The following image is titled Eschatology of Spam by Daniel Y. Harris:

I am delighted to have a set of six of my spam poems published by Daniel Y. Harris, Editor-in-Chief, on his X-Peri site, a wonderful forum for experimental work. Read them on the site here.

My first spam poems Found in Dissonance were published by smallminded books – a foldable chapbooklet – in 2012. These poems were found in a significant swathe of highly literate email spam I received some years ago, but only for a short time, and now sadly no more. Ironic to say, I know.

Further poems from this source have been published here and there online, and the six on X-Peri are published for the first time.

From what little I understand about such email spam, existing text is used by senders so that it can be transferred and invaded into your email account/stream, seeming to be a genuine language source. What is interesting is that this content had no other detail: certainly no links – that dangerous enticement – or advertising of any kind. Just an amazing cacophony of complex language.

Writing from this was a challenging experience. I needed a dictionary to discover meanings in many if not most words, wanting a semblance of focus in what I would then craft/compose from this. The other challenge is for the readers, assuming they want to take it on: I should guess most would need a dictionary too.

I’ve commented before on my delight at having more experimental work published in International Times, and I am similarly pleased with X-Peri and editor Daniel Y. Harris for presenting these, and I recommend his own writing there, as well as further images, and the work of many others.