sweet and hot fibonacci.
winter. she often wept.
length, fragment of mirror, length, fragment of mirror,
Well, no! the blackish back that supported me was smooth, polished, without scales -
***
I feel slightly dirty and contaminated by the flow of inspiration that came into me with this spametry, but... really they are lovely lines. I'll steal 'em!
But doesn't it seem like "the blackish back that supported me" must be _from_ something? It's sort of joyce-ish, or like one of those coded sentences like in that Sherlock Holmes story where every 3rd word is the real message and the rest is nonsense, put in as filler. But it could equally well be an elizabeth bishop poem.
***
Oh, lord, it's from some translation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea! very cool.
The Canadian's last words produced a sudden revolution in my brain. I wriggled myself quickly to the top of the being or object half out of the water which served us for a refuge. I kicked it. It was evidently a hard impenetrable body and not the soft substance that forms the bodies of the great marine mammalia. But this hard body might be a bony covering like that of the antediluvian animals; and I should be free to class this monster among amphibious reptiles such as tortoises or alligators.
Well no! the blackish back that supported me was smooth polished without scales. The blow produced a metallic sound; and incredible though it may be it seemed I might say as if it was made of riveted plates.
It boggles the mind.
Posted by: Jo | August 18, 2004 at 09:25 AM
Makes you want to start spamming people with poetry, doesn't it? Only without selling anything? Just the poetry. I've often thought about if I was really rich, buying commercial airtime for poetry. Thirty second Rilke spots.
Posted by: Jo | August 18, 2004 at 09:26 AM
brilliant idea. spametry forever! Also, there should be random love letters coming into everyone's inbox, and random accusatory fights, like confrontational, weirdly personal performance art.
Posted by: badgerbag | August 18, 2004 at 11:11 AM
Today you must know and understand the history of the table saw!
The man in the hat told me he loves you!
Posted by: Jo | August 18, 2004 at 11:13 AM
The poetry is an attempt to get past spam filters. Which raises the specter of a spam filter which detects and eliminates poetry.
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | August 18, 2004 at 01:28 PM
i particularly like the spam that have about 100 random words strung together at the end. sometimes they are quite poetic and very impressionistic.
as for the 20,000 quote:
"The blow produced a metallic sound..."
that could be interpreted as oh so many things as far as spam is concerned.
Posted by: leblanc | August 18, 2004 at 01:43 PM
Prentiss! I can't believe you just explained to me (us) why there's poetry in spam. DUH.
Posted by: badgerbag | August 18, 2004 at 11:55 PM
Okay, so can I withdraw the offensively obvious first sentence and leave the second?
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle | August 19, 2004 at 01:38 PM