(spam poem by Edward Desautels) smoke peppered everything as we shambled through the dust and bore our load of sorrow into the future the old soldiers behind us lay down along the roadside like all the rest of them, resolute we tried to stay our tears leaving only the ruins children in their tumbled down…
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) we found the gentlemen who married late in life offered them a little glimpse of our ox-marrow satire their idle considerations of class and state business prompted us to exert ourselves in their happy but unusual rooms our lookout broke the wax seal his secretarial manner had something to do…
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) we spoke a barbarian tongue on the stage where swarms confined us in silks and reckless cloth of gold the world gazed and applauded engaged in pitiful longing for the cross and compass for the reckless men like poison we believed in all that was necessary in the seriousness of…
(spam poem by Edward Desautels) we'd saved our lives more than once by degrees we came to understand arithmetical problems and the drawn white faces crawling on hands and knees sentenced and banished like Vallandigham we groped about to please our counsel "we want to make a very careful choice" "we want to comment upon…
A few years back, while attending the &Now conference on innovative writing at Lake Forest College in Chicago, I was introduced to the concept of spam poetry. For some, this exercise simply takes the form of a kind of poetic version of Duchamp's "found object": take the spam email and, without reshaping it in any…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 