Spam poetry
poetic verse composed from spam e-mail contents
Spam poetry, sometimes called spoetry, is poetic verse composed primarily from the subject lines or content of spam e-mail messages.
History
Several writers have claimed to have created spam poetry, and consensus has not emerged about a single origin. Some early examples come from a spam poetry competition held in 2000 by the website Satire Wire. Canadian poet Rob Read began writing and sending out spam poems to a group of 'subscribers' through his Daily Treated Spam email series in September, 2003. A selection from the first two years were published as O Spam, Poams: Selected Daily Treated Spam in 2005 by BookThug. Daily Treated Spam continued until 2011, and a new series, subtitled Spamdemic, began in August 2020. Animator Don Hertzfeldt began writing spam poems in his production journal in 2004. Translator Jorge Candeias wrote Portuguese "spoems" daily, between 5 May 2003 and 5 May 2004, using spam subject lines as title and inspiration.
A book entitled Machine Language by endwar was published in 2005 by IZEN and was followed by Machine Language, Version 2.1 also by endwar in 2006. The latter edition includes a CD of spoetry read by Microsoft Sam and set to ambient musical sounds by Michael Truman who also tweaked the automated readings.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Spam poetry” as poetic verse composed from spam e-mail contents. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as poetic verse composed from spam e-mail contents. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7578804. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 2003, 2005 and 2011.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spam poetry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.