Garrison Keillor's Sarah Palin Poetry

Dana Gioia & Lew Turco, 2008

I.

When Dana Gioia, the retiring (in 2009) Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote a critical essay on-line (at http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ekeillor.html) titled “Good Poems: Title Tells All, A Review of Good Poems by Garrison Keillor,” he began by saying, “When I first saw Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems, I was prepared to treat it with mild condescension. The title struck me as a little too coy, and my first glance through its topically arranged pages noticed mostly the sundry quality of its contents. ‘Title tells all,’ I thought, as the movie commentators in TV Guide used to say, when forced to describe films like Teen Cheerleader Murders or Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Keillor is a deft and original entertainer with a genuine literary gift, especially for a brand of satire so decorous and gentle that it blurs into nostalgic romance, but he is not a writer given to the lyric extremes of powerful emotion so often essential to poetry. I assumed that most of the poems in Good Poems would, indeed, be good poems, but probably not good enough to make the book a necessary addition to the already overcrowded field of anthologies.” Gioia, too, had said it all in his first paragraph, but he went on at great length to modify his opening remark, and he ended by defending what I here call “Sarah Palin Poetry,” that is, “poetry” that I think Sarah Palin might like and recommend — if she in fact reads any literature at all — to hockey moms, who themselves probably never read anything more than potboiler novels or the magazines that are sold at supermarket checkouts, and to Joe Sixpacks who are unlikely to read anything much at all unless it’s Playboy or Sports Illustrated.

Almost everyone, I suppose, has listened to National Public Radio’s Keillor show, The Prairie Home Companion. I tend to agree with what Gioia said about the type of satire Keillor is prone to — at least as far as his skits are concerned, especially his “noir” detective stories that are genuinely funny in the understated way that “Bob and Ray” used to be. But Keillor’s choice of music, I have long believed, is not of that level; in fact, it is several cuts below. Not to put too fine a point upon it, the music Keillor plays on his show is simply execrable. I can think of no other adjective to describe it. Some of it is “bluegrass” from Hell; some, really terrible “jazz”; some is “gospel,” a genre I used to love to listen to, like the “folk songs” and “country-western” music I enjoyed as a kid. Since my youth such music has become, for the most part, simply dreadful, expressing overstated emotions and limning situations that are at best embarrassing: You hope nobody, anywhere, truly feels or thinks that way. Somehow, though, Keillor has managed to discover contemporary musical groups that are a good deal worse even than that.

One of my former colleagues at SUNY Oswego, Donald Vanouse, was on sabbatical with his wife a number of years ago. He writes, “In the winter of ' 79, Mary and I were staying in Minneapolis. The 
broadcasts of The Prairie Home 
Companion occurred every morning, offering a cheerful variation upon the 
rural entertainment of the market reports on steers and sow bellies.

 We listened most mornings until there were broadcasts two mornings in a 
row of a song entitled,
 ‘Jesus Put a Yodel in My Soul.’ That stopped us. It was too hard to 
endure. And we were afraid of the possibility of hearing a third 
broadcast.

 The unpredictable selection of songs can provide a singular charm to the 
PHC, but it can also cause a kind of nausea.” They stopped listening to the show forever. Because Keillor does have, as Gioia said, a nuanced sense of satire, it is difficult for me to believe that he can choose such music without having his tongue stuck in his cheek and one brow lifted above a sardonic eyeball, but I have heard the music he favors too often to believe he picks it in any but a straightforward way.

I don’t suppose one need belabor the point that poetry and music are sister arts. In his essay Gioia further quoted Keillor to this effect: “He goes on to specify his editorial criterion: ‘stickiness, memorability, is one sign of a good poem.’ The goddess Mnemosyne” [Gioia says; Keillor would never use such a highbrow citation] “was the mother of the Muses, and memorability [to coin a term] is a governing aesthetic that Horace, Dante, and Milton would have understood, though one does not hear it mentioned much today in graduate schools. Our age has more sophisticated notions of poetic merit. Yet isn’t there something quite primitive, indeed primal, about the poetic art that links it unbreakably to the power of memorable language? If one compares Keillor’s allegedly modest volume with some ambitious recent anthologies, ‘stickiness’ appears to be a more reliable criterion than some alternatives.”

Indeed, the poems that Keillor chooses for The Writer’s Almanac, and chose for his Good Poems anthology, sometimes are sticky, but that stickiness has nothing to do with memorable language. Here is a poem chosen for the edition of Writer’s Almanac  for Monday, October 27^th, “The Patience of Ordinary Things,” by Pat Schneider, [from her book titled Another River: New and Selected Poems, Amherst Writers and Artists Press, 2005]. It is a perfect example of the “pathetic fallacy”:

It is a kind of love, is it not?

How the cup holds the tea,

How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,

How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes

Or toes. How soles of feet know

Where they’re supposed to be.

I’ve been thinking about the patience

Of ordinary things, how clothes

Wait respectfully in closets

And soap dries quietly in the dish,

And towels drink the wet

From the skin of the back,

And the lovely repetition of stairs,

And what is more generous than a window?

The pathetic fallacy is absurd or overstated personification (prosopopœia); that is, the endowment of objects or animals with human qualities (anthropomorphism), often through cues ('motherhood,' 'Old Glory,' 'apple pie') — words that are meant to induce automatic sentimental responses in the reader, like “soul” in the song title mentioned by Vanouse, above, or as in “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer (see the poem elsewhere on this blog) where there is a string of cues including the vague “lovely,” which Schneider also used, “God,” “pray,” and images like “nest of robins,” “Earth’s sweet-flowing breast.” Besides cues, Kilmer also used trite, or overused, rhymes; about the only ones he missed were "love-above" and "June-moon." Of course, Schneider didn’t use any sort of rhyme at all, or language music of any kind; she merely took prose and “lineated” it — she broke her prose lines (prose is unmetered language) at the ends of phrases or clauses to imitate the look of verse, which is metered language (language that is counted, usually by syllables, accented or unaccented). This practice of lineating, or line-phrasing, prose is erroneously called “free verse,” for how verse can be both “verse” and “free” is beyond me.

But to return to Schneider’s images: Indeed, what is “more generous than a window?” It panes me to say, Gosh, lots of things — allowances, praise, forgiveness, kindness, none of which are inanimate objects like stairs or soap. Of course, clothing can be generous, too, but only in size, not in its feelings.

         The late George Abbe pronounced the word poem as though it were spelled poyme, which always makes me think of work that is over-written, often in a “lovely” way.  Unfortunately, not many people can pull off just writing a poem, though that is the goal, and they wind up under-writing a pome.  Rather a large number of people can't even rise to that level, and they write a peom, a language wreck (poetry is the art of language). Still others have no conception of what a poem actually is, and they write somep'n else.  Those are the categories of “Turco’s Instant Critical System”:

Poyme

Poem

Pome

Peom

Somep'n Else

Garrison Keillor certainly does not favor over-written poymes — give him credit for that; nor does he like peoms; that is, catechretic  pieces— really bad (like the music he favors). On occasion he does publish a poem, but the categories he particularly likes are things that are somep'n else, such as “The Patience of Ordinary Things,” above, which is merely flat prose chopped up into arbitrary lines containing, in this case, pathetic fallacies, or he likes pomes, what I am here calling “Sarah Palin poetry.”

II.

Time to define what I mean by that term. “Sarah Palin poetry” is verse or prose that extols and delineates “jest everyday folks” and their days and ways. Here are some portions of “pomes” (I use the term advisedly) that Keillor has published in his The Writer’s Almanac in recent days:

 

World War II is slipping away, I can feel it.


Its officers are gray.


Their wives who danced at the USO


are gray, too.


Veterans forget their stories. Some lands they fought in 


have new names, and Linda Venetti


who deserted the husband who raised cows


to run off with an officer


has come home to look after her mother


and work the McDonald's morning shift.

 

 [From "I'll Be Seeing You" by Jo McDougall in Towns Facing Railroads, University of Arkansas Press, 1991.]

Would anybody be able to write a bad “country / western” song from this? Without a doubt, if it were written in rhyming verse, but this is written in prose. Write it out as a paragraph; why not? Is there any reason why these lines are broken as they are? Why is there a break after “USO”? After “in” in line five? No reason at all. Why is line four just three words long? Same answer. If somebody wants to try writing the verse of the song, he or she can add it to this refrain:

World War II is slippin’ away,

Its leftover officers have all turned gray.

The old vets down at the town VA

Are fogettin’ their stories every day.

Here is an image from a Tony Hoagland opus that was posted on the Almanac on October 20^th of 2008:

Crossing the porch in the hazy dusk


to worship the moon rising


like a yellow filling-station sign


on the black horizon,



you feel the faint grit


of ants beneath your shoes,…

This, too, is written in simple prose, but what’s wrong with the image that I’ve italicized? What if it were written this way? —

…to worship the filling-station sign

rising like a yellow moon


on the black horizon,

…

If one were traveling east in a car, the revised image would perhaps make sense, for why would anyone “worship” a filling station sign unless one were running out of gasoline? As it stands, the word picture created diminishes the moon to the status of something insignificant, irrelevant, even ridiculous, for the poem abandons the image to make the point that [you] “keep on walking
 / because in this world

 / you have to decide what
 / you're willing to kill[,]” for instance, ants, as in this case, or maybe your marriage, or an elephant to make piano keys — the “poem” wanders off into the night getting farther and farther away from either the moon or the yellow gas station sign, neither of which is threatened with death.

         I’m not saying that Garrison Keillor is incapable of recognizing and publishing a decent poem. Here is one by David Shumate [from The Floating Bridge, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008]: 

Welcome Home, Children

In the early spring I get together with all the people I've been 
in my past lives. We sit around the table at my grandfather's 
farmhouse — mashed potatoes, creamed peas, cornbread. There's 
the Confederate colonel with his mustache and battlefield odor.
 The medieval peasant from Portugal with insects in her hair. The 
Irish boy who died from the fever at nine. There's the patient wife 
of the fishmonger. The petty thief from Cathay who's already 
stuffed his pockets with my grandmother's paperweights. My 
favorite is the Hindu monk. His orange robes. The sacred paint 
across his forehead. He's never reconciled his lust for women and 
steals glances at the dancer from Babylon — my first life. Her long
 dark hair. The thin veils draped over her shoulders. She loves 
to lean across the table for the marmalade, exposing her breasts 
for him to see. After dinner she excuses herself and walks into 
the garden. He follows. I'm not sure if it's just a natural kind of 
thing…One incarnation of mine seducing another…Or an act 
so vile even Narcissus would have gagged.

For one thing, it’s an honest poem, written out in the prose that it truly is, not faked up lines chopped out of a decent paragraph. Although the poem has no rhyme scheme and is not metrical, because it repeats sentence patterns in grammatically parallel structures, it does have a cadence; it is rhythmic — at this point lineation will serve a purpose, to show the syntactic structures, not merely substitute for punctuation:

There's / 
the Confederate colonel

with his mustache and battlefield odor.


/ The medieval peasant

from Portugal with insects in her hair.

/ The 
Irish boy who died

from the fever at nine.

There's / the patient wife 


of the fishmonger.

/ The petty thief from Cathay who's already 
stuffed his pockets

with my grandmother's paperweights.

My 
favorite is

/ the Hindu monk. His orange robes.

/ The sacred paint 
across his forehead.

The reader should be able to recognize from this Walt Whitman’s prosody, the oldest system for writing poetry that exists in the world.

For another thing, the poem has a premise that is set forth in its first sentence and elaborated upon as it travels along through the imagined past. The reader has no trouble following the poet’s train of thought and enjoying it along the way.

The images are clear and interesting, descriptions mostly, but the things described are concrete; they don’t sit around having unlikely human feelings; that is, the marmalade mentioned may be “sticky,” but not in any anthropomorphic way, yet because Shumate set it up deliberately by choosing the perfect detail, we may imagine that Hindu monk, an avatar of the speaker, imagining himself licking that marmalade….

The poem is simultaneously serious and funny — it operates on two levels, so it is complex, but not complicated, although it has in it a classical reference to Narcissus like those Gioia used, but perhaps even Joe the Plumber knows what a narcissist is. He should. And so should Sarah Palin.

One of the things a Narcissist is is someone who can't stop talking about him- or herself, which is the main feature of so-called "confessional poetry," a genre that has been around for centuries but that contemporary poets have forgotten, or never knew, how to write. "Lyric poetry" is basically confessional in nature, and it is one of the three major genres of poetry, the other two being narrative and dramatic poetry. But the word "lyric" means that it is musical; it is song. Take away the language music, and you get a poem like this, published on Keillor's Writer's Almanac on November 11th, 2008:

Amphibious

by Erin Murphy

My daughter wants to take 
a framed oil painting to school,

a nude with loose breasts and a belly
ripe as the full moon. Why? Because

we're studying frogs, she says,
and it's a frog. I cock my head

to consider the angle of the draped arm
but can't get past the female form.
My daughter, though, is swimming
in amphibians, bringing home

scribbled pictures of tadpoles sprouting 
splayed feet. At night, she sleeps

in the bedroom I painted pink, 
her shelves lined with confectionary

teapots and cups. By day, she wants
to be her brother when she grows up.

Lately, she's morphed into 
a creature who'd rather squirm free

than be held. O, how we see what we 
want to see. My daughter, looking at

a nude, sees a frog for show-n-tell.
I look at her and see myself. (by Erin Murphy, from Dislocation and Other Theories. © Word Press, 2008).

It wasn't, however, published as a prose paragraph; my computer, when I copied and pasted it from Keillor's column, automatically returned it to its natural form. It appeared as lineated verse, but looking at it, where would the reader wish to break it into lines? Why would it need to be broken into lines? What, besides lineating it, would make it appear to be a poem? It's a flat prose paragraph with nothing musical about it to recommend it to the ear. And who is it that Erin Murphy is talking about, her daughter? Not at all. Look at the last sentence. The poet is talking about herself, not her child, and she is not singing her poem to make it interesting to a reader. What is she saying? "Gee, my kid is awful cute, and I was just as cute when I was her age." My final comment? Geck.

____________________________________________________________________

COMMENTS:

If that is Keillor as in Garrison I will make like a rope and skip it. He recently did a fund raiser here for the Lakewood Public Library. From reading letters to the editor of the Lakewood community newspaper one would get the impression that a lot of the audience members (mostly older "Prairie Home" fans) came away wondering why GK felt it necessary to venture into the blue side. Instead of "Lake Wobegon" they got "Like, Whoa! Where did that come from!”

William B. (Ohio)

When you say, "blue side," are you talking about blue state / red state or language?

Lew

 

Unfortunately,language/topics. From reading about his Lakewood performance and also from the fact that he refuses to do interviews* I see just another performer whose public image is as much an illusion as his show.

(Full disclosure: my daughter was assigned by the editor of the "Lakewood Observer", a community newspaper, to interview Mr. Keillor the day of the show. It was after she had done her background preparation that she was informed by Keillor's people that "Mr. Keillor does not do interviews")

William B.

 

You have every right to be indignant.

Lew

 

I suggest a contest to write a new form: the Palindrone. It is a poem that runs on and on with platitudes and cue words, appeals to the ordinary, and amounts to the same, read backward or forward: garbage. Best read from a TelePrompTer or memorized by rote before an interview.

I should be careful — my words may come back to haunt me when, on January 21 Sarah Palin — acting as the controller of the Senate - enacts laws that banish us elitists.

Paul A. Austin

Nice pun, Paul: "Palin-drone." I like it.

Lew

I like the insights and assessments on poetry. Palin is so mere a 
flash in the pan that you may want a new label for that sort of 
poetry, though-- I doubt she will raise a hair of memory in a very 
few years down the road ... Thanks for the link. Sorry (as often) 
to be slow ... medical appointments seem (like crabgrass) to be 
spreading and taking hold just now. I plan to grow younger next 
year, and not have so many. 
 
Best, 
 
Ruth 

I know what you mean, Ruth; eye doctor last month 
for me, dentist and urologist this month.
Lew