Thursday, April 03, 2003

Heavy Blue Ear  (listening to the Sec Def Slam live at the Pentagon)   This heavy blue ear is so hard to lift to the radio already full to the brim with Dr. Spin. This heavy blue ear is a marble tureen full of bullet soup which old men using gypsy violins as ladles serve up to the virgin of winks and her escort of young corpses-to-be. This heavy blue ear is cracked and porous. Warring fractions of soundbytes leak into our heads like toxins from a waste site percolate into ground water. This heavy blue ear. Listen to any more news and it'll burst like a well wacked piñata and rain down flaming candy SUVs on the fife and drum corp and the Secretary of Deception. This heavy blue ear gets the droop on us, full of instant dead (just add dread) a pre-owned but newly remodeled coffin which listeners lift up like pallbearers to hear their master's voice.   Dana Pattillo 2003 1:00:02 PM    comment []

Slate has posted transcripts of the performanc poetry of Sec Def Slam: The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld Recent works by the secretary of defense. By Hart Seely Posted Wednesday, April 2, 2003, at 10:03 AM PT 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. 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 Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2081042/ 12:41:51 PM    comment []