It's hard to tell whether Michael Solomon's remixed re-imagining of the former Alaska governor is tawdry or genius. Perhaps he's straddling the line with one foot in each yard.
To be sure, it's a brilliant experiment in language, and the brunt of the work seems to be in data scouring and formatting. It forces us to simultaneously rethink poetry and everyday speech. Somewhere, somehow, the two intersect. And if you can tease that intersection out of the torrential onslaught of faux-folksy speech inflections and you-betcha religious extremism, well then goshdarnit, you can probably find it anywhere.
Reading these poems: where to start? First of all, apologies to the poetry gods for the sin of elevating Palin's verbal utterances to the status of noble wordsmithery. I want so badly to write this project off the way I would cheap political action figures and calendars sold at shopping mall kiosks.
And yet, there's really something beautiful here, in the way a few paragraph breaks can turn a lament over a conference meeting into:
The sunshine is perfect—
Too bad we’ll be looking at it
Through conference windows
This afternoon.
I want to hate Sarah Palin - for her ignorance, her intolerance, her insistence that there are "real" and "not real" parts of America - but when it comes to language I sort of have to pause now. Am I so pretentious that paragraph breaks make everything seem deep and meaningful and beautiful?
Is that Solomon's whole point?
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