Backstory: Spam-ku, the poetry in your in-box

As I grabbed a half hour recently to chip away at the messages piled up in my e-mail box, a piece of spam caught my eye, escaping my normal instantaneous deletion. The random words formed bizarre sentences, but they drew me in as if bathed in some kind of Zen glow. I printed out the message and pinned it up near my computer.

Its quasi-poetic qualities sparked some cross-cubicle banter with my co-workers, but it didn't stop there. A few weeks later I had the sudden urge to turn the message into haiku. Something compelled me to impose a structure on this smattering of words – as if I could make sense out of nonsense.

First I scanned the text for phrases with the right number of syllables (five for each first and last line, seven for each line in the middle). Then I set about fitting them togetherlike a word puzzle inspired by Salvador Dali's surrealism. I smiled as five haiku sprang to life:

Do these poems speak to your deepest self? Or is spam by any other name just as ... annoying?

(If you're the spammer in question and want a share of the credit for these magnificent creations, feel free to contact me. Many people would love to know your name.)

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For a while I enjoyed the illusion that I was the first person to be clever in this particular way. But thanks to Google (and probing editors), we can now easily discover how few of our original ideas are actually original.

A few years ago, SatireWire.com ran spam poetry contests. And since 2003, blogger Kristin Thomas has been posting poems made up solely of spam subject lines ( www.spam-poetry.com).

Ms. Thomas was inspired by anger – the anger stirred by 400-plus messages a day that evaded her spam filters. But her anger faded when she started writing poems and receiving positive responses from readers.

"There are tons of crazy people out there that are passionate about this," says Thomas, now working on a master's degree in education policy in Chicago. One writer told her of holding impromptu readings of "spam-ku" at work.

"I get a lot of really distasteful items sent to me, and it's nice to repurpose it. It becomes very hopeful love poetry, actually," she says with a giggle. Dental ads are especially good fodder, she says. "Look at her gleaming smile," one of her favorite spam poems begins.

I've found a kindred spirit in the found-art movement. Instead of artists picking up leaves, shells, and curious trash, we're picking up the throwaway elements of our screen-saturated world.

"It just seems like a natural response to a frustrating culture," says Fox Harrell, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, who has developed computer programs that people interact with to generate stories and poetry. "Maybe in this data-driven information environment ... it helps us ... to be able to thwart these things that tend to overwhelm our environment."

***

Poetry is nice and all, but let's get to the cold, hard facts. Who sent this message? Why didn't my filters stop it? And what happens if I click on that JPEG picture embedded in the surreal text about polar bears and avocado pits?

With a little research I discovered I was caught up in a wave of spam designed to get past filters by using a combination of text and image files that mimic a normal person's e-mail.

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