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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
From Paul Di Filippo's "SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT" column on The Barnes & Noble Review
In the realm of the small presses, thirty-six years amounts to a geological era. To survive and flourish for nearly four decades is a proud accomplishment that is denied all but a few firms. Examples of contemporary indie publishers still vibrant at the outer edge of small press longevity include City Lights (founded 1953), Burning Deck (founded 1961), and Fiction Collective/FC2 (founded 1973). Just a tad younger than the youngest in that list comes Graywolf Press, established in 1974 by Scott Walker.
A non-profit since the middle of the nineteen-eighties, Graywolf has made its sterling reputation in the realm of fiction, poetry, memoirs and literary criticism. Their available backlist constitutes nearly three hundred titles spread across a wide range of styles and themes, and they regularly issue upwards of twenty new books per year. Partnered in various ventures with the College of Saint Benedict, enjoying a solid base in the nation's three-wolf-moon heartland of Minnesota, Graywolf has proven that quality endures.
Deriving unpredictable inspiration from both Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder, Nick Lantz delivers We Don't Know We Don't Know, a striking volume of poems that are necessarily rife, both amongst and inside themselves, with fruitful cognitive dissonance. "The Prophecies of Paracelsus" is radiant with medieval mysticism, while "Will There Be More Than One 'Questioner'?" rubs the reader's face in the bewildering human realities of torture. Employing both short, compact lines and complex broken ones, Lantz exhibits a feel for the epic noumena hiddenwithin simple objects ("The anemones in the pale cave/gasping."). Likewise, he adroitly parses the tangled emotions webbing loved ones together. "'Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake'" offers a man's melancholy musings on the death of his mother. Meditative and piercing, this book limns the tug of war between eternal verities and their contemporary manifestations.
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Tracy Difillippo
reviewed We Don't Know We Don't Know on January 24, 2013
We Don't Know We Don't Know
Clever but conventional
A majority of poetry books coming out of the American academic creative writing establishment seem to fall into one of two categories. One comprises books in the now standard confessional mode, embodying a (usually disjointed and often obscure) narrative of coping with the more grievous and dysfunctional aspects of an individual life. A second, smaller category try to break from this pattern, but paradoxically, the method of breaking away usually has its own, hardly less rigid, rules: establish an overall framework dividing the work into 3 to 5 sections; find as a continual motif some allusions (often for instance quotes from types of writing sharply different from the book itself) to use as an ironic frame; and adopt a combination of standard reflective styles of poetic discourse with some contrasting innovate rhetorical forms; the whole decked out with the usual creative writing kit of verse gimmicks. The confessional element is often present to a greater or lesser extent also in this second category of books.
We Don't Know We Don't Know falls pretty clearly into the second category. The ironic frame is provided by quotes drawn from Pliny and Donald Rumsfeld (the latter I think an unfortunate choice --- who will remember him twenty years from now?); the sections are named after variations on Rumsfeld's notorious babble about "known-unknown-knowns"; conventional W. C. Williams-like stanzaic variable lines alternate with tighter quasi-syllabic lines, both mostly presenting reflective discourse but with other poems spicing things up a bit by employing less usual rhetorical strategies such as long catalogues beginning with the same phrase; and a subset of confessional material; all decked out with many workshop techniques like extra blank spaces within lines and line breaks which ought to have a gold star pasted on them.
In short, a conventionally unconventional (I know, I sound like Rumsfeld!) book of verse. Within these limits, it's not a bad book: the verse is lucid and sometimes very clever, the confessional material less operatically anguished than in many current poetry collections, and the verse gimmicks less prominent (though still employed enough to generate some irritation in at least one reader.) So three stars, meaning if you like the sort of book I've described, I think you'll find this is one of the better ones of that sort.
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