Silliman's Blog

Some time back, I started receiving – pretty much daily – a series of emails whose header always included the phrase “Daily Treated Spam.” My first thought, before I deleted the message, was “Truth in Advertising.” After awhile, tho, that middle term “Treated” got under my skin & I actually opened one. Voila! Somebody was taking their spam and turning it into a poem of what appeared to be mostly found language. I still pretty much deleted them every day, but now I was reading them first. As somebody who can get 200 legitimate emails on a given day, the whole idea of spam makes me crazed with rage. The idea of turning spam into found works strikes me as a resourceful bit of “if you’ve got lemons, make lemonade,” maybe, an instance of what I take to be Kenny Goldsmith’s idea of “uncreative writing” & not-too-distant a cousin from flarf. But the whole idea of spam’s sleazeball sludge of discourse, the lowest rung of marketing, invading poetry seemed more like an instance of the invasion of the bodysnatchers than anything else.

But then I realized that I was liking these poems, against all my better judgment & deep instincts. Rob Read, of whom I’d never heard before, has a sense of humor that shines right through whatever material he has at hand:

>Subject: DISCOUNT BRAND CIGARETTES

DISCOUNT BRAND CIGARETTES
is the way out

Fleeing:
Harim catanzaro bemyfriend:
Navas lupus adelphi eatathome graftFriction:
Passover robgeider sap campervan

SSince I hhad no moonney,,
and I didnn’t ffeeell liikke scrounging in garbage
I wwiished the sunn
would set sso I could ffalll asleep aand forget
hunger.. And maybe
wheen I woke upp,
I’d be outt of this crazy dream.

Rob is right that this is how some of the language in our lives looks right now – the use of deliberate misspellings & psycho punctuation intended to throw off electronic spam catching programs. Here, however, it’s become a narrative of its own design. Others offer a more precise sense of construction:

>Subject: Freedom at last scamrnjyr

Will the company pay to relocate my horse.
Does your health insurance cover pets with a torch.
On display? I eventually had to go
Down to the cellar to find them.

Others could remind you of Robert Creeley crossed with Ted Berrigan, such as this untitled work:

Lose
Wink
Look
arse
with
Hydro.

Act
and
you
can
get
fine
lines.

While others are almost sociological statements on the genre of spam itself:

>Subject: TraÒmadoÒl

StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney

StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney

StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney
StÒop wastÒing moÒney

syphilitic.u
slanderous.us

By now, I was saving all my Daily Treated Spams & had figured out somewhere that Rob Read was a Canadian poet, tho I still didn’t know much more until finally, this past week, I received my copy of O Spam Poams: Selected Daily Treated Spam from the inimitable BookThug, Jay MillAr’s press. The book’s “dust jacket” wraps around in the manner of a label on a tin can, so that you have to slide the book in & out (this is somewhat sensual & naughty if you don’t like having to bend a book to reinsert it). In addition to over 100 pages of bright work – these poems often remind me of “early Tom Raworth” – Read has added an excellent afterword that shows, among other things, that he knows about more spam poetry projects out there than I ever could have imagined. And he knows how to ask, in fact, the right question: What’s to make this book any better?

Well, for one this is not novelty verse, it’s verse that happens to have an aura of novelty around it. The poetry in this book is poetry.

In fact, Read is too modest: it’s poetry that will ensure that you’re going to read Read’s next book too. Tho, as always with BookThug, the production is impeccable, but the press run is ridiculous – 300 perfect bound copies. Hopefully, the mass success of this book won’t cause Read to shut down what has become one of the favorite moments of my day. In addition to buying this book, which you should, I suspect that if you drop a note to readrobread AT hotmail DOT com, you could get added to Rob’s daily list.

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