NPR's All Things Considered: Spam Poetry

There is a strange relationship between spam and poetry. There is, of course, a proud tradition on the internet of spam haiku, about the trademarked canned lunch meat, not the annoying junk email. SatireWire has hosted at least two "Poetry Spams." Then there is Habeas, an anti-spam filtering software that depends on a copyrighted poem as the heart of its filtering technology.

Poet, novelist, editor of the online magazine Exquisite Corpse and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, provides yet another angle on this fascinating intersection: spam as poetry. Noting that many spammers lately have taken to patching together random strings of words in order to skirt by anti-spam filters, he delights in the resultant "word salad" this often produces:

At first I thought that avante guardists had targeted me personally for the guerilla poetry…. Tristan Zara, founder of dada, would have been proud of this one:

Yearly perplexed bookie Cynthia
Aggression, discretion, bravado culture
Ghost-like introvert
Cybernetic Christie Bulgaria comedian condition
Jigsaw Romsketch [?] Romano cortex
Inflator shree [?] Hopskin nausea dirt
Laser bonanza charcoal orthopedic cellular

There are poets in this country who'd give their left foot for a poem like that.