Unfortunately I need to quote myself again and again: Every time I figured I had been very original and creative, The Internet tells me I am not. Others have come before me. I am a lousy historian of geeky art.
I have been made aware on Google+ of the fact that there have been other spam poets, having created #spampoems more than 10 years ago. At least I have proved all experts wrong who say G+ is a boring ghost town.
So my previous article was not at all the ‘definitive history’. Here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoetry
… which also has an impressive list of links. BBC has reported on this in 2003:
Some have composed poems using the subject lines of the spam they receive; others are creating verse using the strings of strange words that are often found inside spam messages. A lucky few have even found excerpts of novels buried in spam.
Even haikus are mentioned in the Wikipedia article – so I need to ping back once more to the alleged first haiku poet.
But wait:
The entry does not meet Wikipedia’s guidelines, the sources are obviously considered not reliable enough. Are all the articles fakes perhaps?
Above all, this is about spam poetry only. There is still hope that I might have founded search term poetry? I don’t dare to do more research!
In addition, this is an English entry. So chances are that the founder of the hashtag #spampoems is probably the first creator of German or French spam poetry (2019: Links broken).
Seasoned spam poets and search term poets – please bring any other omission to my attention! I will repent in public!
elkemental Force 
I thought spam was invented by monty python’s flying circus … where they made a song about it …
:-) I have not seen your comment yet, when I had submitted the previous reply. Update: So I learned about: Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Monty Python! –> British culture at its best!
It’s this one, correct? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
Yes … that was the ‘song’ the vikings were singing … and it must have been also the birth of ‘spam tv’. Am I that old already?
At no point did I claim originality, by the way; according to Oscar Wilde, nothing ever is. I doubt I’m even the first to do it in non-English languages, but thanks for the sentiment.
You are right – I was only me who made rash statements about originality!
Thanks for the pointer to the Oscar Wilde quote! So finally I could learn something “original” from the comments on this post – about Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde!
Correction: I misremembered the quote, it was actually Mark Twain: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/05/bulk-of-all-human-utterances-is.html
But I doubt even misatrributing the quote to Osar Wilde is even original.
Thanks! :-) Unfortunately this breaks the collection of referrals to British culture in this discussion! We should falsely state that Mark Twain was British.
It clearly didn’t catch on in a big way in 2003. History may still credit you with bringing about a renaissance of the art form!
Great – I’d like to call myself a Renaissance Woman ;-)
Hey Shakespeare didn’t invent the Sonnet, he just perfected it. I’d rather be known as the Shakespeare of search term haiku, rather than the inventor! :D
You made by day! I can cancel the appointments with my psychoanalysts and life coaches! ;-)