Young Writers Society

an interesting poem to start off with!


Edit:
I swear a poem was here
only a moment ago
above my now lonely
commentary left behind
speaking of the incomprehensible
maybe of truth maybe of the future
but it was in the format
of Forum Spam
so it may have gotten
deleted by moderators
how avant-garde.

Edit Reflection Day 2:
in the end what's really the difference
between forum spam and poetry
we're all trying to sell our version of truth
who are we to decide what lives or dies

Edit Reflection Day 3:
it's been three days now
since this forum spam was deleted
and i'm beginning to wonder if i
imagined it, maybe there was never
poetry here, maybe this was actually
my napo thread, but now has become
a strange sort of time capsule
already emptied of its contents

Edit Reflection Day 4:
have you ever considered
spam bots may have their own social site
"Young SpamBots Society" or something
maybe they have different activities like
picture spam month, link spam day, and leave a
Rick Roll camp during the year, and forums
to discuss techniques and tips for spamming.
perhaps sometimes poets infiltrate their site,
leaving a sonnet or hasty love ode and the mods
have to discuss what to do, "they're new, maybe
they didn't know the rules," they send the poet
tips on spamming, but the poet forgets to login
and the exchange of worlds is lost.
maybe we could learn from one another.

Edit Reflection Day 5:
if a tree falls in an empty forest
and no one hears it, does it make
a sound, do few verses written in
isolation make a poem, how about
in a now empty spam-forum thread
that has allegedly been deleted,
is meaning created or merely understood?

Edit Reflection Day 6:
Hello old friend, I see you are still here,
no poem, no spam, just my empty comment -
that's the problem with really revolutionary
poetry is that most people never will accept
that it's poetry, it's just graffiti plastered in
the wrong place at the wrong time, a proper
poem needs line breaks of course, and run-on,
sentences, with a few, misplaced commas,
to really sell the message.

Edit Reflection Day 7:
What is the purpose of poetry?
Has anyone discovered it?

Edit Reflection Day 11: A a haiku
I've gotten behind
on this secret napo thread,
need to catch back up.

Edit Reflection Day 11: B an acrostic
For some reason
or another I'm
really not willing to admit, anything's
unworthy of being called poetry
maybe it's superstition, but

someone has to called spam
poetry, or i'm
afraid that we
might miss something important.

Edit Reflection Day 11: C a lanturne
what
reason
do we have
to write what's true?
thoughts -

Edit Reflection Day 11: D a cinquain

the truth
could be written
hedged, folded, spun like yarn
but how could we know such a thing
and doubt.

Edit Reflection Day 12
imagine an entire field littered with easter eggs during quarantine, left by some well-meaning older-lady who hadn't heard the news that the world was ending. perhaps chocolate filled eggs, left-unbothered, might transform into real eggs, that chickens could hatch from, and the field would become filled with new life - and we'd never know it, until months later when the chickens demanded their own labor union, and we would have to comply because egg-layers are now considered essential laborers, entitled to appropriate compensation for their work.

what fields lay waiting, while we hide, might new life spring up unexpectedly safe from our looking - what responsibilities do we have for a world demanding that life goes on.

Edit Reflection Day 13
I'm not too worried,
that no one is reading this thread,
call me arrogant, but it occurs to me
that the very best poetry
was probably written
on the margins of Shakespeare's
director's notes, the copy
no one will ever read
stuck in some sixteenth
century waste-paper basket
because there's something
so intriguing about
all the words written
that we'll never read.

Edit Reflection Day 14
it's been two weeks now
since our spammer was here
since i took up his mission
to fill up this thread with
nonsense or poetry or maybe
those are synonyms, i wonder
how is the forum spammer
doing, is he well? is his spam
getting better? has he decided
to try out email spamming to
get a little diversity in his
daily writing, or has his little
time on our site, inspired him
to become a proper poet?

Edit Reflection Day 14.5
what sort of poem gets written at 3.am
sometimes the very best
and sometimes
the
worrrrrsssst

Edit Reflection Day 16
i feel like spammers must have
pretty good job security all things
considered during an epidemic
i've received three spam phone
calls just today, and i almost
asked each robo-caller if they
knew any forum-spam-bots
that wrote poetry, but un-
fortunately all the spam-
callers were robots, so they
were only interested in tell-
ing me about free trips to the
Bahamas and how the warranty
on some piece of technology
could run out if i don't act
now, spam bots are great
for inspiration, but i'm sorry
to say, not much for
conversation.

Edit Reflection Day 17
a month is a very long time,
long enough to forget what
you're doing here, but not
long enough to consider
doing much else.

Edit Reflection Day 18
i've been informed that perhaps
the software that the spam forum
post was advertising was
malicious, intended to spread
viruses to unexpecting clickers,
can words, or rather poems, be
malicious though, can they hold
grudges and dream dreams, and
fear for the future, or is that just
something an author feels and then
hopes sifts into their work. in any case,
malicious links ought to be deleted,
and maybe a few other poems.

Edit Reflection Day 19
i don't have time to write
a real fake-poem for my
fake-napo thread today,
so i apologize dear reader,
these haphazard line
breaks will have to do!

Edit Reflection Day 20
at some point, i'm not sure
which napo thread became
the real one, poetry is strange
like that, we put labels on
things with titles, because
we like order i suppose, but try
to forget the expiration date
on the carton of spoiled milk
could be poetry or mistyped text,
or waking yawn, or burned out
light bulb shadow, or rain cloud,
it's all poetry, and the things
that don't fit our labels even
more so, we're breathing here
aren't we, so who is to say,
that this isn't my real thread,
and the other one,
is the spam.

Edit Reflection Day 21
i wrote a poem once about if
you lie in your poetry, then
you're lying to yourself, but
to be honest today's a poem is
a poetic-invention, that i'm actually
writing on April 24th rather than
April 21st, because days are fuzzy
now, and poetry brings some sense
of order, or acknowledges the
disorder, or maybe those are the
same thing, anyways, i want to
be honest with you, or me, or
whoever is the subject of this poem;
the title is metaphor.

Edit Reflection Day 22
i intended to write a lot more
_______shape poems this month,
they're almost fail-proof, because even if the words stop conveying
meaning, people are generally
____________receptive to shapes conveying meaning, we're programmed that
_______________way maybe, anyways this poem
_______is a shape poem, you might not have realized it, but it is
intended to portray the shape of a box that's had text haphazardly
wiped across it.

Edit Reflection Day 23
There have been more forum spammers lately,
I don't know if you've noticed them, but roughly
every day, sometimes twice, there'll be a new post
in the NaPo threads posing as poetry, but really
just conveying random words arranged in verses,
and yes, I am referring to my "NaPo Thread".

Edit Reflection Day 24
What's the best way to end this?
Sometimes I get the sinking
suspicion that people don't actually
read anything, maybe not even the
authors, we just copy and paste
our thoughts into word documents
and hope they convey meaning,
should I draw people's attention to
this strange forgotten thread, or
does that ruin the point?
I'll need to copy and paste more
thoughts around and see what
pops up.

Is this for real?

@Arcticus you've caught me - I was doing a sneaky second napo thread in this one that was posted by a forum spammer, and not fully deleted. The first day it posted I left a comment saying "nice poem" and I think that's why it didn't get fully deleted. I was trying to keep it over on the second page so people wouldn't notice.

Alas, it's at the top of the first page now @alliyah

Reflection Day 25
The plot has been discovered,
as they say, pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain.
Even the most inconspicuous
poetry has a way of being found,
an ant will pause to reflect on
a fallen leaf, the child stops
to breathe in the sea-air,
we notice the smoke escaping
a cigarette to claim empty air,
or we'll chew on a turn of
phrase said half-heartedly,
even if for a moment, we are
always making and finding
poetry.

Edit Reflection Day 26
"Is this for real?" @Arcticus asked,
and what could that have referred to?
is the poetry real? is the thread?
is time, is space, is anything?
are we? I suppose this can't truly be
my NaPo thread, or the forum
spammer's spam, because it
was all deleted on April 1st.
But now am I the forum spammer
or still a poet?

Dollars are precious, keep them safe
Piracy happens, who cares?
You might as well save a buck or two
And buy cheap, cheap software

"You caught me" @alliyah said
For she was being sneaky, it's clear
But we all know she was trying
to sell cheap, cheap software

(This so wack, my apologies)

Edit 27
for some reason
i was more disciplined
in keeping up the charade
when no one
was watching.

Edit 28
not that i am looking,
but if i was in the market
for cheap cheap software,
i'm not sure the national poetry
month forum is the first place
i'd look.

Edit 29: For the Forum Spammer
Dear NaPo Forum Spammer,
your poetry was only here a moment
and quickly mistaken for spam,
but thank you, for having the bravery
to post what looked like random
websites arranged around incoherent
text and calling it poetry, i think
it gives a little courage to us all,
and although you haven't been here
to read the poems i left behind
on your abandoned thread,
i hope you'd be pleased,
or at least attempt again
to compose poetry.

Edit Poem 30 / "poem arranged in the form of spam"


<<<< GET YOUR POETRY HERE >>>>>

Pay, NOTHING TODAY, confirmed LOWEST RATES in the USA,
just read and click the links, to acquire POETRY,

this is not SPAM, it is an AUTOMATED MESSAGE generated by a POET,

you can't call everything spam,
if you're not willing to call it all poetry,

<<<< WE'RE ALL WRITING HERE >>>>

BEST POETRY, VERY Best POETRY, READ ALL the POETRY!!

and sometimes it takes courage, to write something unexpected,
sometimes we're brave, or just sufficiently random &/or vague,




READ NOW, or MISS your CHANCE! April is ending soon,
offer doesn't last long, NaPo is closing up shop.

what if there was a random detail about nature here,
about how the longest sung song is the one the ocean sings to the sand.

IGNORE THE FINE PRINT
{READ TWO POEMS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE, all you have to do is separate the original piece with creatively placed roman numerals, and then you have multiple poems}

this message is not endorsed by the author, and yet i wrote it, maybe this poem will self-destruct, become star dust, what else is new?

Other LINKS for CONSIDERATION, FREE LINKS (read at your own risk): tortential spam, meme spam collection, parrot, can robots write poetry, the secret to the universe




The missing pig has been here reading some poetry! But look! They left a clue below...



(click on the tracks & find alliyah's answer to the question within the thread - feel free to leave your own too...)

Edit:

@alliyah
Aaahh I love every poem here! and how their questions and musings progress over the month—it's really cool to witness!! I also definitely feel that unique sense of writing poetry without attention on its existence (there's something nice about writing poetry in some tucked away thread that can only really be stumbled upon or hunted down). I'm amazed at this thread and these poems <3

Edit2:

Okay so I ended up writing a whole thought dump on this topic of what is and isn’t poetry/art (mainly drawing from my knowledge of visual art) because I got excited, and the questions and ideas in the poems you wrote here triggered my love for considering them d:

(I may have written a thing oh no)

often the text i generate feels gl tch d,
enc ypt d like it did ’t quit(e) send
right, or fast enough, or human enough,
so who is to say the spammer is not
the software they’re selling?

if we wait long enough, by accident,
a message could rearrange itself again
in another post, with another name,
to look like something felt, and right,
and convincingly human for us to trust
whatever link, and take the risk
of getting to know this
cheap cheap software.


The following are spam messages I deleted along with another spam thread that popped up in the NaPoWriMo forum early April (which somehow felt appropriate to put at the end here):

Hello to all
In this puzzling forthwith, I proclivity you all
Appreciate your one's nearest and friends

Hello to all
In this difficult forthwith, I love you all
Esteem your strain and friends

Hello to all
In this enigmatical continuously, I honey you all
Prize your one's nearest and friends

Hello to all
In this baffling forthwith, I proclivity you all
Esteem your strain and friends

Hello to all
In this difficult span, I honey you all
Prize your relations and friends

Hello to all
In this puzzling forthwith, I proclivity you all
Esteem your relations and friends

Hello to all
In this difficult forthwith, I love you all
Prize your family and friends

c: