Some spam emails are filled with nonsense. Others simply fill the heart. Recently, under a colourful link to a website selling penis extensions, I found this poetic jewel:
Elizabeth you siren me, coriander. glasswort you alveolus me, chocks.
Dastard you backyard me, colonial cybernetic. risen you begrudge me,
Baccarat rebuke alfresco
This nugget of verse was not created entirely by chance. Bayesian filters, anti-spam programs which rank words in emails according to undesirability, can be fooled when said bad words (Cialis, mortgage, porn) are broken up with arbitrary prose. A message screaming cock pump drug pimp for example, will be filtered out, but if it's couched with terms such as hawk, seize, hence and triumvirate, the spam will be eluded and your inbox will receive a surreal and striking surprise.
In an unedited, authorless spoem (spam poem) "aardvarks sweat in gibbon rucksacks" and "freight trains rejoice toothpicks, merrily".
Reminiscent of Ezra Pound, or William Burroughs' cut-ups, spoetry transcends its mundane commercial aim and becomes, yes, art. "There's no doubt that 'random' word combination can be fantastic," says Dr Philip West of Oxford University. "The ungrammatical use of nouns as verbs is something Shakespeare was very fond of, as, famously, in King Lear when Edgar says 'He childed as I fathered'."
So should Faber & Faber be publishing a volume of spoetry? To assess the genre's literary merit, we invited Paul Edwards, professor of English and history of art at Bath Spa University to critique our inbox sonnets.
Bosom it had sprung [advert for discount Rolexes]
When she was first over and over again.
She rubs everything that can be rubbed, until
It was originally, I think, eight thousand pounds, Consols?
said she had patted me on the shoulder, and sat down in my chair
bosom it had sprung from his mouth,
I think, looking fixedly at I
fell into a brown study as I walked on, and a voice at my side
PE: With its disrupted phrases and clauses, the poem mirrors the channelling of the old stable ego into flows that are continuously redirected, interrupted and abandoned. Thought and desire suddenly jump the rails to take new directions: "looking fixedly at I fell into a brown study as I walked on, and a voice at my side". When, erotically, she rubs "everything that can be rubbed", the original £8,000 expands to an unknown larger sum. Aladdin is present here, too, with his lamp - also rubbed as a key to desire.
The bosom that springs from his mouth images the eroticism of acquisition, the fantasy of being "first over and over again": the American dream of (in Scott Fitzgerald's words), "a fresh, green breast of the new world".
