The Joys of Curiously-Formatted Text!
Apr. 4th, 2003 02:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe following poem is not by myself, but I must admit that it's a wonderful piece of blank verse. I wonder if anyone would recognize the poet?
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.
The poet is a true man of the written word, the United States secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Slate magazine has taken a collection of his "jazzy improvisational poems" (actual quotes from Defense Department briefings) and formatted them into blank verse. I actually liked "Glass Box" and thought it was kind of neat.
There's actually a term for this kind of poetry: found poetry, "a felicitous selection of words, perhaps slightly manipulated, certainly pulled from their context." Rumsfeld just seems to be particularly adept at creating them.
Oh, and I took Lain, the laptop, to lunch and ate alone, so I managed to get up to 9802 words, meaning I did about 1310 words in an hour. Not bad. The 72-minute one-track CD dance remix of Ayumi Hamasaki at 120 BPM probably helped.
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.
The poet is a true man of the written word, the United States secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. Slate magazine has taken a collection of his "jazzy improvisational poems" (actual quotes from Defense Department briefings) and formatted them into blank verse. I actually liked "Glass Box" and thought it was kind of neat.
There's actually a term for this kind of poetry: found poetry, "a felicitous selection of words, perhaps slightly manipulated, certainly pulled from their context." Rumsfeld just seems to be particularly adept at creating them.
Oh, and I took Lain, the laptop, to lunch and ate alone, so I managed to get up to 9802 words, meaning I did about 1310 words in an hour. Not bad. The 72-minute one-track CD dance remix of Ayumi Hamasaki at 120 BPM probably helped.
