Rumpus: A few years ago, I heard you read We Don’t Know’s “Will There Be More than One ‘Questioner’?” and was completely gob-smacked. The poem takes its subject and some phrasing from the CIA’s Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual, a guide written in 1983 and declassified via a Freedom of Information Act request in 1997. In The Washington Post you suggest that in “clumsily seeking to conceal the manual’s actual subject, the euphemism ‘human resource exploitation’ comes off more sinister than ‘interrogation’ (or even ‘torture’) ever could.” While irony and doublespeak make strong contributions, to my mind the poem’s most powerful rhetorical effects arrive via implication and omission. Several lines feature blacked-out phrases that orchestrate exaggerated caesurae. It’s fashionable in poetry to cite the power of the unsaid; in this case, however, the unarticulated is more than an idea—it’s performed action. The implications are terrifying, palpable. How is the danger suggested by such silence related to the collection’s central tension between what’s known and unknown?
Lantz: I think you’re feeding me a better answer than I could come up with on my own! It’s a horror movie truism—the monster you half-see (or even don’t see) is often scarier than the one that steps out into the full light of day. The orchestrated terror of a scary movie relies on suggestion instead of directness. Euphemism tries to preemptively deflect a particular reaction. It tries to say something unpleasant without actually sounding unpleasant, and it always ultimately fails, because while it’s intended as a form of misdirection, it can’t help being suggestive as well. A euphemism is the flimsy door behind which you know some monster is lurking: maybe you can’t see it directly, but because you can hear it and smell it, the door offers little protection from your imagination, your ability to intuit, to infer what you don’t know from what you do.
Language resists those who abuse it (a fact I find encouraging) because language has evolved as a means of communication, a means of making oneself understood. It resists those who would use it otherwise. You can’t hide torture under a word like “questioning” any more than you can hide a rhinoceros under a bed sheet. The truth bleeds through, and the more frantically you point away from it, the more attention you draw to it.
Both the original Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual and “Will There Be More Than One ‘Questioner’?” rely on the same linguistic and formal deflections (euphemism, omission, redaction), but the difference is that I’m deliberately cultivating the menace that those deflections generate. Omissions, erasures, gaps, and lacunae appear in several poems in the book, and one of the issues I often found myself exploring in these instances was the insufficiency of language, the ways in which language fails to articulate experience. That’s maybe a self-defeating thing for a poet to think about, but I do think about it. “Will There Be More Than One ‘Questioner’?” moves past that insufficiency by, as you say, making those caesurae a meaningful act rather than an expression of frustration with the limitations of mere words.
The poem imitates the lines of the original manual that have been blacked out to preserve secrecy, but the poem uses this tactic to, again, embrace the power of suggestion, which transcends language. And, again, I see this as an inverse of what Rumsfeld does in the bits of speech that I quote from him. He gives his audience an intricate tangle of language that is somehow subtractive: it shuts down imagination. In this poem, perhaps counter-intuitively, the moments of omission, of pause, of silence, provoke the imagination. Or at least I hope they do.
Rumpus: In 2008 we lunched with a poet/self-described technophobe who lamented the “ease” with which today’s young writers gather compelling facts and imagistic fragments online. If I remember correctly, his main complaint was that he’d been researching the “legitimate” way for years, i.e. slowly, purposefully, and without any creative shortcuts. Given the diversity of your subjects and imaginative juxtapositions, how much do you rely on Internet resources?
Lantz: Ha! I remember that lunch distinctly. Well, I’ll say this: technology is new until it isn’t anymore. Books and library card catalogs were novel technologies (creative shortcuts) at one time too. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll lament how kids these days just plug their brain interfaces straight into their computers (“They don’t even type with their hands, for goodness sake!”). While I’m certainly not young enough to have grown up with the Internet (I had never sent an e-mail or even seen a website until I got to college), it’s so deeply embedded in my life at this point that I have a hard time imagining writing without it. And I do use it, all the time, both as a source of input (research, reading) and as a source of output (publication).
I agree that easier and faster don’t always equal better, but the claim that information should not be readily accessible strikes me as highly problematic. Would my experience of reading Pliny really be enhanced if I had to travel to a library in Rome or Paris just to glance at the text? Some people clearly see danger in the credulous masses being exposed to a nearly infinite quantity of information, but how is that any different than the situation of Pliny himself, who compiled much of his data from other sources? I would venture that Wikipedia is, generally speaking, more factually accurate than Pliny’s Natural History. Slower and more difficult doesn’t equal better either.
I don’t want to be unfair to our lunch companion, though. I think that the nature of technology itself (whether pen and paper or a word processor, library or Internet) informs a poet’s writing process. The ability to manipulate and rearrange poems within a computer file has been indispensable to me as a poet—it’s allowed me to change the way I write in a significant way, and it’s thus become an indispensable part of how I write. Different writers are going to develop different processes and different relationships to the technology they use to create art, and that’s fine by me. When I’m reading for pleasure, I could care less about the process that the author used—I only want the product to be something that delights and interests me. The process of another poet’s work only becomes important to me when I’m trying to reverse engineer (i.e., copy) his or her techniques.
Rumpus: Here’s a sample from your Twitter feed (March 10):
I’m gathering blown-down branches
from the roadside to build an effigy
of Whitman, tangled six-pack rings
and string for his scraggly beard.
Have any lines generated in this daily exercise evolved past 140 characters? How many people follow your micro-poems? What does this form demand of you as an author?
Lantz: At the moment I have 116 “followers” (which makes me sound like a cult leader), though I don’t know how many people actually read what I post. I won’t venture to say what my hit-to-miss ratio with these micro-poems has been thus far, but many of them are winding up, in one form or another, in longer poems. My current preferred method of composing poems (or at least their first drafts) could be described more as assembly than as writing, and the Twitter poems have been a useful source for me to draw on.
I keep all the Twitter poems archived in a file, and the ones I like I dump into another file. And when I sit down to write a poem, I often go to this file and just grab a few micro-poems that seem to have an affinity (tonal, imagistic, etc.) with each other. And I put them in another file, start fooling around with them, and see what happens. Sometimes, this results in complete failure, and back the micro-poems go into the master file. Other times, something clicks, and I start generating/adding new material until I have something resembling a poem. Then I revise. So the Twitter project has been helpful to me on a practical level, because it keeps me generating many bits of material that I can make something bigger out of later. But I do hope that they stand on their own, too.
I like the micro-poems because it’s very manageable to write one every day. An important rule in setting a discipline for yourself is to make the benchmarks manageable. Otherwise you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment and self-reproach. I’ve tried write-a-poem-a-day projects before, and I’ve always burned out so quickly that I just felt ashamed of myself. But 140 characters a day! That’s doable. And 140 characters is just enough room to do something interesting while forcing me to be concise at the same time.
I originally thought that this idea would catch on like wildfire with other poets, but so far, not so much. The conventional use of Twitter is pretty vapid, and it’s a very public forum (if anyone bothers to watch, that is) in which to practice your craft, so that may be scaring some poets away from it, but I still occasionally find I’m surprised that I’m the only poet doing this (as far as I know). Other people have harnessed Twitter for poetic ends, but this usually involves posting links to longer poems, sharing writing prompts, or mixing infrequent snippets of poetry with more conventional Twitter social networking noise. I’ve seen some positively rotten haiku on Twitter, too, but that’s about it. I haven’t yet been at it for a year, though, so I’ll give it time. After 365 micro-poems, I’ll reassess whether I want to keep it up or not.
Rumpus: You’re one of the hardest working and least self-promoting young poets I know. This year you’re attending AWP and Bread Loaf for the first time. What else are you doing to support the books? What, if anything, do you think about the business side of poetry? What’s next for the writing? Is there yet a third manuscript in circulation?
Lantz: I don’t know about the hard working part, but I am trying to promote my poetry much more than I have in the past. I think that promoting my work feels at times like promoting myself, which is why it makes me uncomfortable. For example, I made a Facebook fan page for myself, and that felt a little ridiculous, but it has been a useful way to put out notices about readings and so forth. Having books published makes a big difference psychologically—both of them won contests judged by well-known poets, and the books are tangible objects, substantial in a way that getting an MFA or a fellowship isn’t. So it feels easier to promote them.
I’ve been on the radio a couple of times in the past two months, and I’ve tried to use the Internet to my advantage as much as I can. I would dearly, dearly love to be able to say that I made a poem “go viral” on the Internet, but I don’t think I’ve written a poem capable of that yet. I put up a website mainly to promote the books. I’m doing a lot (or what feels like a lot) of readings in the coming months—in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Madison, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. I’d do more readings if I could afford to take the time off. Readings are odd because while they make me extremely anxious, I enjoy doing them. That’s rare for me, and I hope it bodes well.
Manuscript number three is still very much underway, though I’m starting to get a clearer sense of what it will be like, what its forms and themes will be, and so forth. I’m maybe a third of the way there, in terms of finished poems. The first poem from that series was just accepted by the Indiana Review, so I feel like I’m off to a good start. In the summer of 2008, I was commissioned to write the script/libretto for a play/opera that is now scheduled to appear on the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s main stage theater as part of their 2010 fall season. I’m very excited to see it produced: it includes music, poetry, spoken performance, and American Sign Language, and it’s the product of a now years-long collaboration with a very talented director, composer, singer, and actor who were kind enough to bring me in on their project. So who knows what’s next? Maybe I’ll get my short story manuscript published or actually finish one of my unfinished novels—every good writer should have at least one of those.
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Read the other pieces of our Super-sized combo: the Rumpus review of We Don’t Know, We Don’t Know and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbor’s House, as well as “How to Dance When You do Not Know How to Dance,” a new poem from Nick Lantz, in Rumpus Original Poems.
