Saturday, August 18, 2007

Spam Lit Poem: "Palladio Who Beckons from the Other Shore"


E-mail spam has gone "literary," at least on the Bugzita e-mail address: I suppose having "foetry" and "poetry" bandied about on our site invites spammers to get through to us by including bad poetry and prose (keyword spamming?) in their sales pitches--certainly no worse than some of the "valid" published poetry and prose out there.

I thought I'd start a new feature called "The Spam Lit Project," which also serves notice to spammers that their handy work will appear here (without their sales pitches, of course), along with their spammer IDs and e-mail addresses. I have added a permanent announcement on the left panel of this blog.

Some Spam Lit Spammers actually use obscure public domain works for their nefarious purposes; before posting, I'll do a quick Google search to see if this is the case and attribute poems and prose to the original poets and authors. If I miss something, feel free to inform me, and I'll add the original author's or poet's name.

In other words, if you send Spam Lit to the Bugzita address (or any other e-mail address associated with this site and its members' sites), it's fair game. If I can figure out how to post their IP address, I'll do that as well. Al and Matt? Any tips? Is this even legal?
I'm all for protecting people's IDs, but I figure all bets are off for spammers.

I have just registered SpamLit.com (a catch-all domain for all genres of Spam Lit; I've got to cut back on buying domains!), and I will soon post a webpage that will attempt to explain SpamLit and how not to be be fooled by it. I may even start a Wikipedia article about the term, for the term is not my own original idea. Shortly after registering the domain, I found a site called Shovelware that uses the term "Spam Lit," posts Spam Lit work, and allows comments about it.

The Google term, without quotation marks, gets 2,150,000 hits; with quotation marks, 835 Google hits.

I'm surprised (yet thankful) that the domain name was still available.

Without further ado, here's our first Spam Lit poem:

Palladio who beckons from the other shore,
Floating on the sky.
The road, but not far enough ahead
The road, but not far enough ahead
giddy as good kids playing hookey. Now,
Late February, and the air's so balmy
Wheezing ravens, when
Snow haze gleams like sand.
Only a whiter absence to my mind,
So you can watch me watch uplifted snow
Gray the cloud-like oaks
XIII. The Route to the North
then takes a step back, to be safe as she reaches.
grow hot in the parking lot, though they're
I've drifted somewhat from the distant heart
That square—Oh, 56 x 56
Preface to the 1970 Edition
As if your human shape were what the storm
XX. To the Pole

*
Spammer: Rod London (which is probably not his/her real name)

Rod London
grohk@rojamwebhosting.com

Feel free to e-mail your appreciation to our Spam Lit spammers!

Bring it on, Spam Lit Spammers!

1 comment:

Tom Konyves said...

You may be interested in my new videopoem, All This Day Is Good For, posted on movingpoems.com by Dave Bonta

http://movingpoems.com/poet/tom-konyves/

which was tagged "spam lit" with as link to the wikipedia article.

Great term!