Writing Poetry From Spam

Metatags are declassé. The big search engines haven’t used them for 6 yrs. now. Anybody can put “god, love, jesus” in their metatags while the img src tag points to a jpg of a dwarf in flagrante delicto with a dog. Metatags became unreliable the instant they were proposed because most people have no scruples about lying. And so search engines stopped indexing metatags in order to avoid indexing porn sites. Ah, but that was merely the opening salvo in a grand war—maybe a world war. World War XXX. And virulent marketing sploggers keep link farms that trap hapless surfers into infinite loops. These spirals descend into consumer hell. “Buy me, no buy me, no me,” they scream as you finally close your browser in despair. And here’s their latest trick: they analyse keywords, then include them in their blog entries and their spam, or include words from rss and atom feeds, all to gain top page ranking on google or to avoid detection by bots and crawlers. And so the search engines respond by ignoring the primary search terms in text on an html page. But what if … and my mind begins a crawl all its own.

What if you are a poet whose compressed text and multivalent lines happen also to be common key search words? Will undiscerning readers merely dismiss you as a purveyor of porn, or a click–through con man? Maybe you are unjustly scorned. Here are a selection of such poems which risk being overlooked for their coincidental resemblance to the stuff produced by spammers.

Ode to a Grecian Spam

1. and yukon a walgreen some baneberry see bathe in feminine but minerva it’s trump or aloof may cannister not magnet not addition the corpse it’s alison try manometer and belfast a betsey see militarist in knoll ! catbird some cabot not jacm but nonce some conflagrate it’s horoscope ! cupric, turbid ! order be faulty it joyful some blowup or aurora the hurdle it’s fisk ! aggressor, embrace be tranquil not hummock it’s antony it’s connector, drip a yachtsman may iii but extrude some photometry ! bois Naw

2. There were shouts of joy, screams of pain, wild enthusiasm. As we drifted down to the ground, silently on null-gray drive. The door No, I suggested. If you wish to be of assistance, you can really

3. fire. I dared not look in the mirror for fear of what I would see same time. If you cant think of anything else to do crook your arm numberless rustlers.

4. farms. The only really puzzling thing about the 3D map was what looked while our next door neighbors tried to wipe us out. The inferior sex Put the mind in gear, Jim! I shouted at myself, my words loud in

5. cumin and antithetic on colatitude the demystify on bucknell in biltmore not cyclotomic some animate it’s arterial and conrail be accra or belvedere it’s cactus be apollonian or childish it’s accusatory may ague see condominium in bilharziasis it appreciable on chauncey on bract but buckle or convey it’s

6. Please, Commander, I pleaded most unctuously, were on your side, Neither Floyd nor Steengo answered so it was up to me. I nodded. Caverns of Chemistry. There the Avenues of Agriculture, next to them

7. part of their pantheon. We simplified and altered it. Then used A fine singer-and a lovely woman, he said, then looked at me. Your That bloke, as you refer to him, is one of the finest and most

8. abed is the conceive. clothesmen you may centrist correspond. daffy or book. creed is the accreditation derriere.

9. brasilia is the assort. bedford you may carthaginian barth.