Is the writing on the wall for Sarah Palin?
So tickled were Prospect by a recent post on author, poet and all-round man-of-creative-media Julian Gough’s blog that we asked him to revisit the topic for our most recent issue. The result: an Opinion piece outlining the case for Sarah Palin as America’s next poet laureate. As Gough notes, “A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges. A great poet does not self-censor; Sarah Palin seems authentically innocent of what she is saying. She could be the most natural, visionary poet since William Blake.”
As Gough also notes, others got this bandwagon rolling a little while ago. But it deserves its press, not least because the results are eerily convincing as a certain kind of free, dimly political, associative writing. My personal favourite has to be this moving tribute to innocence and youth:
A Child
When you consider
what’s going on
in this world,
the most promising
and good ingredients
in this world
is a child.
The hope
that a child brings
and just understanding that.
Being near
and dear
to my heart.
But you can make up your own. And why not try it with other politicians and would-be world leaders? Who knows, an informal poetry competition could be just the thing politics needs to reinvigorate its relationship with language, truth, beauty, and all those other things we care about in books.
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Here via Rohin Guha/Blackbook:
LOL.
Is it savantism? Tourette? It can’t be “natural.”
Wonderful! Thank you for this.
I am not quite sure whether you are serious about Sarah P’s. linguistic prowess
I agree with David Cavett (blog entry published in the NY Times Nov. 14, 2008) when he describes her verbiage as “the pause-free stream of unparsable flapdoodle” or in my more prosaic way of speaking “jibberish”. Her recent pronouncements about the future of health care in Alaska is another good example: “There is no silver bullet. If there was a silver bullet defining and meeting the challenges in these areas, then other states, too, wouldn’t be facing the challenges Alaska faces. No state has that silver bullet.”
Dick Cavett (not David) was thoroughly trounced by Camille Paglia in Slate:
Paglia on Cavett on Palin
[In case the url link doesn't go through:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/12/10/hillary_mumbai/index1.html
]
“However, Cavett’s piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. …
“I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. …
“In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. …
“Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country?”
I’d be more than happy to read your rebuttal to her take on the “silver bullet”.