The phenomenon of “spam poetry” has a taken on a discrete life of its own. One need only google search the terms to find a smattering of blogs devoted to it, as well as some reporting on the trend. Borrowing from the idea of found poetry, you open your inbox and see what the spammers (the twisted, ugly younger sisters of the Muse) have brought to your doorstep–constellating the choicest scraps of the bounty into a poem, or something that closely resembles one.
Sometimes, those sisters can be incredibly kind–if you don’t mind masquerading as literary treasure hunter, and are skilled in the art of patience. And if your anti-virus protection is fully updated. Beware, though–???the needle in the haystack’ clich?? applies, liberally and literally.
For those whose palette prefers looking for inspiration in higher places, be sure to check out Jen Bervin’s Nets (available here), her filtered versions of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Beautifully printed by Ugly Duckling Presse, the book includes the majority of the original sonnets, one per page, in soft gray print. Bervin’s filtered ???net’ of each sonnet is in bold, overlaying. Each ???net’ is rendered spatially as it appears in the original sonnet–a word from line 3, a phrase from line 11, etc., so space becomes important. The meter of the original sonnets is exchanged for that space–often with great effect. Some astonishing things happen with regularity, and I can’t resist including my favorite, an erasure of sonnet 136 (and the book’s dedication), that appears simply as:
hold me / to / my name
(See more accurately represented ‘nets‘, published online by Web Conjunctions).