Sarah Palin for poet laureate

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.



It reads:

And the relevance to me With that issue, As we spoke About Africa and some Of the countries There that were Kind of the people succumbing To the dictators And the corruption Of some collapsed governments On the Continent, The relevance Was Alaska's.

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.

I searched the internet in a frenzy, for "Sarah Palin" and "poetry," hoping she'd perhaps published a slim volume through the University of Alaska Press. I was not alone. Hart Seely, the grey eminence of American poetry who discovered Donald Rumsfeld, praises her work. Bennett Gordon, of the magazine Utne Reader, calls her a worthy heir to Kerouac and Ginsberg.

Not since Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass has there been such an electrifying debut. And she is yet to publish a collection. This is an astonishing poetic insurgency. The building momentum will soon be unstoppable.

The current American poet laureate is Kay Ryan, a recent and controversial choice. Six weeks ago, Michael Kelleher, the artistic director at Just Buffalo Literary Center, said of Ryan, "She kind of came out of nowhere. She's the Sarah Palin of poetry right now."

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Palin, widely blamed for John McCain's defeat, is now the Kay Ryan of politics. For President-elect Obama to send her back to Alaska would be a crime as great as Stalin's exiling of Osip Mandelstam to Siberia.

The talent of a woman who can improvise a perfect 17-syllable haiku live, in front of 30,000 people— What's the difference Between a hockey mom and A pit bull? Lipstick

—must not be wasted!

If Obama is serious about ending the divisions between Democrat and Republican, between blue states and red, between Darwinist and creationist; if he truly believes in change—then he will appoint Sarah Palin as America's 47th poet laureate.