Rumpus: Speaking of titles, it’s fitting that “lightning” find its way into the name of one of your collections. I can’t think of a more appropriate characterization of your mind at work on the page than electric, lightning-quick. Soon as you locate the reader you’re off, charging through time from image to image, bridging history, religion, politics, science, culture. In “The Cricket in the Basement,” for example, in just 22 lines you move from that which “chirps all night behind the empty boxes” to Joseph Smith, a tethered dog, Moses, Quivira and Coronado, Zeno, Achilles, a blizzard, the human eye—and more. How do you generate such juxtapositions? Is the associative leap instinctive?
Lantz: It’s not instinctive at all, though I wish it were. In fact, it couldn’t be more unnatural for me. During my MFA, I was very comfortable writing a certain kind of poem that had a very clear through-line. My poems often read like lineated stories or essays. A professor who read my (then in-progress) thesis said to me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “You know, you don’t have to go from A to B to C in a straight line like that. Not everything in a poem has to be logically connected.” This was another one of those observations that probably would have been obvious to anyone except me, but for the following year or two, that comment just ate at me. I’m a very linear, literal thinker, which is probably a terrible thing for a poet to be. But I’ve always liked to read poetry that wasn’t like that, poetry that could connect the conscious and the unconscious in what Robert Bly has called a “long floating leap.” Agha Shahid Ali said that, when discussing poetry with students, he liked to pose the question of how a great poem doesn’t hold together, how its disunities are as important as its unities. He was maybe the best writer of the ghazal in English, and the ghazal is a form that builds “leaps” or “disunities,” or whatever you want to call them, into its formal structure, while still managing to work as a single poem.
I tried writing a few ghazals, without much luck. At the time (2006 or 2007), I was also becoming obsessed with Robert Bly’s The Night Abraham Called to the Stars and My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy. The poems in those books claim to be ghazals, though they take such enormous liberties with the form, it’s a bit of a stretch. But they retain that sort of pleasant disunity, that ability to skip around wildly, to draw intuitive connections rather than logical ones. I desperately wanted to write poems like that, but when I sat down to actually do it, I found that my mind just does not work that way. I couldn’t think from one line to the next in that way.
In the fall of 2007, Cole Swensen came to read at the University of Wisconsin. She’s another poet whose work I really admire, particularly Goest and The Book of a Hundred Hands. In a Q&A after the reading, she alluded to her writing process: she writes a lot of (presumably) more continuous text and then pulls bits and pieces of it out of their original contexts to construct poems. Again, this probably wouldn’t have been a revelatory moment for anyone else, but it had never occurred to me to compose poems in this way.
Very soon after that, I set about trying to fundamentally change the way I actually wrote poems. Instead of sitting down with an idea or premise and simply writing out a narrative or discursive thread (as I’d done before), I would dump several unrelated bits of unfinished poems into a single computer file and start hacking them to bits, deliberately interweaving them into configurations that didn’t make logical sense. The saving grace of composing poems this way was that I have a fairly one-track mind—I tend to gravitate to the same kinds of images, metaphors, and so forth—so these unrelated threads that I was weaving together often had more in common than I anticipated. And usually these surprise connections were not literal or obvious; they tended to be intuitive, maybe even subconscious.
Rumpus: Ok. Seriously—what’s the deal with Donald Rumsfeld? His commentary (along with that by first-century philosopher Pliny the Elder) provides We Don’t Know’s epigraph. Rumsfeld is also quoted no fewer than eight times throughout the collection. Is he a muse, trickster, fool?
Lantz: Linda Gregerson calls him a “fallen muse” in her introduction to the book, and I like that characterization a lot. The Rumsfeld quote from which the book takes its title is indicative of what drew me to him. His wording is precise, his syntax and logic are labyrinthine, and he manages to say something that’s true, strictly speaking, without actually telling the capital-T truth. His verbal contortions are infamous, but a lot of people mistakenly lump them in with our former President’s accidental malapropisms. Rumsfeld doesn’t misspeak in that way. He says exactly what he means to. He deploys language in a very deliberate way, and often says something that is technically true, but usually with the goal of obfuscating, confusing, or otherwise clouding the issue. In that sense, I see him as sort of the inverse of a poet—a poet being someone who uses language deliberately and makes things up (i.e., says things that are technically untrue), with the goal of clarifying human experience. Rumsfeld’s use of language is Machiavellian and very cynical, but it’s also very intelligent.
One of the issues that I wanted to probe in the book was the distinction between intelligence and wisdom, particularly as they relate to language and action, and Rumsfeld is a fascinating case in that regard. I agree that there’s a difference (even a significant difference) between what we know we don’t know and what we don’t know we don’t know, and that’s a distinction worth making, epistemologically, but that’s not why Rumsfeld is making that point. He’s using language to deflect us away from the sorts of considerations that truly matter. What I wanted to do, with this book and specifically with the poems that use his words as epigraphs, was to reclaim language for the purpose of poetry, that is, to use language to redirect us toward what really matters. I made a decision very early on in the process of writing the book that none of the poems would be about Donald Rumsfeld; if he can have his deflections, I can have mine. I wanted to deflect language away from the quagmires of politics and redirect them toward more artistic and human ends.
Rumpus: Pliny the Elder and the former U.S. Secretary of Defense—a dynamic but unlikely duo to say the least! Where, how, when did you decide to marry these seemingly disparate figures? What do you think these two have to say to and/or about each other in public, in private?
Lantz: Pliny came after Rumsfeld, in the conception of the book. I write about the natural world and about animals a lot, and We Don’t Know really bears out that obsession. I’m always on the lookout for interesting information about nature, and in the course of doing research, I had come across Pliny several times in passing. So I decided to give his Natural History a closer look, at first just to see if I could mine it for some ideas. I landed on a seventeenth-century translation by Philemon Holland, and was instantly hooked. Pliny’s history is full of weird, fantastic accounts (many of which are obviously untrue from a modern perspective), and Holland’s translation added an Elizabethan flair to the descriptions that was mesmerizing. I knew there was more there than what I could fit into a single poem, and I was running out of Rumsfeld quotes to use as poem epigraphs, so I decided to adopt Pliny as the second “muse” of the book. Some people have assumed that I’m trying to draw a contrast along the lines of Rumsfeld = bad, Pliny = good, but that’s not the case at all. Pliny has some absolutely scurrilous things to say about women, for example, and many of his accounts are just factually untrue. But like Rumsfeld, Pliny’s project (in Natural History) spoke to the interests of my book. If a distinction is to be made between them, it’s that Rumsfeld is very guarded about what he will assert or admit to, while Pliny is a libertine when it comes to information: one gets the impression that he’s willing to repeat whatever he hears, no matter how far-fetched. What was important to me is that I feel strongly but also ambivalently about both of these men, and that tension generated a lot of poetry, which is ultimately what I’m after.
