As ~Slavoj Zizek~ (ikr, sorry) declares, ‘I already am eating from the trash can all the time.’ We live in a culture saturated by throwaway discourse: public transport advertising, corporate PR, social media squabbles, flowery specifications for crap jobs. Our online and IRL everyday floats on an infinite stream of textual detritus. If the visual art world has been very responsive to this technological acceleration and cultural hypertrophy, the same cannot be said of the literary world, often stuck in its old ways, still clinging to a pen-and-quill ideal of the poetic sublime that we dare call ~drab and ~trite.

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It is time for poetry to enter the post-internet age, and SPAM zine wishes to take upon its shoulder the weight of this herculean enterprise. To bridge the gap between the internet divine and the pathetic IRL; to make poetry meme, and meme poetry; to watch highbrow theory and pop culture have animalistic sex live on Facebook; to Make Poetry Cool Again - that is what SPAM is for.

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We believe to be entering the metamodern phase in which the monstrous Chthulucene of self-devouring irony and the reduplication of signs and slogans find an inseparable companion in new constructive sincerity, in the need for wholesomeness and reciprocal care. Unlike most publications, SPAM does not ask its contributors to choose one pole over the other. We acknowledge our generation’s need to constantly move between pretence and eagerness, between the absolute and the relative, between optimism and cynicism - never having or wanting to choose.

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Like the artist Luke Turner, we, too, ‘recognise oscillation to be the natural order of the world.’ Our contributors represent a generation raised on the anxiety of a culture deprived of structure, stability and origin. SPAM provides a DIY platform for writers, artists and musicians to work through the frustrations of the times as much as unfolding the everyday weirdness, joy, and bipolarity of our contemporary condition.

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Our aim is to import the experimental culture, computer aesthetics and hypertextual modalities of the internet era into a literary scene we perceive as conservative and resistant to change. SPAM very much aspires to a semi-rhizomatic model of publication, accepting contributions from cyberspace and beyond, and facilitating the everyday exhibition of memes, tweets, troll quotes, and the strange k-hole of YouTube comments, next to nuggets of critical theory, and masterpieces of the poetic canon. 

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Although our aesthetic tendencies converge towards the realms of the post-internet and avant-pop, our visual style is also in constant flux - mimicking the visual variety of the landscape explored by the modern-day internet surfer. All of our publications are affordably priced, and all profits go directly into funding future issues, and nurturing the pamphlet machine SPAM Press. We are 100% volunteer-run.
 

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