Poetry

Since December 2012 I have been creating Search Term Poetry, Spam Poetry and related poems from the virtual scrapyard such as comments, error messages or titles of my own blog posts. The lines of the poems are created from search terms or spam comments (or other equally precious web content). If not stated otherwise no editing is allowed except truncating at the beginning or end.

Of course I hope some reader will not recognize satire and irony and submit my poems to a postmodern literature journal.

[Page last edited 2018-07-12. Feed for this category.]

[2018-07-10] Sources of Heat, Life, and Everything. Same procedure as every summer: Science and tech blogging comes to a halt – look at (engineering-themed) avant-garde art instead.

[2018-02-18] The Subtle Power of the Top Snippet. A New Sub-Genre of Google Poetry. New rules: Only the top result can be used for search term poetry.

[2018-02-03] Bots, Like This! I am an Ardent Fan of HTTPS and Certificates! Not a poem (yet) – rather an attempt to ask The Internet to give me more raw material.

[2018-01-12] Things You Find in Your Hydraulic Schematic. ‘Poetry’ spotted in an unlikely place – our technical drawings! Plutonium and mutated butterflies!

[2017-07-28] Bing Says We Are Weird. I Prove It. Using Search Term Poetry. Bing (Places, Business) has done so repeatedly. What else should I do than creating poetry from search terms that Bing users submitted to find our websites?

[2016-10-10] Spam Poetry: “Cris-Crossing the Universe”. Less spam comments, but raising the bar nonetheless: Spam comments must be used immediately, in the same order as comments.

[2016-07-14] Self-Sufficiency Poetry. ‘Normally’, search terms determined my pick of random images. This time, I have picked garden images, that illustrate self-sufficiency (sort of  😉 !) , and then searched for ‘proper’ search terms.

[2016-05-03] Blinded by the Light: Links Not Considered Click-Worthy. Poetry from search terms displayed in Google Search Console – in Impressions, not clicked.

[2015-12-16] Google-Mediated Self-Poetry – Holiday Edition. One more attempt to poetry-size my prose, and to try to decode the hidden meaning of my posts.

[2015-08-01] Travelling Like Spam Poetry. How spam poetry actually started – doing it in real-live instead of writing it.

[2015-07-02] What the Internet Asks of Me. A cross-over between Search Term Poetry and trying to seriously learn from the searchers’ questions.

[2015-03-18] Virtual Book Spine Poetry (Edition 2014 + 2015/6). Merging two posts: 1) the 2014 edition of my yearly book reviews, a tradition I started last year, and 2) my next experimental poem, in a new experimental genre.

[2014-12-22] Google Translational Poetry – Austrian Christmas Edition. Poem already created from Google results – transformed once more by running them through 10 languages in Google Translate. Bonus: Literary critique and a connection to a Wikimedia image related to Christmas and to Austria.

[2014-12-04] Imaginative Poetry. Inspired by the Second Name of Collected Space. Flarf taken to the next level: Inspired by images created also by a flarf-y method. And printed on real paper – for the first time.

[2014-11-01] Poetry of Anything. Now I Know This Is Called Flarf! I learned two things: 1) I am very late to the poetry-from-the-internet-scrapyard party, but 2) that stuff is serious art. I am also trying something new – poems unrelated to my websites but fuelled by Google only.

[2014-08-24] The Destiny of the Universe. My darkest spam poem so far, not for the faint of heart. I owe to the spammer trying to sell games involving the killing of aliens.

[2014-07-28] Crowdsourcing Poetry (Again). Search terms from the second quarter, blended with terms from Google Webmaster Tools and some enigmatic – and typically Austrian – images.

[2014-04-04] Search Term Poetry – Spring Edition. Very condensed search terms, mixed with some pathetic images taken by an ancient smart phone.

[2014-01-10] Search Term Poetry Sans Google. I am determined to subvert Google’s efforts to hide this precious raw material for Search Term Poetry.

[2013-12-06] Poetry from the Virtual Scrapyard Anniversary: I Subconsciously Think about This Element. Celebrating one year of so-called poetry with a stream-of-consciousness-style Spam Poem.

[2013-10-12] Breaking News on Search Term Poetry (Good, Bad, Ugly). A post by an accomplished author featuring one of my search term poems has been Freshly Pressed, but Google has started encrypting search terms. The end of Search Term Poetry?

[2013-10-03] The Science of Search Term Poetry, using mostly physics-related search terms from the third quarter.

[2013-09-08] Quarterly Search Term Poetry Results (Overdue!) based on search terms submitted in the second quarter. For the first time comments left on the previous post have been included.

[2013-08-14] Welcome to the Real World! – warm-up after a time-out from social media with an haiku-style short Search Term Poem.

[2013-06-06] What? A Spooky Spam Poem of Danger, Fear, Hope, and Lifeless Faces: combining Spam Poetry and images for the first time. (Warning: This poem is not for the faint of heart.)

[2013-05-26] Decoding Myself: Searching for Hidden Clues in My Blog Posts’ Titles – founding a new variety of the genre (again) by creating poetry from headers of posts of mine.

[2013-05-16] Existential Spam Poem: The Soul of This Bag takes the concept of dialogue one step further: We hear a disciple appealing to his or her cult leader.

[2013-05-07] Remarks Written by Brain-Dead Visitors is a surprisingly apt self-referential comment, promoted to the title of this post and the spam poem (sub-)titled searching for sanskrit tattoos. This poem was the first showing off dialogues containing fortune-cookie-like pearls of bizarre wisdom.

[2013-04-26] Surprise Potatoes in the Soldiers’ Vegetable Soup!  My debut as a  literary critic and spam poetry expert – a review on the (alleged) first book of Spam Poetry:

[2013-04-16] Impolite and Humiliating Spam and Why We Really Need Tags for Spam Comments More than Time Machines, a poem made from nasty spam only.

[2013-04-04] Spam Poets Write Weird Things was a Search Term Poem. For the first time the title of a blog post was borrowed from a search term. Since search terms on WordPress Stats started to repeat themselves I have also added terms from Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand I introduced length ordering of search terms.

[2013-03-29] I Need More Trivial Content which was: A Spam Poem created from snippets of a blog post of mine that had been pasted into a spam comment in its entirety.

[2013-03-22] On the Hierarchy of Needs and Needless Things – not really poetry, just two search terms. But the post itself could be called art from the scrapyard.

[2013-03-03] My Zen-ny Search Terms: Where Engineering Meets Art Meets Physics Meets Geekdom. (And Rodents, Sometimes.) and providing the concise How-to-guide readers have asked for.

[2013-02-13] Turning Flattering Chatty Spam into Postmodern Art.

[2013-02-01] The Art of Error Messages. An attempt to transcend the genre.

[2013-01-24] Standing on the Shoulders of Giants and Not Recognizing It. What a let-down:.

[2013-01-18] Spam Poems and Search Terms Poems: Preliminary Results. I have started a movement – this is an account of its history.

[2013-01-14] Taking Crowdsourcing of Art to the Next Level? by including spam comments in my poems, in addition to search terms.

[2012-12-31] 2012: The Year We Make Contact. The end of the year and some some life events are celebrated in a search term poem:

[2012-12-12] The very first search term poem saw the light of the blogospheric day: Crowdsourcing of Art: Poetry from Search Terms.

Prequel on Facebook:

[2012-12-10] Another FB search term poem vanished from a wildly flickering, buggy timeline. But I was able to save it from the virtual abyss by resharing it.

[2012-12-06] The dawn of search term poetry – called on absurd poem on my FB timeline.

This was the first search term poem ever – I have improved my art ever since:

burn org chart
theory about stupid questions
just received a blank piece of paper in the mail
universe life combine
heat pump outer space
reconcile corporate goals
stiff wire instead of helium
sniffing of path
original idea already cliche
silly questions on microwave engineering
dead mouse smell around microwave