Yesterday Slate published a small collection of Donald Rumsfeld's poems. Hart Seely, who introduced the collection, said
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 by God some of it reads like Williams on a mediocre day. Here's my favorite, though not particularly Williamsish:
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
4:54:11 PM
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