"Poetry & Popular Culture" is still trying to learn whether Sarah Palin has a favorite poem. Several readers of this blog have suggested Palin's preferences might run toward the classic religious verse "Footprints," but despite two weeks of phone calls and emails from "Poetry & Popular Culture," both the Palin and Palin/McCain offices have yet to respond. Perhaps they're too busy getting their tax statements in order to at least make
them public?
"Poetry & Popular Culture" has called the following offices in Alaska & elsewhere, hoping to get in touch with the Governor to discover her poetic proclivities:
• Juneau at 907-465-3500
• Anchorage at 907-269-7450
• Fairbanks at 907-451-2920
• Kenai at 907-283-2918
• D.C. at 202-624-5858
• McCain office at 703-418-2008
• McCain office at 703-418-2008
• McCain campaign email at ideas@mccain08hq.com
To this point, however, "Poetry & Popular Culture" has encountered only a bridge to nowhere, and speculation is beginning to mount about Palin's tastes. Is she a fan of Robert Service's "Cremation of Sam McGee"—a popular Alaskan ditty even though Service himself is from Canada (a nation, like Russia, next to Alaska and hence a probable site of Palin's foreign policy experience)? Perhaps she prefers Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose"? "Poetry & Popular Culture" hesitates to publicize other speculations out of a committment to journalistic fairness, but this blog is nonetheless beginning to wonder if Palin's reticence to respond suggests, in fact, that she has something to hide...
"The number of books published each year in America has been steadily increasing, and poetry is more popular than ever" the USPS writes, adding that "The ten great writers honored on the Twentieth-Century Poets stamp pane [pictured above and due out in April 2012] ... surely deserve part of the credit."
We here at P&PC aren't really sure that there's a firm link between poetry's popularity and the increasing number of books being published each year, and we would have preferred to see actual poems or quotations from poems printed on these new Forever stamps, but we're not going to complain too loudly. (Can you imagine the USPS quoting from Paterson, Book I: "And clerks in the post- / office ungum rare stamps from / his packages and steal them for their / children's albums"?) After all, as suggested by the 1960 edition of Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Lyrics pictured here—in which the cancellation mark on the 1981 stamp neatly picks up the decorative flourish motif of Millay's name—poems, books, and stamps will find each other one way or another.
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