Erin J. Watson

"What is a poem after all? you say.
Maybe it is a kind of possessing
a heap of rocks, a buoy or anything"
-- from No Experiences

This collection of 24 short poems by Erin Watson began as a playful response to the randomly wise ravings of a popular spam horse, @Horse_ebooks on twitter. The spam horse account spewed phrases that revealed hidden poetry. For each of these poems, Erin took one spam tweet and built a poem around it, rel="nofollow" target="_top">posting each one online. Later she kickstarter funded a physical chapbook of the poetry, which is how I discovered the project (and spam horse).

Coming from an experimental project as it did, Erin's poetry is playful and surprising, each short line taking unexpected twists and turns. The poems are thick with layered images and meaning and they're the kind of poems that fill up the small space they encompass. They're poems to sit with and consider the many possible meanings of, they're poems to read over and over again, to giggle at, to enjoy.

As a side note, it was revealed recently that Horse_ebooks was not a spambot but a performance art project by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief. Many people who followed the span horse felt betrayed by this news.

I asked how Erin felt about this, and this was her wonderful response:

"Yeah. I've been thinking about it a lot today: like, why does it feel a little duplicitous that something wonderful was someone's wonderful creation instead of a weird mistake? I don't know, mostly I'm grateful that I got to inhabit a moment where it seemed real and make a thing with the means available. Everyone should make their own weirdness in the world."

I'm glad she got to inhabit this moment, too and that it allowed me to read and discover her poetry. I also hope she's still avidly writing and that she will release more of her words into the world soon.… (meer)