Several composers, most notably Phil Kline, have set to music the press-conference poetry of Donald Rumsfeld — "There are known knowns / There are things we know we know." Scooter Libby's recently published correspondence with Judy Miller cries out for a similar musical treatment, perhaps in the lyrical-melancholy American Romantic style of Samuel Barber:
You went into jail
In the summer. It is fall now.
You will have stories to cover —
Iraqi elections and suicide bombers,
Biological threats and the Iranian
Nuclear program. Out West,
Where you vacation, the aspens
Will already be turning.
They turn in clusters, because
Their roots connect them.
Come back to work — and life.
Until then, you will remain
In my thoughts and prayers.
With admiration,
Scooter Libby.
I hear a prolonged melisma on "turning"....
