Palin Poet

In 2011, Michael Solomon released a Kindle single entitled “I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems of Sarah Palin.” The book consisted of Palin speeches reprinted word for word but broken into poetic lines. Solomon isn’t the only one who has noticed that Palin’s much-mocked speeches make more sense if formatted as poetry. Writers for both Fusion and the Huffington Post have taken Palin’s speech endorsing Donald Trump and re-cast it as vatic verse.

Here is a fragment of Palin, with line breaks from Jason O. Gilbert of Fusion:

I Sing the Body Apoplectic

We all have a part in this, we all have a responsibility.
Looking around at all of you, you hard-working Iowa families.
You farm families! And teachers! And teamsters! And cops, and cooks!
You rockin’ rollers! And holy rollers!
All of you who work so hard,
You full-time moms!
You, with the hands that rock the cradle!
You all make the world go round,
and now,

Our cause is one!

(…) As Michael Solomon writes, “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.”

Jason O. Gilbert agrees. “Many critics derided [Palin’s] speech as ‘rambling’ and ‘insane,’” he notes. “These critics are wrong. With a little proper formatting, this speech was poetry, in the tradition of Walt Whitman.” / Jeet Heer, New Republic