We Don't Know We Don't Know: Poems by Lantz, Nick (2010) Paperback

by Nick Lantz

Winner of the 2008 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Poetry, Nick Lantz's poems introduce a startling new voice. Taking its title from a dodging statement from former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know assesses what it means to claim new knowledge within a culture that professes to know everything already. The result is a poetry that upends the deeply and dangerously assumed concepts of such a culture—that new knowledge is always better knowledge, that history is a steady progress, that humans are in control of the natural order. Nick Lantz’s poems hurtle through time from ancient theories of physics to the CIA training manual for the practice of torture, from the history of the question mark to the would-be masterpieces left incomplete by the deaths of Leonardo da Vinci, Nikolai Gogol, Bruce Lee, and Jimi Hendrix. Selected by Linda Gregerson for the esteemed Bakeless Prize for Poetry, We Don’t Know We Don’t

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Nick Lantz is the author of Graywolf title We Don't Know We Don't Know and a second collection, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors House, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Reviews

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a good chunk of the Bush administration's shambolic mess of a reign I lived in Santa Fe, just a stone's throw from Donald Rumsfeld's residence in Taos. Whatever you may think of northern New Mexico, if you think of it at all, we know how to protest idiocy. This occurred at Rumsfeld Manor on a reassuringly regular basis. So it was with gleeful delight that I learned this collection by Nick Lantz draws inspiration — of a sort — from Rumsfeld's bizarre wordplay. As Linda Gregorson wonders in the introduction, "Is this the first time Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder have entered into dialogue? If so, the meeting is long overdue." Word.

I discovered Lantz through a history of science-driven search for Paracelsus at Poetry Foundation and promptly headed to Book Depository. We Don't Know We Don't Know, its very title a Rumsfeldism, doesn't disappoint. Though I usually favor poetry that gleans the universal from the particular, Lantz won me over by taking the opposite tack, derived mostly from recent events or antiquity, simply because the man can write. He plays with form in ways I probably don't appreciate, and can't seem to replicate here, though the meaning remains intact. Here his focus is epistemic as he contemplates what we know we know, what we don't know we don't, and everything in between:

As you know, during the Cat Festival in Ypres,
effigies of cats are thrown from a belfry tower
(live cats were thrown until 1817).
Revelers, dressed as cats and witches,
dance in the street.
As you know, this is the only event of interest
ever to occur in Ypres.

(from "As You Know")

These poems contain belly laughs and breath-hitching and gasps of wonder. They're lit from the left by a glowing windowed expanse, unseen but understood. They concern themselves with art both as artifice and beauty; they ask whether we should submit to the lies we are told — the lies we tell ourselves — about reality in the name of _____ or _____. (They are American.) They are both heavy and light:

Think of all the beautiful Bigfoots striding
forever into the forest of our unknowing.

(from "Homeless in the Land of Aphorism")

and

Stranded with you at the Ferris wheel's apogee
I learned the physics
of desire — fixed at the center,
it spins and goes nowhere.

(from "Ancient Theories")

and

(To say that the heart rests between
beats says nothing of its tirelessness.)

(from "Things Will Not")

They will break your heart. The second section, Known Unknowns, contains a single lengthy poem. Relentlessly questioning, intimate and tragically opaque, "Will There Be More Than One 'Questioner'?" (excerpted below) alludes to the torture of detainees, the relationship between interrogator and prisoner, the connections between us no matter what our relationship:

Will you ask questions you know are beyond his knowledge?
Will you ask questions that have no answers?
Will he say, No more for today, please?
Will you listen?
In the letters his wife sends, will she have left a blank space exactly the length of the words Where are you?
Will there be a window at all?
Will you show him your pistol just once?
Will you ask him what he did before the war?
Will a bucket in the corner continue to catch the drip of water?
Will he say, I was a farmer?
Will he say, I salvaged scrap metal?
Will he say, I was a faith healer who traveled in a covered wagon?
Will he say, I was a thief?
Will he say, I was an interrogator?
Will he say, I was a weaver?
Will you admit you've never understood the mechanics of the loom, how the shuttle racks back and forth and a pattern emerges?
WIll he say, The loom has been more essential to the development of civilization than the printing press or the cotton gin?
Will he say, I was a scribe when the centurions crucified your god?
Will you ask, How could you sit by and do nothing?
Will he say, It was my job to record such things, not to intercede?
Will you ask the stenographer to strike his last statement from the record?
Will there be a stenographer?
Will there be any record of what you've done, what you plan to do?
After many weeks, during a lull in the "questioning," will you speak of the first time your fingers grazed the inside of your wife's thigh?
Will he nod and say, Yes, I remember too, the smell of my own wife's hair on my face in the morning?
Will you ask him how he can remember anything?
Will he admit that more than once he has tried drowning himself in that bucket of dripped-down water?
Will you say, I know, we watch you day and night?
Will he ask, How could you sit by and do nothing?
Will you say, We thought you were praying?
Will you say, Even to witness an atrocity is a kind of courage?
Will you say, The remedy is worse than the disease?
Will you say, I misspoke, we see nothing?
Will you say, Such things are not up to me?
Will he say, After I failed, I had to wait ten years for the bucket to fill so I could try again?
Will you say, It was a hundred years?

And then they will fill the cracks with the care and artistry of a restorer, and it won't matter that you can't put the feeling of blood pulsing in and out of your newly mended heart into words, because Nick Lantz has found them:

_____, for Which There Is No Translation

Traduttore, traditore (Proverb)

_____, by which the islanders mean an empty boat
alone on the water,
one's only boat, which has drifted off, too far out
for even the strongest swimmer
to reach, beyond
saving, which is to say hopeless, but visibly so, and thus
a reminder of how seeing something
is not the same as possessing it.

_____, by which travelers mean falling asleep on a train
and waking hours later to discover that the other passengers
have all been replaced
by new travelers, that even the agent who punched your ticket
is gone, has ended
his shift at some earlier station, and your heart feels
like a pair of couplers holding two freight cars
together in a long turn.

_____, by which the bereaved mean the memory of walking
into the house and seeing some small object
askew: half-flayed orange
left on the table, cup of tea gone cold, dog-eared magazine
pages flailing in the breeze.

_____, by which I mean an ice storm, one that glazes
each leaf of the backyard maple — creating, after
the real leaves have dropped
away, ice replicas, each xylem and phloem preserved
as if cut into glass, though of course they are not really leaves, no matter how
they dazzle you.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a complete surprise. I thought, "oh, here's someone trying to make poetry out of Donald Rumsfeld's convolutedly evasive syntax. That'll interest me for a minute." Instead, what I found was a remarkable exploration of our time, using Rumsfeld as one point of demarcation in the survey of how we acquire, understand and use facts; Pliny the Elder as the other. This book is a CT scan of America, and we can see right where the synapses are working and right where they are being blocked. Both timely and lyrical, I'd put this book in the hands of every college student in the US. This will be much discussed, I guarantee.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting to read this book after the Bush Administration has given way to the current one. There's something quaintly amusing about the Donald Rumsfeld epigraphs throughout the book, e.g. "I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started." I suppose at the time of its publication (2010), the use of Donald Rumsfeld's doublespeak as an organizing principle seemed a bit outdated. Linda Gregerson suggests as much in her introduction:

New leadership and a cathartic election have restored some of our immediate hopes for America. But hope is not the work of a moment. Lantz has his eye on the long haul: how deeply, how steadily we must probe the fonts of feeling and thought if we are to address the afflictions that all-too-chronically ail us.

Now that the federal pendulum has swung way, way back to the right, one hears in the Rumsfeld quotations the current administration's dissembling justifications of the abhorrent conditions in immigrant detention centers, or the notorious "alternative facts." Sadly, the book's treatment of weaponized misinformation is more relevant than ever.

The individual poems' execution isn't always as interesting and important as the book's concept. Most of the poems are good: musical, surprising, funny, full of interesting information (or faux information: "40% of all / births are / accidental. / 10% of all / accidents / are births"). But in light of the current political climate, I found myself wanting the poems to be a little more savage in their attack on the poisoners of language.

[Kassy Lee]

A provocative interweaving of contemporary politics and ancient philosophy produces the intended effect. I began to question the language of the parrot, the politician, and the philosopher and how all three operate in a certain of doublspeak that distances reality from speech.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, I liked this collection less than "The Lightning..." though it is more thought-provoking. The poetry here is more dense, more ambitious. At the same time, there is a little less emotionally impactful than his other collection in my opinion. I also personally felt that the second half of the book was more immediate and powerful than the first half, but admittedly I may have been getting used to the different voice in this collection.

I don't have a lot more to say about it right now. I felt a bit disappointed initially, but it grew on me. I really think this book warrants (deserves) a second read. Hopefully, I will have more solid things to say at that point.

[Inverted · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm thinking it was the scribbled note, from an ex-lover, at the inside front cover. Or probably just a simple change of heart, sans personal history. I didn't finish reading it the first time because of something, but I found it ridiculously good before. After I reread it, only the interesting premise remained true for me. I felt some lines were forced, strained. Imagery was hit or miss too, though __________, for Which There Is No Translation still is one of my most favorite poems as of late.

[Roxanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this. Lantz really gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder, two humans who you'd think have nothing to do with each other. You're reading this description right now and thinking it must be a joke of a book, but there's an unexpected lot of emotional resonance here, as Lantz also, somehow, works in the narrator's mother's illness as a recurring theme. My favorite piece is probably the Notes at the end but you really have to read the whole book to get there. It's worth doing.

[Michael Brockley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Lantz' WE DON'T KNOW WE DON'T KNOW is a striking collection of poetry in which the wisdom of Pliny the Elder is juxtaposed with the bloviations of Donald Rumsfeld in order, for instance, to criticize Rilke's poetry, explicate the Portuguese word "saudade" and reflect on one's family history as if it were a conspiracy theory. Lantz' poems are guaranteed to.

[John Pappas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this now. Drawing inspiration from such diverse muses as Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder, Lantz explores the epistemology of knowing, and not-knowing. Amazing, evocative images and motifs pepper this diverse and rewarding collection.

[Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Startling poems with unexpected moves that reclaim the power of language. The poems seek to tell truths. They are beautiful and emotionally haunting. These are poems that make you feel before you even know what it is you feel.

[Tom Hrycyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

8.3/10
Poet Nick Lantz’ first collection of poetry is surprisingly ambitious and thought-provoking in the era of fake news. It treats the near decade of the George W administration like an amusement park rather than a museum or atrocity exhibition.

[Elyssa Back · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing use of language.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

i bought this book because of nick's reading of "will there be more than one questioner present," and the rest of the volume did not disappoint. such a wonderful voice, i thoroughly enjoyed.

[Eric Mueller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure if I should add this to my "read" or "reading" shelf, because I'll never stop reading this book.