Spam Lit - History and Reactions

History and Reactions

The Spam Lit phenomenon seems to have first been noticed on September 20, 2002, on listserv.buffalo.edu. A member of the Poetics listserv first coined the term in a subject line followed by this message:

"I'm still thinking about the ramifications of literature and art created with the delete button in mind. Jess (Glass)"

However, email recipients began noticing a spike in Spam Lit starting in late 2005 and continuing throughout 2007.

A book entitled 'Spam: E-mail Inspired Poems' by Ben Myers was published in 2008 by Blackheath Books. Myers claims to have been writing spam poems since circa 1999.

In August 2006, David Kestenbaum of NPR's Morning Edition broadcast a story on what he termed "Literary Spam." According to Kestenbaum, Paul Graham, a programmer is indirectly responsible for the current Spam Lit dilemma. Graham noticed that spammers were circumventing spam filters by purposely misspelling key words, for example replacing "I" with "1" in the word "click." According to Kestenbaum, Graham "wrote a program to find out how to best separate spam from real e-mail. To train it, he fed it a good helping of spam and a separate sample of real e-mail."

Graham discovered that his 50-line code eliminated 99% of his own spam. Soon, however, spammers discovered the works of long-dead poets and writers as yet another way to circumvent Graham's anti-spam code.