Sarah Palin, Accidental Poet: A Triumph from San Francisco's Byliner

​Anticipation has built since Byliner debuted in April with Jon Krakauer's "Three Cups of Deceit," an investigative piece on Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greg Mortenson's fabricated humanitarian efforts. The San Francisco-based publisher launched its full website just last month, going in strong with a heady topic and a serious mandate: to be a new source for long-form journalism, to hearten the blaze for the stories that matter.

But -- not all writers are created equal. Along with an impressive compendium of long-form journalism and politically charged pieces branded as Byliner Originals, one project stands out against the Krakauer investigation, a deep-dive into the Civil War, and a post-tsunami report of life in Japan.

The writer is Sarah Palin: the accidental poet.

First, let's get a little Workshop 101 and agree to say that there are all kinds of poetry, right? As many as there are good poets. The duty of the critic is to examine and evaluate, and when there's nothing really left to be said, often the type of poetry we still regard as "good" has at least this single, distinct quality about it: tension.

Byliner executive editor Michael Solomon has created this tension (and release, as is the natural cause and effect of any good joke) in the more than 24,000 pages of e-mails dispatched during Palin's reign as governor of Alaska. Solomon preserves every nuanced misspelling of Palin's prose in his Byliner Original "I Hope Like Heck: The Selected Poems of Sarah Palin" to create poetry out of a common language that seems to be deteriorating.

Earlier this week, the editor appeared on Current TV's (another S.F.-headquartered company) Countdown with Keith Olbermann to present the work of the accidental poet, each line break (as determined by Solomon) necessitating a dramatic pause by Olbermann as the host read excerpts from I Hope Like Heck.

Here's one of our favorites:

Out of the Loop

I only heard
This evening
That there's some
Kind of briefing
Next week.
Hopefully
Someone will tell me more asap.
Sounds like u
Know more about it
Than I do.

In his foreword, Solomon satirizes the absurdity of Palin's e-mails, parsing out her vocab into epic folktales and hyperbole. With a smirk and nudge-nudge, he says that the Belle of Wasilla's verse "has resonated with millions." We get the joke, but also shudder at the possibility of truth.

In the Olbermann clip, Palin is likened to Dr. Seuss and even William Carlos Williams for her disregard for standards of language, and sure, in the essay "The Poem as Field of Action," Williams says, "language is changing and giving new means for expand possibilities for literary expression."

But do we really want to give Sarah Palin that much credit? Nah. Solomon doesn't either, but he insists he found poetry in the e-mail cache.

"You don't want to go there," he says of the Alaskan's cache-hole. "It's not a pretty place."

Still, Solomon surfaced with a collection that exemplifies that tension and absurdity we turn to poetry for, contextualizing each with a title that is brusque and brilliant, laconic and ludicrous.

Next: More choice excerpts of Palin poetry!