
UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie
Clockwise from top left: Jessie Rauch-Dickson, Tiffany Rauch-Dickson, Jessie (again),
and Alexander (Fish) Bohn. Narrated by Mary-Jo Valentino

UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie

UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie

UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie

UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie

UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie

UNDERSTANDING SPOETRY Watch movie
Last year my classmate Jessie and I became intrigued with the content of our spam email. We noticed that companies strategically attach randomized text fragments to text to the end of Junk mail in order to get it through spam filters.
So we decided to engage with this idea, as a sort of cut-up/dada approach taken to its ridiculous extreme. We created the character of a spam poet, played by Jessie, who believes the Internet sends sending her cosmic poems, and she performs them on film. Tiffany plays the literary critic who deeply believes in spoetry's "metatheatrical absence of meaning", while Fish plays the spam-eliminating programmer who states "If spam poetry is a movement, it should keep moving."
The final piece takes the form of a mockumentary called Understanding Spoetry and a book documenting the process of making the film.

