Happy Shopping - Massurrealist Spam Poetry

Book excerpt: In this book of poetry Cecil Touchon extracts material from the very fabric of the massurreality; texts from spam email. In these poems Touchon gives us a contemplative glimpse into contemporary artistic practice where the artist becomes, much more a connector of things than a creator. Every day trillions of bits of data are transmitted over the Internet. As artists peer into this world of information overload a vast body of incoherent data is brought into view. Much like the subconscious explored by the early Surrealists, Touchon uses this raw material to explore unlikely configurations through the use of found text, the abutment of random, unrelated words and phrases such as the classic example from Lautreamonts Chants de Maldoror: "the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella." This embrace of randomness is central to Touchon's poetic output.