Whose round hairy silver magazine is angry? The journalistic discovery of literary value in spam emails – otherwise considered a pest – is no longer news. But if some poets endorse this view, celebrating the convention-breaching ‘wrongness’ of spam language, is this posture really as subversive as it seems? Keston Sutherland on a consumer revolt in the avant-garde’s inbox

Self-confessed cybersnob and net.artist Lewis LaCook relates the tale of his conversion to poetry blogs. The blog, he argues, is a medium which opens up the net to poets whose forte is words and not (necessarily) code

Subverting the Cybersnobs

John Cayley on poetry, the alphabet and the future of programmatrons

Text is the Net's supreme structuring principle.
It also creates its destructive elements -
its weeds, moles, acidbaths and bombs.
In the age of multimedia convergence,
what is there left for text to teach us?

Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics contains a selection of half a dozen pieces of writing, all of which can be seen as in some sense process-generated; the co-work of Brian Kim Stefans and certain of his digital familiars – demons that drive both him and his media.

In Howard Slater's consideration of Rimbaud's Season in Hell, the poetry is adopted and adapted as a transhistorical 'locus of expression'; one that - in keeping with Rimbaud's own desire to move beyond identity, self-expression and representation - centres on a poetic politics of affectability and becoming. This text first appeared on http://www.infopool.org.uk.

Ed Emery, translator extraordinaire of Italian literature and political theory, discusses his ‘personal key to the universe’: the ancient poetic form of the Muwashshah. For insights into Dante and the development of western culture in general, read on

In Writing Machines, literary theorist N.Katherine Hayles, together with designer Anne Burdick, have tried hard to embody conceptual thinking around the material impact of digital technology on text through the publication's own design. Net artist and language mutator Mez casts a critical eye over the results.

'Education systems are crumbling ... ' in a communique to the Copenhagen Free University, Howard Slater muses amongst the ruins

"Become many, brave the outside world, split off somewhere else..."
– Michel Serres