Nick Lantz made his mark in the poetry community this year by winning not one but two first book prizes, and thus having, in effect, two first books debut this spring. This fact alone has drawn readers to his work—who is this prolific guy, and how did he snag two of the few-and-far-between poetry book prizes last year? But now that the books have appeared in print, the question I began to ponder was how would the two relate to each other, how differentiate themselves? We’re used to charting growth and change in a poet through subsequent books, but in Lantz’s case we don’t know which came first (or whether one did at all). It provides a nice little conundrum, not one that needs solving, but which offers interesting ways for a reviewer to think about not just a single book as a project, but glimpse a larger vision in an emerging poet.

Nick Lantz’s books probe the psychology of our modern world—in both We Don’t Know We Don’t Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House we are made to look around ourselves at the American culture in which we live and consider just what we have created. It’s not pretty. We Don’t Know We Don’t Know takes its title and many of its epigraphs from Donald Rumsfeld, for example, and calls our attention to the intentional corruption of language that that administration foisted upon the country to justify a war. My favorite quote Lantz has included, after all this frustrating business about known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, is Rumsfeld’s explanation that “If I said yes, that would then suggest that that might be the only place where it might be done which would not be accurate, necessarily accurate. It might also not be inaccurate, but I’m disinclined to mislead anyone.” It’s only funny because it is so misleading, of course. The tail-chasing language of politics and profit has dismayed poets forever, but the audacity and extremity of it during the Bush administration seemed to push a huge portion of the nation to a breaking point. Lantz has his finger on the pulse of the patient here—he chronicles the psychological trauma, through first person, second, and several other characters invented and historical, of disconnection between what is experienced and what is broadcast.

And thankfully there are antidotes. We Don’t Know We Don’t Know pairs Rumsfeld’s language of obfuscation with Pliny the Elder’s wonderfully inquisitive and incisive discussion of the natural world and humans’ place within it, providing, through that juxtaposition, some relief that there is still a place for logic for those of us looking for it. And the poems in this book, as a whole, investigate that logic—they attempt to locate humans, and human understanding, in this seething and misleading landscape. In comparison to bees, to swine, to apes, to parrots, Lantz places our species, offering us new contexts in which to understand who we are and how we behave. In one instance, for example, a mother receives a parrot from her son:

Then one day it says, ‘infect.’

Your mother tells you this on the phone,
and you drive over, find the frozen meals
you bought for her last week sweating
on the countertop. “In fact,” she says

in answer to your question, “I have been
eating, and it’s as you point to the empty
trash can, the spotless dishes, that you
realize the bird is only saying, ‘in fact,’…

In other poems, creatures appear more briefly, perhaps as reference points away from the human, and inevitably dismaying, scale of the world. For example, in “Homeless in the Land of Aphorism,” the speaker directs us to think of all kinds of things outside our range of daily experience:

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

Think of scribbles of light             left behind
by UFOs, ball                      lightning, swamp gas.

Try not to think           of insensible columns
of black smoke rising over                 the desert.

The poem ends by directing our attention to renewal of life, even if it’s not our own:

. . . Somewhere, catfish are spawning
in the trunk of a submerged car          and couldn’t

care less whether we                  live or die.

“Tell me/ again who I am answerable to,” Lantz asks in “ ‘The resemblance that Apes have to men.’ ” It seems a request for connection to a natural world we have cut ourselves off from, to a logic that binds and roots us. Through examining the language of obfuscation and bad faith up close, he pierces a hole for us to another side, another way to see, and tell about what we find.

Lantz’s other book, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, shares the same central concerns with logic and connectedness, but the poems hold together not through an external construct such as Rumsfeld’s logical structure, but through the subtler and slowly-accruing elements that bubble up within the poems themselves. Here, too, the use of juxtaposition makes every statement stand up and demand consideration. Where in We Don’t Know We Don’t Know those juxtapositions were between the natural world and spoken phrases (those misuses of language we heard from the administration as well as those that pepper our daily speech, like “in fact” and “as you know”), here they are often between documentary facts of various types—historical, folkloric, scientific, personal. For example, in “The Diving Horses,” we get this sequence of statements:

You know how the old stories go: the peasant’s hut
            grows a little smaller every
                                    day, the frog by the window
a little louder. It’s a miracle we can sleep at all.

            In the hotel room the night after
                                                your brother’s funeral,
we watched a bad movie about horses trained to jump
            from a platform into a small pool
                                                                                    forty feet below.

In the first garden, the fruit didn’t know when to drop.
            So what if starvation is the only thing
                                                                                    that can make
the young albatross use its wings for the first time?

Lantz expands and contracts the scale on which he views the world constantly, so we are asked to read every detail within a new and strangely-fitting lens. Suddenly the diving horses and their willingness to go (“The horses, we’re told, required very little prodding”) become a great tragedy, a comment on something much larger and more human. Meanwhile, the brother resonates as well, full of mystery—and yet made animal, his death another inevitability in this chain of facts (just as “Without the fox’s teeth deep/ in the hen’s downy neck,/ we would starve”).

Lantz forces us again and again to reexamine the way we see through such juxtaposition of facts as well as through the voices of characters who search for and experience improbable things: a cryptozoologist, those listening for aliens with SETI, a sci-fi actor, a werewolf. The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House becomes a lament not only for the neighbors and their tragedy but for ourselves—that we’re unharmed, that we can keep on keeping on. Mom replaces our dead pets; Theseus’ ship is so well cared for by the Athenians that each rotting plank is replaced until nothing is left of the original. There’s a sadness in surviving, in finding out one can keep going even after the metaphorical end. Lantz diagnoses us with this sickness, dubs it “affluenza”—but he doesn’t stop at despair. He examines our state, questioning what’s left to us. As in “The Marian Apparitions”:

. . . the lie of poetry saves no more lives than the lie
            of prayer. A birthmark. A bruise.
                                                            The gory Rorschach
of a red river delta seen from a plane. For every
            piece of falling fruit we catch,
                                                            a hundred others

find the ground and rot. And what we do catch fares no better.
            What does it mean, even if
                                                the Virgin really is in that peach pit,
that dirty bed sheet? Does she bless or curse
            the things she touches?

In this form of tight contrasts and strangely intimate images, Lantz lets us look sideways at our world. He outmaneuvers linear patterns, finding resonance in the most unlikely pairings—knowing, as he says in “The Cricket in the Basement,” that “Every aim/ is an asymptote,/ and the blind spot is in the center of the human eye.”

Disclosure: I should note that my interest in Nick Lantz’s work was further piqued when my mother sent me a box of books I’d stashed away years ago, in which I rediscovered an old literary magazine from my senior year of high school, when I was that august publication’s rosy-cheeked editor. Though my tastes were woefully undeveloped, I would like to think the staff and I recognized talent when we saw it. (We also published anything vaguely anarchic or grotesque.) At least I can say we did publish a few of Nick’s early poems. I will not quote from them here out of respect for my subject (and because he could easily return the favor by exposing my own “poems” from that period). We didn’t know each other more than in passing—it was a big urban high school—but we shared at least one beloved iconoclastic English teacher (also possibly an anarchist). I was, therefore, delighted to see this double debut and to be asked to review it.

Read The Rumpus Interview with Nick Lantz, as well as “How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance,”, a new poem from Nick Lantz, as part of our Super-Sized Combo.

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“It is not sad not to be human,” Louise Glück reminds us. As she did so strikingly in The Wild Iris, Glück presents the voices of other creatures to balance the human speakers in her new book of poems, A Village Life. If we are condemned to our limited human perspective, if we must see everything in nature as specifically relating to us, she is determined to present her poems from multiple physical stances, by which we might better understand our position. The speaker of the poem above is an earthworm, a meditative fellow offering a gentle reminder and sly comic jab at our self-centered species. This earth-dweller rebuts our sense of superiority and luck in our position on top of the ground. “Once you enter the earth, you will not fear the earth;/ . . . /death will come to seem a web of channels or tunnels like/ a sponge’s or honeycomb’s,” it points out (“Earthworm”).

And while this book clearly draws upon Glück’s earlier work in terms of voice and perspective shifts, it also marks a departure. Don’t expect a book about coping with a death or divorce, or making it through another long northern winter. Glück is far less concerned with the personal interior life here, except as it stands as a symbol for universal feeling and the cyclical nature of time. She is not concerned with humans, but with humanity, set in its larger context.

The parable for humanity—for the life cycle—is the village. And as such, the village of this book is unspecified: a mediterranean landscape of indeterminate time and location. There are lemon and acacia trees blooming, employees working on farms and in factories, adolescents pairing off on summer evenings. There are meadows and a river, and a central mountain to which most everyone focuses their gaze and yearnings. Glück mentions one street name in Italian, then counters it with some very American-sounding descriptions of parents teaching their children about sex (one mother, uncomfortably talking about the term “pleasure,” gives her daughter a book called Ideal Marriage). The village is familiar in the way that fables are familiar, yet too modern to fit our myths, and too untouched by media and technology to mirror our contemporary lives. In this way it remains apart, mythic, while also feeling oddly intimate.

But what is striking about this landscape is not so much its indeterminacy, but that it is so fully peopled. One thinks of Glück as a poet of the singular—in past books her focus has been on the individual voice, and individual’s sense of being. Her voices have always been detached, threatened by family, lovers, and the larger, teeming world, preferring to be left alone to their private pain and reflection. In A Village Life, she hasn’t changed her central philosophy: her characters are still isolated in their own skins, and feel both trapped and safe in the solitude of that prison—and yet, there are so many of them. Glück writes about, and in the voices of, men, women, and children (not to mention earthworms and bats). She gives all inhabitants of the village the wisdom of their own experiences and allows each its time to speak. This is a book which, while still devoted to the epiphanies of solitude, welcomes in the bustle of the larger place.

One always has the sense, in reading Glück, that each word is heavy with meaning: there is a deep iceberg under the visible tip. Yet her long lines in A Village Life strive to lighten each word, to unburden them of some of their weight. In this collection, speakers may meditate more expansively on their conditions, even the mundane. In “A Slip of Paper,” for example, after a visit to the doctor, a man considers:

No one taught me how to care for my body.
You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.
Once you’re free of them, your wife takes over, but she’s nervous,
she doesn’t go too far. So this body I have,
that the doctor blames me for—it’s always been supervised by women,
and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

Her use of the second person point of view here and in other poems allows her speakers to contextualize their situations as universal. These speakers, unlike Glück’s usual personae, expect to be understood. They can be empathized with because, in many ways, they are—and this is not a slight—simply tropes.

Glück’s poems have a theatrical quality imparted by the spare, verb-driven sentences and weight of what is said. (“A Slip of Paper” ends with the superlative statement “It’s a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.”) In earlier books, the theater was mostly played out on a small stage, where the dramas were about the self and the interpersonal (or impossibility of such). The mind, from the safety of its private room, meditated on divorce, the bleakness of winter, a bird making a paltry nest in the yard.

The boldness of A Village Life, in contrast, is its willingness to look beyond the self into the town. There are many selves offering their private dramas for our view, but none holds the reader’s attention longer than the single poem in which he or she speaks: in the end, all individual striving is small in the face of nature. And yet, Glück would not have it be dismissed. The human perspective is the one we are given and the one by which we are limited, and so Glück, with an attentiveness indicating respect, enumerates its range of experience within the manageable stage set of the village.

A farm worker burns leaves in a field by himself. A woman, old enough not to be pursued by men, walks the streets at night. A girl looks at her body under covers, vowing to protect it from age and fat. Every person is a symbol of a person; one of each of these types lives in every town. And feelings, thereby, are also universal, as essential and physical as the changing colors of the leaves, their eventual fall, and the coming snow.

The book makes several passes through the seasons, making the poems eventually feel like a collection of allegories. A Village Life is the work of a mature poet looking out at the world from a window, but now concerned with the larger cycles in which she participates, instead of the singular life in a petri dish. Glück acknowledges she is looking at “not the world but a squared-off landscape/ representing the world” (“Twilight”). The bats and earthworms, blind, living above and below human habitations, argue, for their part, that they don’t miss sight, don’t reject what they cannot control. As the counterpoints to the community’s striving, they remind us of Glück’s own position—that, in the end, every one of us is still alone.

But, in being alone, we share a common purpose, and this should be of comfort. A human speaker in the poem “Solitude,” near the end of the collection, laments the dark rainy day: he cannot see the mountain in the distance, and fears “the earth has vanished.” He concludes,

Now we return to what we were,
animals living in darkness
without language or vision—

Nothing proves I’m alive.
There is only the rain, the rain is endless.

And the voice of the earthworm, which doesn’t need sight to understand its purpose on earth, counters:

It is not painful to return
without language or vision: if, like the Buddhists,
one declines to leave
inventories of the self, one emerges in a space
the mind cannot conceive, being wholly physical, not
metaphoric. What is your word? Infinity, meaning
that which cannot be measured.

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In 1915, during the first World War, Britain was battening down the hatches, tightening its borders, and sternly discouraging travel by canceling trains and plastering placards inside the cars of those that remained on their routes—“Unnecessary traveling uses coal required to heat your homes.” Rationing was strictly observed, movement curtailed, but England’s greater loss, as Paul Fussell notes in his study of early twentieth century travel writing, Abroad, was “a loss of amplitude, a decay of imaginative and intellectual possibility…. The very theater of thought and feeling contracted; the horizons closed in.” Literature, then, was not in the forefront of the minds of the populace. Still, Augustine Birrell, England’s Chief Secretary for Ireland, was riled enough by its pesky persistence to proclaim that he, for one, “would forbid the use, during the war, of poetry.”

The statement feels remarkably familiar today, in another wartime era. Poetry stands, as usual, on the outer margin of the national discussion. The public sentiment may be that poetry doesn’t matter, but, of course, in its not mattering lies its freedom to hop trains, to transcend borders, to speak from behind enemy lines. Poetry’s trickery is interpreted in two simultaneous ways: one, it is difficult, and two, it is unreliable, questioning the way things are—and therefore it is possibly dangerous.

In her thirteenth book, Rising, Falling, Hovering, published in the final months of the Bush Administration, C. D. Wright commits just such an offense as her title suggests—she loiters in all the wrong places. The book, with its halting, unbeautiful, disjointed lines, proves her awareness of the difficulty of writing poetry about war, trade, immigration, Hurricane Katrina, and George Bush. These are intensely politicized issues, claimed by a blunt, politicized language. And so a book on these subjects is a constant tugging between poetry and prose statement, between lyric and document. She levels accusations at herself for her own project: “Poetry/ Doesn’t/ Protect/ You/ Anymore,” making clear the increasing psychological weight of the decision simply to write poems when one is aware of the magnitude of the problems surrounding her in the world.

But this is not an overwhelmingly self-conscious or self-referential book. In addition to Wright’s own persona, there is a chorus of other characters—written as he, she, I, yo, Juan and Juana Doe—Mexicans and Americans who are presented in passing as strangers, friends, and family members. Unnamed characters occasionally narrate whole sections, but mostly they are recorded in partial ways, clipped, as if Wright is photographically trying to document as many people’s lives as she can through these brief interactions, with the goal that the accumulation of moments and glimpses will create a fuller, more human picture than national generalizations and government policy-speak ever could. For example, we see, on the other side of the border, this scene:

Smoking husks

The macho with an ulcerated back

One of us with dysentery y yo embarazada

A woman con pistola y cuchillo

Wears his trousers for comfort

Riding low

A boy the señora says

Fifty pesos

Hands washed with mescal

He will pass out

In the corn crib

He will cut the cord he will

Cut it with his teeth

And back in Wright’s own life in Providence (a city whose symbolic name she repeatedly calls to our attention), we get this view:

At the level           of policy           their kids           don’t exist

never did           never will reach           the sun-drenched shore

                                        and now it’s Monday again

I have been to Pilates           I found my old coat

I took my will to the notary           I found my good glasses

I have filled my tank           I am going to the market

Then I think I’ll cut my hair off with a broken bottle

                                        As of three hours ago

2,311 of our members are to remain           Forever Young

While the contrast between the lives of the Mexican “yo” and American “I” is stark, their direct, honest accounts echo each other. They both see and report their circumstances, with each detail made strange and more human by what it accompanies. A woman carrying a pistol and knife wears a man’s trousers for comfort; another woman, having heard the new count of American war dead in the Middle East, activates her will at the notary, then buys gasoline for her car in order to do the shopping. Such images could degenerate into dogma on the evils of desperation and war and the inability of the modern citizen to disentangle herself, but Wright is not interested in synthesis. In all her books, Wright’s project—one which has had varying and increasing degrees of success over her career—has been to make her language come as close as possible to the physicality of the places she portrays. This is not a romance with the subjects, a beautification—her lines are often strident, cut-off, even anti-lyrical—and it is always multiple, conflicted, messy. Her poetics is one of mirroring. She shows the dailiness of experience through a style and structure that capture it as closely as possible, particularly in its flawed and awkward moments. But, because her mastery lies in juxtaposition, placing charged objects in such relation to each other that their meanings change, what we see reflected is never quite as we thought.

All poets worth their salt struggle with the difficulty of representation—how to be accurate to the subject or feeling through both language and form—but few are so explicit about the process as Wright is. The effort itself becomes a large part of the subject matter, with the result being that we as readers feel we are stepping into her mind. And it is not a quiet mind. It is a modern mind, filled with airplane flights, marital squabbles, fury at the television news. As a poetic documentary-maker (which may be a more accurate term, anyhow, for someone who fights poetic convention and describes her books with terms such as “A Valentine,” “A Walk-In Book of Arkansas,” “An American Poetry Vigil,” and “An Investigation”), Wright is kin to James Agee, who agonized in his 1939 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,

If I could do it, I’d do no writing here at all. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement…. A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point.

The desire is for an organic medium, one that will be severe enough, and intimate enough, to wake the reader into understanding and action. In times of war and hunger, the obvious and immediate yearning is for afflictions to be ameliorated—to stop the firing of guns, to bandage the wounds, to feed the starving. The writer taking such a subject, then, is tormented by the choice she has made—and she has made it—to document the situation, and therefore be a witness instead of an actor. But Wright doesn’t allow guilt to consume her entirely. “I want you to burn every notebook, every disk,/ Every ream, every scratch of my improvident pen,” she directs a confidante, but then also, understanding a reason and finding a community for her loathing, she contextualizes: “to be ashamed is to be American.” She levels her anger at those who have the most agency to inflict harm—big corporations like Wal-Mart and Wal-Mex, and the Bush Administration.

At one point she speaks directly, almost obsessively, about her feelings toward the 2008 “occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania,” admitting, cheekily, “Rage could be my issue.” But mostly she works by implication, allowing images and politicized rhetoric to spark off of each other, and letting that proximity elucidate the loaded relationships between them. In adjacent sections, we move from the U.S. to Iraq to Mexico:

According to the Gaia hypothesis, the earth is alive;

According to Lieutenant Colonel Venable white phosphorus
is not a chemical weapon, it’s an incendiary.

It is an obscurant, it is for illumination;
nor are we a signatory of any treaty restricting its use.

And then:

Elsewhere a suicide car bomber struck a police station.
Killing at least one and wounding seven.
Gunmen also killed a teacher near his home.
The bakeries become targets. The saints removed from the walls.
For protection. One who was kidnapped and tortured.

And then:

If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or
5 cents for 50 chiles can Walmex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.
Will they open a Supercenter in Fallujah once it is pacified.

In such a poetry, with such a broad and public subject, the reader must participate in the completion of the book. A poetry of cultural implication requires readers to recognize their involvement—first, in the act of piecing Wright’s fragments, notes, and echoes together, picking up on her suggestions and drawing the connections between them, and second, in the fact that most of us have witnessed the same war, the same desperation and hunger, from the safety of towns like Providence.

With political leaders who have mastered the art of the passive voice (“Mistakes were made”), a media that perpetuates such blamelessness, and a mass consumer culture increasingly detached from the manufacture and disposal of the products it demands, a book that so directly seeks sources is a serious reckoning. Even though she says “This is no time for poetry,” we don’t quite believe her. Wright knows one of the major battles to be fought in our time is a linguistic one.

The book lists facetious war names several times, such as “Operation product endorsement” and “Operation it depends/ upon how you define the word torture,” playing on the capitalistic and linguistic sleights-of-hand that have become so familiar. If we are to call people “souls,” as Wright does, and if we try to remember and document names and stories instead of numbers of the dead and balance sheets of profit and expense, our understanding of our actions changes. Perhaps, doing so, we could not operate as easily in the way that we have done.

Within days of Birrell’s 1915 declamation of poetry during wartime, Britain instituted the photo passport as a new requirement for travel abroad, including travel to the rest of Europe, which had previously been seen as neighboring ground in which one could roam freely. Fussell explains that it was a wartime convenience for the state to restrict travel, but it also had the effect of making citizens feel like replaceable parts in the national machine, and making outsiders suddenly aliens.

In our country, which doesn’t have the natural oceanic barriers that Britain does, this division by borders—patrol agents, checkpoints, high fences—is even more contrived. Wright comments, in that clipped manner of hers that takes shape as a political statement as well as a description of her poetic problem: “breath chopped in half by a border.” The belief in borders is a belief in limitations, and she steadily refuses it—“These are not the limits of my world/ but the limits of my words tonight.”

Though the book is long for its genre, there are only a handful of titled poems within it, and most of these titles begin with the word “Like,” as if Wright, in sitting down to her problem of “breath chopped in half,” is determined to parallel everything. “Is this the war of all against all,” she says, and it isn’t a question. Her response to such a war is that no subject she enters will be allowed to remain foreign or unconnected. Many poems end “to be cont.”, refusing even the inherent border of the book’s page. The remaining, untitled stretches of language that stitch the book together act less as individual, enclosed poems, and more like jotted notes and detached poetic lines—they drift, hover in open space, and, instead of finishing, just pause from time to time for breath.

The biggest success of Rising, Falling, Hovering is in its subtle but persistent linguistic pairings, which shift the typical framework of what we are accustomed to, rehumanizing civilians, workers, “aliens,” Mexicans, Iraqis, American soldiers. Wright’s lines skitter across borders, uncomfortable with the “surround-sound” smoothness of singular public proclamation. They insist on a stumbling, multiple, intimate accounting for our strange new century. In so doing, the Administration, whose constant buzz we heard on the news and saw in the morning papers for so many years, becomes the foreign entity, while those they would call foreign seem increasingly familiar. The horizon expands, inch by inch.

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