New book turns Sarah Palin's words into poetry
By Jeff MillsJuly 5th, 2011, 1:00 pmComments (7)
It turns out Sarah Palin was a poet, and she didn't even know it. Hart Seely, writing for Slate in 2008, kicked off the Palin-poetry movement by transmuting the base metal of Palin's actual words from interviews into poetic gold. Such alchemical efforts produced "found" gems like this one, titled "On Good and Evil," taken from an interview with Katie Couric:
It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.
That's not a good guy.
Now, picking up where Seely left off, Michael Solomon has produced I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems of Sarah Palin, boasting fifty previously-unpublished poems by "Alaska's comic bard." Solomon's foreword tells us that:
"Verse, like America, yearns to be free. Few 21st-century poets understand this better than Sarah Palin. Not since Walt Whitman first heard America singing has a writer captured the hopes and dreams of her people so effortlessly — and with so many gerunds."
Solomon waded through 24,000 pages of those recently-released Palin emails to come up with the verses, like the positively William Carlos Williamsian "But I'm Not Bitter":
The sunshine is perfect --
Too bad we'll be looking at it
Through conference windows
This afternoon.
Solomon made an Independence Day appearance on Keith Olbermann's Countdown, where Olbermann indulged us with pregnantly-paused recitations of several free-verse beauties. Recommended only for the tin-eared.
Comments ( 7 )
"Recommended only for the tin-eared. "
You mean emails being read as poetry by a talentless hack don't come across well? I wonder what Olby's viewers thought of it. If I had to guess, 1 person liked it while the other 2 did not.
...is your choice of nick, Publius.
"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead." - Thomas Paine
Exactly why I chose it, How Ironic; reason has been (almost) completely lost. Conservatives will bring it back and I'm leading the charge.
And good job on getting into those history books, sniffer. I didn't think you had it in you.
I'd like to add: Duhhhhhhh.
Keep smiling! I know I am.
And that's also one of my favorite quotes, by the way. Paine's sermon-like oratory was a primary motivator as previously loyal British subjects clamored for liberty.
What's funny is that I've used about a dozen nicks that reference Common Sense in one way or another and my detractors have yet to detect any of them. I keep lowering the bar and they keep banging into it. I mean, "TPaine." Can I make it any easier for these faux intellectuals?
TPaine...you mean, you weren't referencing the chart-topping rapper? With the Auto-Tune and whatnot? That guy...now he's got some real knowledge to drop.
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