Spam Poets

There is a long tradition in modern art of composing with "found objects." With boulders, boughs, and leaves, an artist constructs an outdoor sculpture. Vast stacks of coffee filters are the raw material for an indoor installation. And discarded bolts, fishing line, and bits of machined steel might be just the thing to frame a work in oils.

Now a few bold souls are trying to fashion art from electronic found objects. Their battle cry: From spam, poetry. Taking phrases from the deluge of junk mail as their raw material, they assemble the verbal detritus into

poems. Kristin Thomas, a blogger whose spam poetry was part of a recent article on the BBC's website, writes poems using only the subject lines of junk mail she gets. An example from one poem, called "Number 2":

I know you like me --

I saw you at work today.

You'll really like this

badboy you

New times demand new forms of art. I don't sense that spam poems are going to have great lasting value, but they are perfect in their own way. And who knows, 50 years from now, a social critic could easily look back and say, yes, it is the spam poem that best captures the spirit of the time -- the cynicism, the materialism, the increasing speed of existence, the awkward integration of computers into mainstream life.

I am deluged by spam at work, maybe 75 e-mails a day. I get all the usual suspects: "URGENT BUSINESS ASSISTANCE," "hi," toner, prescriptions, refinancing, and various offers to have myself enlarged. It is a huge nuisance. (I am sure the IT guys "are working on it.")

Yet I have been interested to watch how the form evolves. In a way, the subject lines are like poetry, in that they are carefully honed to achieve an emotional effect. They want you to open the e-mail.

Put them together, in stanzas, and they are pathetic, in the most complete sense of the word. Consider a spam poem on the website SatireWire

.com:

I wouldn't have believed it myself,

But now there is a better way.

There is no catch.

I have to get this off my chest before I explode!!!

Electrigel Creme

Another online poet, Ben Brown, who edits a Web zine called Uber, has created an even more elaborate technique that, appropriately enough, automates the artistic process. Brown has compiled a huge database of junk mail. He uses another piece of software, called DadaDodo, that looks for patterns in the text and generates new text according to those patterns.

On his website, there is a place where you can click to get a custom-made prose poem. I got one that I think perfectly captures the numb, dissociated feeling of spending a long day in airports:

Check the safest most Liberal lenders,

will send an opted in major Bonus gold;

rewards travel generate targeted

it could be all Requests processed

and competition and save up s.

Spam poems also evoke another particular state of mind. When I come into work every morning, I have a large haul of spam sitting in my in-box. I have become accustomed to quickly sifting through the subject lines, deleting large blocks of the e-mail.Not until I had read the spam poems, and started to think about them, did I realize how much of my time I spend fending off an inhuman overload of information -- TV commercials, the buzz of the newsroom, the noise of urban life. You think: Do I need to pay attention to that? No. How about that? No. That? Maybe.

Many people, I suspect, spend good parts of their day in this filtering mode. My question, inspired by this new art form: How much of the mounting spam of life comes to us entirely uninvited, and how much do we bring upon ourselves?

Gareth Cook can probably be reached at cook@globe.com.