More Sarah Palin Poetry: Small Mayors Quote Unquote

Befoulers of the Verbiage

It was an unfair attack on the verbiage
That Senator McCain chose to use,
Because the fundamentals,
As he was having to explain afterwards,
He means our workforce.
He means the ingenuity of the American.
And of course that is strong,
And that is the foundation of our economy.
So that was an unfair attack there,
Again based on verbiage.

-Sarah Palin

Last November, Julian Gough famously wrote about Sarah Palin as a poet: "What the philistine media take for incoherence is, in fact, the fruitful ambiguity of verse. [...] A great poet needs to leave open the door between the conscious and unconscious; Sarah Palin has removed her door from its hinges." He was referring to a poem he had rewritten in verse & called "The Relevance of Alaska" (we quoted it here last November - "And the relevance to me / With that issue, / As we spoke / About Africa...") Sarah Palin poetry is back like the eskimos: Hart Seeley has a collection at Slate.com, there's some analysis by John Lundberg at the Huffington Post. Someone named Beau Vent is selling an eBook called "Tap That Verbiage, Also". And seemingly unrelatedly, last night, Conan O'Brien had William Shatner read some of Palin's resignation speech as beat poetry with bongos & upright bass:



I love that Alaskan imagery, especially the bit about being midway between extreme temperatures. I've also already posted this, but I feel it didn't get enough notice, the composer/pianist Henry Hey set accompaniment to one of Governor Palin's rambling sentencagraphs in the style of Steve Reich's The Cave:

You know,
Small mayors,
Mayors of small towns--
Quote, unquote--
They're on the front lines.