- all that "almost neo-classical attention to the poem as a made thing [...] pushing craft into newer and newer territories", as if they are doing something different that no one before has ever done. The next move in poetry, I think, is to accept that everything has been done, and then go on. Bernstein's line "Who prefer hate to rime" is a case in point; no more poetry that alludes to writing poetry; it's time to stop being meta and just write. At least, that's my mood for this week.

Here's my almost-latest poem, in first draft, so that you can scorn it if you wish:

Signals

When we were waiting in the line
It passed hand to hand to hand
The note
"Ten" it read
We looked at, up, eye to eye
And waited
For the branded bottles of water
The flies
The mold the crooked sign
Unmoving

"It's time to go" he said at the bar
"Time to join up"
He would get a bonus
His face gleamed
Shiny, "nothing else to do"
And the TV static
Formed a nine, circled,
Testing

He had a job
Coordination
The dismal flicker of eight
On the CRT
The flights sent
Dropping people one-way
Only digits came back
"Eight" he Emailled
Broadcast

"Seven" puffs the sky writing
Over the assembled cameras
The backdrop
The camouflaged ranks
The mike

They were well dressed
Celebration signs waved decorously
Conversationally
"We want the Rapture"
And others
"666 speeds the second coming"
Crosses
And forward-looking smiles
And a wind-blown sign tumbling
With just one more six

"Five" whispered the voice on the phone line
It was recorded
Aren't they all?
In a special file
Played over and over
Scanned for hidden messages
"Five" it said "five"
They let it alone
There was so much else

"Four" he laughed crazy
To the people at the nation's mall
"More years" he laughed
"You all want more"
And they nodded,
More

The radio said three chirpily
In between the uncanny voices
The time-old talk
They had been talking from the beginning
About three-fifths,
Three fifths
And how that was always
Written, always should be

When all the LEDS
On all the alarm clocks
Blinked two endlessly
The people
Who were to have awoken that day
Looked, groggy,
Decided to get up, go on,
Wanting it over with
Wanting it the same

On the final day of that country
The voice said One, everyone heard it
"One" and they took out matches
"One" and burned the books that told them they were good
"One" and stumbled, footsore, into the wilderness

-- Rich Puchalsky

[Jonathan Dresner]

"We Aim to Articulate" is my clear favorite here. I have no opinion whatsoever on the nature of poetry as such.

[Sarapen]

Been lurking for a while but am commenting for the first time. Anyway, this article is kind of old, but it's about how a spam poisoning program evidently produces (produced?) output greatly resembling L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Kind of interesting that both spam poisoners and spammers are now producing gibberish.

Also, an article about the politics behind found poetry created from spam.

The last paragraph of the 2nd article:

"The recycling of spam e-mail into postmodern lyric is, from one angle, a symptom of this ‘extremist’ curtailment of negativity. The raw material comes from black-marketeers and fraudsters in countries that the US bombs or enslaves through financial debt; it ends up reinforcing the orthodox aesthetic ideology of the US avant-garde. It is negated by means of a strictly ironic détournement, which amounts to positive inclusion in a dominant poetic culture whose creed is Anti-Author. The interface is violent and preposterous. What western theoreticians of aesthetics are keen to be seen avoiding with sophisticated zeal – the rights of an author, authority for the English language in western society – is almost certainly something that the African ‘businessmen’ sitting in front of their keyboards in their IMF colonies are highly anxious to take for themselves. Spam is not there to be reordered magically into poetry. It is evidence of the desire of people to cheat capitalism and screw money out of gullible and greedy English-speakers. And for anyone unconcerned with the consumer rights of westerners and the parapolitical ideologies that make up their pedestal, that is poetry enough."