The Poetry of Spam

Bob Newhart had a routine during his "Button-Down Mind" days that looked at the concept of the proverbial "Infinite Number of Monkeys with an Infinite Number of Typewriters," which, so the theory goes, would eventually produce all the works of Shakespeare...and Fannie Hurst, presumably. Being a recent ex-accountant, Newhart had to think about the day to day drudgery of the poor inspectors who had to monitor the monkeys' progress: "Hey, Charlie, over here! Number 40 has something! It says 'To be or not to be--that...is...the...gzornenplatt.'"

Probably not a Union job.

We all get "spam"--probably less so than a couple weeks ago now that "The Spam King," the little twerp who had the condo on the Harbor Steps has been put out of commission. "Spam" is an annoyance (unless its a food product, then its fine in all sorts of Island dishes and makes a fine sculpting material), but every day I go through the ritual of adding each and every address to my e-mail's spam filter to make sure I never hear from that Nigerian potentate's heir, or the christian minister in Lagos, or that barrister entrusted with the vast legacy, or the International Mega-Millions Microsoft Lottery again.

But in going through that process I'd run across some that intrigued me. To avoid spam filters and being deleted immediately, some of these "annoying people" (as register.com calls them) would take phrases from...somewhere, toss them into the "Phrase-Parser 3.0" and produce a string of phrases in the main body of the message that would skip merrily by the sentries standing at the gates of my e-mail (looking for such "profiling" words as "viagra," or "penis," or "Nairobi," or "Dear one"). Some of these things would scan quite nicely and even resemble modern and postmodern poetry. They might even pass muster at an open-mike poetry jam.

So, here are some I've saved. A couple of weeks ago, I'd have attributed them to "Anon." but now I'll list them as R. Soloway.

I. Arctic Scenery

Over the chilly dale.
Père and Mère Chose could be in conversation
Between the high and the low, in this night.
The face of a Quos ego
To mark that square, perhaps:
were Mère and Père
By the design of our own silent eyes
Sculpting each tree to fit your ghostly form?
But what I am looking at is hardened snow,
To a higher level of appearance.

Of too much truth to do much more than lie
Wheel tracks entrench themselves in snow, yet painted
shaded by live oaks and bottlebrush trees
Oh you builders,
That square—Oh, 56 x 56
to matter, for the flushed boys are muscular.



VIII. Russia

Alberti, Brunelleschi, Sangallo,
In realms of dingy gloom and deep crevasse
Will hear the storm-blast of his clarion
Close at the end of distance the two chose
Rain. We are forced to fly.

And I would like
Of meaning like these—the world created
Where, as I discover as I go through
To have been claimed by what we see of what,
Not daring to oppose.
This third day of our January thaw,
A kind of snow, which hesitates
And the worlds—skiffs rudderless, rolling on—
and the numbed yards will go back undercover.
Pallid waste where no radiant fathomers,
And half-starved foxes shake and paw
To watch me watch drowned snow lift from the lake.

(At four, the spectators leave in pairs, off
In dense bare branches,
I draw near to one of them, the lowest,
Demonstrating their talent for comedy.)

Beneath the snowflakes I notice façades
Coextensive with everything? How could they know?
As if your absence now concluded long ago
Is dumb; he is the mute white stony shape
Of observation lying on the ground
By bloody pool—rattling, gasping his last
And trumpet at his lips; nor does he cast
At these masses the snow hides from me.
Of observation lying on the ground
Everywhere, utterly.
Chose to walk out of it, they'd have to pass
Wide, whited fields, a way unframed at last
As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light,
Appear to lift up from the lake;
Lucky the bell—still full and deep of throat
For a few dreamy dollars,
Columbuses or Gamas, ever pass,
and the Splendid splinter
Seems reflected in the infinite of the lamps.

What? What can you do?
With a hand freed from weight,
—The place the road ends, that patch of white paint
Out of the road into a way across
And piled up at the base of the column
Partly stone, partly the absence of stone,
Your gloved hands covering your lips' good-bye
Brush the lone giant in that somber pall
Writhing their stunted limbs
Among us, only Alberti, then Sangallo,
their bellies, they're out cold, instantaneously
as in the time of the bee, seeking
wonders if she'd ever be brave enough.


Set on that tomb in the eternal night;
By trees—or might see as the masonry
Side of the painting, the world of that wise, white
A pallid yellow lingers,
That neither the motionless farm couple trudging
flips young alligators over on their backs,
at balls hit again and again toward her offspring,
Scrawny wolves, and you,
Seen. What you know is only manifest
And beyond, the same sound of bees
With sun's warmth wasted on a stone,
Place of absorbing snow, itself to be
Again awaken from your being gone to find
Hoarfrost is in his bones and on his head.

And so I gaze avidly
Cascading snowflakes settle in the pines,
Glimmering of light:
The winter road from the St. Simeon farm
And melt the spirit; his mouth will distend
Palladio who beckons from the other shore,
Sits at the limit of a kind of world
And then I go on until I am beneath an archway,
Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
Absurdly, my eyes can only see the arc
No name, no meaning.

Oh my friends,
Snow haze gleams like sand.
Floating on the sky.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Polls Apart

They're polling people again (and you know how painful that can be). http://www.kiro710.com/Article.asp?id=222812&spid=
President Bush's approval rating is back down to 32% approval overall to where it was at its all-time low in January. For some unexplained reason it shot up 3% in May, but with gasoline geysering to above $3.00 a gallon across the nation, as well as being hip-deep in the quick-sand pit that is Iraq, its come back down. Historically, the lowest approval rating was Nixon's in August of '74 at 24%, so Bush gets the encouraging news that he's polling 8% higher than a president right before he resigned in disgrace. That can only be seen by this administration as something of a mandate.

Still, he's got plenty of time (and, as he's shown, lots of creative ways) to get that approval rating even lower--maybe even surpassing Nixon's pre-Exodus days.

And that will be a useful figure to have. Because it will give us one more bench-mark in the creative interpretation of polls. We already have the "margin of error," which determines how accurate a random sampling is (in this latest poll, the opinions of one thousand Americans is supposed to reflect those of the actual number which, at the time I'm writing this, is 302,029,267 individuals--courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau),* and in this case, I'd say not much (3.1%, astonishingly). In addition, we have the "Undecided's," the perpetually wishy-washy number of folks who can't make up their mind one way or the other about any subject whatsoever. This poll doesn't use that figure, and applies thumb-screws to people to say which way, if they are, indeed, thinking, they're leaning.

But if Bush the lesser's poll numbers do bottom out it will give us a new, more accurate measure of the percentage of people in the country who are so obstinately stupid that they'll stick to their cherished opinions despite all evidence to the contrary.

Now, THAT is a useful figure.

Can't you see the news reports? "In the latest Zogby/New York Times/Outback Steakhouse poll, 55% of Americans believe that UFO's are influencing the voting of 'American Idol,' 30% say that it's an immigration problem, 5% that it's their cousin Louie at the phone-bank, with 10% unsure, uninformed or not awake, with the standard blinkerdly pig-ignorant factor of 18%."

See, now, that is accurate polling.

*I think it would be useful if this site actually showed the number increasing in real time--or like McDonald's, had a "..served" added to it!)