Michelle writes that I beat her to the punch by posting spam poetry. I don’t know if what I posted would really qualify as “spam” — “real” spam poetry would probably look like this crude offering:

I am hard.
I stay hard.
I am natural viagra.
I add three inches to my cable descrambler.
I make $$$$$ from my hot and horny computer.
I find the truth about my neighbor’s gas mileage.
I astound my wife with prescription drugs delivered overnight.
I watch Jenny and her slutty cheerleader friends refinance home loans.

I am spam.
I contain multitudes.

Since then I’ve received about three or four more of those odd spam messages — with great titles like “restless old immanuels” and “when he laid” — and I’m not sure what to do with them. “restless old immanuels” doesn’t start off very well — the first two words are “german pecan,” and “gesture wotan cheesecake cunningham” just stops the whole thing dead (though “cheesecake cunningham” works with “terrible betsy”). But it ends with:

glued thickish.
delinquent
soften

which I kind of like.

Popularity: 1% [?]

A couple of spam e-mail messages — for a digital cable filter — arrived in my mailbox today. The way it tucked its contents into html by inserting random words into the text was rather ingenious, though.

For instance, the phrase “The ultimate digital cable filter” is actually coded as “Thbracketslashmcknightslashe ulbracketslashcredobrackettimate dbracketslashreplenishbracketigital cabracketslashartistrybracketble fbracketslashapparatusbracketilter” (I’ve replaced “<” and “/” with “bracket” and “slash.”). It didn’t completely foil SF State’s spam filter, though: it still arrived in my mailbox marked as spam, with the message left unrendered in html.

I’ve taken the random words — in the same order they appeared in the spam e-mail, inserted into a “font color=white” tag, and laid them out below, adding punctuation here and there. It’s called “Stymie.”

Stymie

cryptanalytic allison
dither breech nnw julie
enunciate o’brien.

declassify integument aflame
perch punt testimonial
bookish.

dye
fife turnoff:
myriad sundial regulatory timeshare

bleed syrup appear
(jeres child gladstone cacm)
scoff falstaff

conflagration share decor.

cleft birch conspiracy –
giraffe tantalum dutiable
inverse fire.

galapagos: vengeful.

haircut conversion,
quizzical bmw,
forgetful soothsayer erastus:

catlike intrigue,
brainy lemonade.

brookhaven:
id dope deductible

atkins.

jitter.

cotangent malady

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Here’s Eudora Welty, writing about the photographs in The Democratic Forest, by my favorite photographer, William Eggleston:

They focus on the mundane world. But no subject is fuller of implications than the mundane world! When you see what the mundane world so openly and multitudinously affirms, there is everything left to say.

After reading Aimee Nezhukumatathil‘s new poetry collection, one is more convinced than ever that poets — or, at least, this particular poet — unlike ordinary human beings, have different eyes through which to see: the reds of a jungle, a sari swinging over the shoulder, cherry farmers, potatoes pulled up from the earth. Each poem in her quietly stunning Miracle Fruit is a finely calibrated balancing act of breathlessness and restraint, sprinkled with words that must be savored in the mouth: “fire sponges, jingle shells, a remnant of whelk,” she writes.

Here’s an almost random excerpt, the last stanza of “In Praise of Colophons:”

My favorite colophon reports that another monk
designed Carlyle over two centuries ago. Its letters
sit round and open as fishbowls on a windowsill.
The balance so delicate, one strong wind
could spill the glass and its slippery contents
across the stone floor. O, but the light in each
watery leaf, the small transparencies in those fins –
the arc of orange fish that leap and leap and leap.

Her poems are afflicted with the ecstasy of small things, with an exuberant, barely containable delight in the ordinary. Look, she says to the reader, these are the miracles I see. And you must see them too.

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I’ve just finished reading Barbara Jane Reyes‘s first collection of poetry, Gravities of Center, Reyes, an MFA student here at SF State, has an assured voice that suffuses her impressive debut.

At first glance, there seems to be an uneasy fit between the earlier, more political poems and the poems in the second half about the bass player with the long hair and black jacket — no, wait: the poems are also about what she feels when he’s with him. But what is common to all the poems is the vital, seething, unruly energy simmering underneath the surface. Passion manifests itself as either anger or desire (perhaps they are the same in any case), and this collection is rich with evidence of both kinds. (The lesson of the seeming disjunction between the poems, it seems to me, is that the more explicitly “political” ones, like “Arithmetic” and “Now Showing,” for instance, are inherently personal as well, as part of an exploration of the poet’s identity, and therefore inextricable from the nakedness of the later poems.)

(It’s funny, too; the piece “Delicadeza” is almost — hopefully she forgives the adjective — ethnographic in its attention to detail when she describes the Filipino denizens of a casino and the awkward misunderstandings (and shared cultural assumptions) between strangers.)

“Anthropologic” is the poem that made the deepest impression on me: a collage-poem about anthropology and colonialism, inspired by Marlon Fuentes’s Bontoc Eulogy. There’s sometimes a tendency, in less capable hands, for a poem like this to become predictably polemical, but that is not the case here. Cinematic, clipped, with truncated and erased captions, “Anthropologic” functions like photographs exhibited — or butterflies pinned? — on a wall. The way it looks on the printed page sometimes uncannily brings to mind the acquisitive, classificatory and dissecting impulses of the empire.

Like the skeletons embracing on the cover, Gravities of Center deals with the buried, the repressed, the hidden, the private: “margins always contain undeniable silent worlds,” she writes in “Brown Man’s Burden.” A collection of Pinay postcolonial intimacies. Poems whispered in languorous darkness and secrets sealed with a hiss.

(I should mention too that it’s not available on Amazon, alas, which is why I couldn’t put it in my All-Consuming box to the right, but it’s available through Arkipelago Books.)

Popularity: 1% [?]

We are told grit suffuses all.
Endless upon endless, piled in quarters.

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