The Poetry of Spam: Part II

A while ago, I wrote about some bizarre sentences showing up in the spam emails I had been getting.  The usual form the language took was something like “growncoriander in causedcomfortable,” basically gibberish.  Well, I was sifting through my spam filter today (what if my Nobel nomination gets mislabeled?) and I happened on something really striking.  Instead of the usual pitches for Cialis and porn, there were phrases like this one: “A rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur.”

Not only was this not about hardcore sluts or enlarging things that are really quite fine the way they are, the line didn’t sound like the usual spam gibberish either. It was also a reasonably proficient image, from a poetic standpoint, and nicely worded, forgiving the morbidity of the image itself.  Where had it come from?  Are spammers, figuring that they have to fill their missives with something anyway, trying their hands at poetry?  Are there some undiscovered Rimbauds or Emily Dickinsons out there, whose chosen medium is the ephemeral, infinitely ignorable electronic tableau of spam?

In short, probably not.

As with the gibberish emails I had already been getting, these emails are collections of statistically improbable phrases.  By filling an email with unusual language,  the hope is to confuse spam filters into thinking a message is genuine.  The strategy does not appear to be succeeding at its primary goal (staying out of my junk file), but is succeeding in stringing together some pretty vivid language.

Googling (as I am wont to do) “rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur” brought up, to my surprise, a number of websites devoted to chronicling these kinds of random assemblages of statistically improbably phrases, particularly Hell Archive and Spamdom (which proposes to catalogue “the wisdom hidden inside unwanted email”).  Some examples of spam messages including the rabbit line (I found a bunch) are:

Hoarfrost is in his bones and on his head, Empty streets I come upon by chance, And all at once it is the meadow I walked in at ten, In realms of dingy gloom and deep crevasse. A rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur. The pain of being born into matter. That open before me? What I see indeed, the bit of paint itself can know of. And still my mind goes groping in the mud to bring wonders if she’d ever be brave enough This perfection, this absence. Set on that tomb in the eternal night; Dim, and die tonight? snoozing. A schoolgirl on vacation gapes, He never even dreams, being sheer snow; The form sought for centuries by at balls hit again and again toward her offspring. I seek, above all, in the wandering Beneath a pile of corpses, lying massed.

And and this one, which I assume Spamdom has delineated for us:

 Looms in the air, deliberate and slow,
Covering the land—
And still my mind goes groping in the mud to bring
Père and Mère Chose could be in conversation
whose soft bristles graze the top-racks.
A rabbit carcass in its stiffened fur.
This gap in time, this season not their own,
they sit with their wives all day in the sun,
The winged winds, captives of that age-old foe
In the woods, close by,
With my foot the supple ball, for perhaps
For any part of them we can make out
visitors’ dugout. The osprey whose nest is atop
Against this sky no longer of our world.
With its lament, it often sounds, instead,
Dismal, endless plain—
Preface to the 1970 Edition
Is it almost honey, is it snow?
into early blooming. Then, the inevitable blizzard

Now this is very bad poetry by any standard, but there are some passages that work quite well.  In fact, line by line, there’s some great stuff.  There are also places where the lines obviously do not follow, prepositions stack up between clauses, and so on.  “Preface to the 1970 Edition” is especially out of place.  It feels like a collage.

So where does our rabbit phrase really come from?  I did find it, after a while.  It’s from a poem by Robert Pack called “Midwinter Thaw” that you can read here (scroll about half way, or click on his name).  In fact, all of the phrases in both poems seem to come from this page, titled Poems for a Long Winter’s Night, rearranged in different ways.  Why a spammer would choose the University of Chicago Press as their secret weapon against the spam filters of the world, we may never know.  But it does make for interesting reading.

Comments

[Casey]

I do love the idea of a spamming Emily Dickinson, though -- man that's a great thought...

[ldaniels]

I had also noticed the frozen rabbit motif appearing in several recent emails, and thought the poetry interesting, although odd. Then I see that the genre seems to have quite a following. Odd and interesting.

[Melissa]

You should check out spamoscope and saint ofle too.