In memory of Kurt Brown

Last week, author, poet and good friend Kurt Brown died after a sudden illness. Every night this week at midnight Pacific, I am posting something to honor his memory including one of his poems each day. If you wish to read tonight’s reflection, hit More.

Kurt and I used to make each other laugh. And Kurt had a boisterous laugh, delightful to hear, so I would often dust off my stand-up comedy mask to elicit a variety of giggles, cackles, snorts and guffaws from him on the other end of the phone line.

It was in that spirit one day I had an inspiration.

For about a year, I would routinely peruse my junk email folder, and save ones with the best spam lines. Not actual logical spam, but those weird ones that seemed to be generated by an English-as-a-second-language computer whacked out on mescaline. Lines like:

I think this wine has been drunk before.

Polysexual bad taste fondue party.

Aches be gone right here.

One day, I strung together about 20 of the most absurd lines into one long stanza, emailed it to Kurt with the subject heading: “Spam Poem” with a brief explanation, figuring I could call him later, we’d read through it, and I’d get to hear him laugh.

Well, we did do that call, but after our regular laugh-fest, Kurt said, “I think there’s something here. Could you send me your entire folder of spam email?”

I was like, okay, whatever. And so I did, literally hundreds and hundreds of spam emails, featuring what I had found to be the weirdest collection of electronic inanities.

A few weeks later, Kurt sent me a series of poems consisting of… well, here is his explanation:

SPAM POETRY: A MANIFESTO

You’ve heard of “Slam” Poetry? Well now there is “Spam” Poetry. It comes to us every day from the infinity of hyperspace like the words of some digital god whose silent oracles are delivered in the form of subject lines for various ads trying to sell us everything from sex-enhancing gadgets to eternal-life producing drugs. It is condensed, pithy, and as pointed as the Oracle of Delphi’s famous pronouncements. “Buy this,” it hisses, “Try that,” it coos, playing on our aspirations and fears, our ambitions and fantasies, for the god of hyperspace isn’t a jealous god, but a greedy one. His cajoling is crass, his wisdom mercantile. If you would worship him, get out your credit card and buy. Halleluiah, brother, the best of life is yours for a few keystrokes and some personal information as secure as the words spoken between a priest and his parishioner in a confessional.

The religious metaphor isn’t chosen arbitrarily, for Spam Poetry is inherently supernatural in its claims. It almost always proposes the impossible: unhindered and unending growth, eternal happiness, miraculous success. It promises to transform you and your life exponentially, into a perfection about which you have only dreamed. It is exuberant, even rapturous. Each of these “poems” is a psalm, a contribution to the great hymnal of Capitalism from which we all sing the other six days of the week.

Many are directed towards men, and their longings for infallibility. For that, the word Spam might just as well be an acronym for “Super Products for the American Male.” Whether it’s a bigger penis, an equally engorged checkbook, or invulnerability from aging or disease, a Spam poem panders to the adolescent male’s dreams of unlimited power and invincibility. And the words of these “poems” — written, as many are, by non-English speaking pitchmen on the other side of the world — have that curious, cryptic, mythic-sounding quality we have come to expect of divine pronouncements, produced in Spam Poetry by interesting twists and turns of grammar that drop articles and compress ideas into crabbed and mysterious phrases. A little credulity is all that is needed to transcend the aches and failures of an ordinary, mortal life.

Each of the “poems” has been lifted verbatim, line by line, from the collection of spam that gathers in our in-boxes on a daily basis. Occasionally, punctuation has been altered to make the lines flow more smoothly. Even the titles of the “poems” are subject lines from various spam that seemed to us resonant and slightly above the run- of-the-mill. Only the more interesting subject lines were selected, and later arranged as lines of a poem according to various themes that seemed to emerge naturally from the wealth of items offered: love and romance; bodily enhancement; anti-aging schemes; financial success, and gaudy products of all kinds meant to pamper one’s ego and impress one’s friends. In this sense Spam Poetry — like all poetry — is a reflection of who we are and who we wish to become. And Spam Poetry is authorless, like the ancients who were said to go into a trance and recite lines almost automatically. The Spam poet is merely a conduit, a channel through which the pronouncements come — all he or she has to do is arrange the lines of already existing statements. But the statements come from somewhere else, and are accepted whole.

Some will call these “Found” Poems, referring to a temporary movement in the 1960s that rapidly garnered adherents, soon waxed, and just as soon vanished. Spam poems are found, but the Spam poet must work with many elements, selecting them and organizing them into a fairly coherent whole. Thus, the Spam poet resembles a collagist and is more involved in his or her work than the old “Found” poet. The lines are given, but the poem is not. Culling out the most interesting lines from the common glut of spam, seeing which subject or theme they address, and deciding the best order of lines in a given poem to render some idea of a narrative gives the Spam poet more latitude than the old Found poet, and hence a chance to exercise a bit more creativity and imagination. Still, the words are there before the poet ever approaches them, so Spam poetry, like Found poetry before it, is an amusing but inferior art. There is not a single, profound voice speaking — synthesizing ideas and images for us — but something like the garbled, impersonal, stuttering voice of the culture itself coming at us from nowhere, or everywhere, at once.

Kurt had seized on this idea and run with it as a metaphor for the contemporary consumer experience. He crafted 24 spam poems. Here are three of them:

GREAT PEOPLE NEEDED

I’ll tell you what’s the matter!
A program is using you.

Only God can make a random selection.
Here’s the next batch.

Can you believe that thing is STILL moving?
Or is it?

You have 30 seconds!

The real world is a special case,
A priceless jewel.

Um, actually, it’s an olive fragment.
Why ask for more?

Electron band structure in germanium, my ass.
You are the one.

The Impotence of the gods,
Poised to make a big move,

Make some sudden changes.
No need to worry, you are always ready for it!

Time to reshape you.
Please confirm everything.

— —

CYBER DRAWS

Blow your lady’s mind into bits.
Receive a complimentary travel kit.

Put an end to all your woes.
Get yourself fixed up. Save your nose.

Your new time spending with your wife.
This is the secret to my new life.

Be the best boss you’ve ever had.
Keep the good ones and reduce the bad.

Pleasures of peace — last chance.
Afternoon very favorable for romance.

Christian? Single? We have a solution.
Summer poles for every occasion.

Get rid of this weakness. Forget the rest.
Ace the nation’s fitness test.

Send greeting cards without fees.
Fat ass waive squander. Puff of breeze.

— —

IDENTICAL NARCOTICS

1.

Attention!
Big News:

Green tea fights cancer.

No study needed.
Life will get better with this.

Phentermime, Ambien, Xamax, Valiun,
You will never know the difference.

2.

Did you or your loved one ever use Digitek?

Please visit us.
We are looking for you.

Help us change lives.
Come to L. A. and be treated like a king!

3.

Get this version.
HEAL THE WORLD!

Now is the time to grab the opportunity.

Don’t ignore this notice.
Decide.

Your services near to be disconnected.

4.

Please legibly write all complaints in this box.

Somehow Kurt went through all those spam lines and crafted individual poems with a thematic thread for each. The poems are at the same time entertaining and absurd, and yet they do convey a specific sense of our modern world, snapshots of the electronic chatter that pulses through those tubes of information leading into our homes, offices, computers, and ultimately our minds.

Here is the last spam poem in the collection, a fitting capstone:

A NEVER ENDING FESTIVAL

I bet your energy drink can’t do this:
Paris Hilton drops bikini in
Nice Becoming the new incredible hulk.

These are the kinds of side effects you look forward to.

“I wanted to hurt an enemy.”
Your feelings are ugly and wrong.

Would you like to stop more energy info?

If you no longer wish to receive this announcement
Place it under the tongue and achieve amazing results!

The internet Godfather

A Never Ending Festival. Brought to you by the internet Godfather. Doesn’t that just about perfectly sum up what we experience on a daily basis when we go online?

Kurt wrote a lot of great poems. Edited numerous books of poetry. Founded the Aspen Writers Conference. Taught poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Published essays and critical analysis. All of that an exhibition of his creativity.

But this collection of spam poems demonstrates a whimsical aspect of his creative instincts, both insightful and ironic, making sense out of the senseless… and leaving us to smile at it all.

You may learn more about Kurt by going here.

An obituary in the Aspen Daily News.

You may find some of Kurt’s original poetry as well as numerous books he has edited here.

For Part 1 of my tribute to Kurt, you may go here.

For Part 2, go here.

For Part 3, go here.

For Part 4, go here.

Godspeed, Kurt.