Back in the olden days before Google, the powers that be had an idea. It was a way to help automated search and classification with metadata; if the content was about literature, then a keyword “literature” was to be helpfully placed into the HTML source. A librarian’s dream, it was a good idea, and like so many good ideas, ended up being exploited mercilessly for fun and profit.

Here’s an example: At some point in 1997 I was searching Altavista for some information on Karlheinz Stockhausen and turned up a result page which proved to be completely devoid of content; as blank as Beginner’s Mind. Looking into the source, however, I found a goodly number of keywords, which seemed to fool the search engine into thinking this page to contain the Secrets of Sirius. I copied the keywords out to a file and saved it for posterity, thinking it would make some right proper performance poetry.

Each line of the keywords follows a form of sorts. The first word is random, and the remaining four are something related to what was then (and now) the only thing online that really brought in the cash. Here’s a sample — note the classy use of pogrom.

This runs for 19 pages. If you’d like to take a gander for your upcoming naughty poetry slam, here’s the complete set of keywords.