Spam prose and poetry

I always like it when spam arrives in a batch that sort of goes together in some linguistic or “literary” way. Sometimes it’s a batch of similar nonsense that makes a kind of haiku-like thing. Sometimes it’s... well, see for yourself. Here’s a set of three that arrived recently, at about the same time, apparently from the same spam run (the content was the same in all three, urging me to purchase some Viagra-like philtre). These are the subject lines — reordered by my own artistic license, but the words are all the spammer’s:

Put your doughnut in her oven
Postpone your love bomb’s explode
She’ll reward you so much

Trees

National Poetry Month has passed, but it’s still a good season for poetry. The flowering trees continue to show off here in the northeast, so here’s a recent photo (click to enlarge) from the Grounds for Sculpture in New Jersey, along with a well-known poem from New Jersey’s [Alfred] Joyce Kilmer. Kilmer was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey — there’s a rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike that’s named after him — and was killed 90 years ago, at age 31, in World War I. He wrote this, his most famous poem, in 1913.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

—— Joyce Kilmer, “Trees”    

Poetry in April

The Ridger points out that April is National Poetry Month. She’s celebrating it by posting a poem a day, so go see what she has to post (the one linked above is her own).

I won’t go into it with quite that zeal, but today I’ll kick in two April-related items to get the month started (it’s still early enough for a “start”, yes).

This is the first verse of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, one of my favourites. I love the way he puts the verbs at the ends of the lines at the beginning, giving an odd rhythm by making the last word of one line really be the first word of the next.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

And this is one of Paul Simon’s shorter ditties, “April Come She Will”, which first appeared on Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence album. This, too, has an interesting pattern, but much more simple; it’s reminiscent of the old traditional rhyme about “Monday’s child”. The inverted word order for April and August also adds to it.

April, come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May, she will stay
Resting in my arms again
June, she’ll change her tune
In restless walks she’ll prowl the night
July, she will fly
And give no warning to her flight
August, die she must
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September, I’ll remember
A love once new has now grown old