I'm sorry. I could not resist this. It's by Hart Seely from www.Slate.com.
Many sites that publicised this collection are hostile to the great man,
but not us. We reprint it in genuine homage.
UNTIL NOW, the secretary’s poetry has found only a small and skeptical
audience: the Pentagon press corps. Every day, Rumsfeld regales reporters with
his jazzy, impromptu riffs. Few of them seem to appreciate it.
But we should all be listening.
Rumsfeld’s poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most
somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality.
Much of it is about indirection and
evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions
and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the
fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William
Carlos Williams’.
Some readers may find that Rumsfeld’s
gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank
O’Hara’s.
And so Slate has compiled a collection of
Rumsfeld’s poems, bringing them to a wider public for the first time. The
poems that follow are the exact words of the defense secretary, as taken from
the official transcripts on the Defense Department Web site.
The Unknown
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense
news briefing
Glass Box
You know, it’s the old glass box at the
—
At the gas station,
Where you’re using those little things
Trying to pick up the prize,
And you can’t find it.
It’s —
And it’s all these arms are going down in
there,
And so you keep dropping it
And picking it up again and moving it,
But —
Some of you are probably too young to
remember
those —
Those glass boxes,
But —
But they used to have them
At all the gas stations
When I was a kid.
—Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense
news briefing
A Confession
Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.
—May 16, 2001, interview with the New
York Times
Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t
happen.
It doesn’t seem to bother people, they
don’t —
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense
briefing
The Digital Revolution
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
—June 9, 2001, following European trip
The Situation
Things will not be necessarily continuous.
The fact that they are something other than
perfectly
continuous
Ought not to be characterized as a pause.
There will be some things that people will
see.
There will be some things that people
won’t see.
And life goes on.
—Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense
news briefing
Clarity
I think what you’ll find,
I think what you’ll find is,
Whatever it is we do substantively,
There will be near-perfect clarity
As to what it is.
And it will be known,
And it will be known to the Congress,
And it will be known to you,
Probably before we decide it,
But it will be known.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense
briefing
