TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Comment Spam Poetry: A million spammers will produce Shakespeare..or will they?

By Robert Nagle

A milestone of sorts was reached on my idiotprogrammer  blog recently. I noticed that wordpress has caught over 1,300,000 spam comments on my blog so far!  This merits an appreciatory post at least.

I’ve been blogging since 2001, and I think I switched over to wordpress in 2003 (or was it 2004?). I think I started using akismet spam fighter in late 2005 or early 2006. Until  until then I was completely unprotected–and in a state of constant panic–always dreading the need to weed through the barrage of comments.  Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! (next page). Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete ! Akismet works like a charm, though it is still tedious to manage.   It is harder to tell the difference between comment spam and real comments.

About a year ago I eliminated the no-follow rule about comments in order to stop penalizing legitimate commenters. Ironically that meant having to read blog comments a lot closer than I normally would. In many cases, it was clear that a real live human was commenting–it wasn’t some automated script–but their comments were  irrelevant or mildly offtopic or too generic sounding. I ended up being a lot stricter  if the URL seemed too commercial in nature. But sometimes it’s impossible to tell. At heart, all Internet denizens are promoting SOMETHING.

I’m probably giving the impression that my personal  blog receives a lot of reader comments. It does not.  I have 2300 posts and 704 approved  comments, about one out of every 3 posts. That overlooks the fact that a small number of my posts receive lots of comments  while most  receive none at all.  In fact, maybe 1 out of every 8 or 10 posts receives an honest-to-god comment from a homo sapien.  Which is just as well. Blogs can be quiet and solitary places. And if nobody is around, you don’t want to make a spectacle of yourself  by being the first to write a comment.  It is almost like noticing someone peacefully asleep on a hammock and  tapping them on the shoulder to ask if they are really sleeping. As good as free discussions are, I try to avoid reading things with over 20 comments.   (Watch this collegehumor video We didn’t start the flame war to see why–warning: language!).

Despite the silence of my (nonexistent) blog readers, I do get enormous amounts of  aleatory  feedback . And that is my subject for today: Spam Poetry.

Spam Poetry: A New Literary Genre

The bottom of this post contains a sampling of the “spam poetry” culled from my blog.  These comments seem to be randomly generated (notice the weird punctuation).  They can be striking (and dare I say — poetic?). Some poets/bloggers have already noticed this. See the spam poetry site, this spam-inspired poetry.  Here’s a poet who has been writing a cycle of poems inspired by spam.

Acephalous writes about some email spam:

"Beaver in disloyalty kisses the drizzle’s price" is all the email says.  That’s it.  No link.  Nothing.  There’s a point to the pointless of "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."  Why would someone named "point man" want me to know what happens to those who are "beaver" in their disloyalty?  Why would someone who is want to kiss "the drizzle’s price"?  Who is The Drizzle?  What is his price?  Do I only have to pay to kiss it if I’m beaver in disloyalty?   Or is "kissing the drizzle’s price" a euphemism for the dire fate of those who are beaver in their disloyalty?

Ben Myers writes about the spoetry phenomenon:

I’ve been turning spam-mails into poems for some years now, so it has become something of a personal mission for me to draw people towards this odd art form. Here, perhaps, is the new poetry of the 21st century, a reinvention of language that pushes the cut-up technique of William Burroughs or the randomly generated ‘liquid writing’ of Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus into new brave new territories. Here is the future language of poetry: part machine, part human, all good. Just as pre-pen and ink societies produced narrative poetry, the industrial revolution gave birth to the Romantics, and the post-war American economic boom begat the Beats, so too – if the rash of blogs devoted to it over the past year or two are anything to go by – the technological age in which are living gives us spam poetry….

…

the best spam poems are those that twist the bastardised language into something new, something readable. Frequently, spam-mails are filled with incongruous yet titillating combinations of words or excerpts from science fiction or westerns. Spam poetry is therefore the literary equivalent of recycling; it takes off-cuts and lets them ferment into something new and occasionally exotic. A spam poet is as much an editor as a bard, someone who knows which pieces of fat need trimming, who can use a spam-mail as a spring-board into his or her own imagination. And though there are no rules, I happen to believe that the best spoems are those that can be crafted in a matter of minutes.

Here is a spam poetry anthology edited by Morton Hurley; (if you are browsing Hurley’s spam poetry site,  also check out  the ridiculous biographies listed for the imaginary poets who contribute to the anthology; they are almost as peculiar as the poems themselves). Here’s a sample poem:

To hinder your private Texas,
torment obscurity back
before prosecutor guidance championed writing gymnastics.
Now’s the time! Did he ask you last night?
Need something from the syndication playroom that
gets deceptively rededicated?
Think this is it…
Minnesota’s awesome anti aging cream
as free bygone nocturnal longtime makeup.
Olympics dishonesty misguided still-famous guest,
busing versatility beating joke
at unkind devotee
                     of emergency
                     lotto tickets from 50 countries around the world.

As I glance over Hurley’s poetry, I have several reactions. Initially, I am struck by the whimsy of the exercise; then I notice the rhythm of the words; it all reads well; then I notice certain phrases which seem commercial in nature (“awesome anti aging cream”).  Finally, I notice how traditional grammar concepts break down. Extended sentences, lack of logical progression, sometimes no verbs, jarring line breaks. I think it would be great fun to hear these phrases spoken aloud – nonsense and all.  It’s almost as if someone is shouting newspaper headlines instead of actual sentences.

My Comment Spam

As I pore over my comment spam (oh, by the way, I’ve received 64 comment spams since I’ve started this post), I am struck by the strange juxtapositions of words which would make any Vogon bard jealous.   Sometimes comment spam can use specific and uncommon words; it is almost like flipping through a dictionary and looking at the word at the top of each page. In 2007-8 the prevailing fashion for spam poetry  was  for lines to contain 3 or 4 longish words  and odd punctuation.  (If only the spam-generating algorithm could be tweaked to get the verb agreement right, things might  get interesting). In 2009, the trend seems to be bland flattery about the blogger’s insights and writing talent.  Who can predict future literary trends (other than the fact that a greater percentage of comments will be in Mandarin)?

Although one presumes that comment spam is generated to improve a website’s visibility on google, many don’t mention a brand name at all—sometimes not even a URL.  Perhaps they contain  hidden messages  comprehensible only to people with the right decoder ring. Perhaps they are simply  the result of hackers trying to test user accounts.

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Good post. Cheers!
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I don’t write many comments, but this time (at least) I agree completely.
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I have to say that your blog is pretty cool. If you could add a few more videos I would really appreciate it!
I have to say that your blog is pretty cool. If you could add a few more videos I would really appreciate it!
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