Reading Sarah Palin’s anguished interview with Greta van Susteren of Fox News just after the election, I had an epiphany: Palin is a poet, and a fine one at that. What the philistine media take for incoherence is, in fact, the fruitful ambiguity of verse.
Here she is, in a work I have taken to calling “The Relevance of Africa.” (Not a single word or comma has been changed, but the line breaks are placed where they naturally fall.) In it, Palin blends the energy of free verse with the austerity of a classic 14-line sonnet.
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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“In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date.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”.
Wonderful. But just two examples? More, please!
Looking back at some blogging I did a while ago, here’s a personal favourite from the great SP: a moving tribute to innocence and youth tentatively entitled “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.
This is an old joke, previously applied to Rummy.
http://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Intelligence-Existential-Poetry-Rumsfeld/dp/0743255976
Lazy.
Oops, as you make quite clear in the article. More fool me. Apologies.
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