We Dont Know We Dont Know Poems

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 Dont Know We Dont 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 Lantzs 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 Dont Know We Dont Nick Lantz is the winner of the 2009 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry, selected by Linda Gregerson and awarded by the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He is the author of a second collection, The Lightening That Strikes the Neighbor's House, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Nick Lantz, who won the the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Bakeless Prize for this collection, has borrowed this title from Donald Rumsfeld's justification of the war in Iraq, one of the lowest points in American public discourse. Lantz's powerful book of political satire addresses the brutal limits of sympathy and imagination and assesses what it means to claim new knowledge within a culture that professes to know everything already. The result is 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. "Exotic facts, 'Ancient Theories' (one poems title), memorable quotations and familial griefs collide and mingle throughout this striking first collection from the Wisconsin poet Lantz. Lantz takes his title, and many epigraphs, from Donald Rumsfeld ('there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we dont know we dont know'), but few of the poems pursue political causes. Instead, Lantz seems driven by quirky and quotable phrases, those he finds and those he creates—'As you know, the human head is the most/ commonly stolen body part'; 'The whip/ makes a pleasing/ sound when it strikes.' Lantzs best poems have traditional strengths and narrative surprises: 'Thinking Makes It So' records a shockingly callous act, and 'Of the Parrat and other that can speake' (another title from Pliny) reacts to the death of a parent, first with controlled humor, then with grief, and finally with sharpened irony—in a just world, anthologies would snap it up."—Publishers Weekly

                                                On the moon, astronaut David Scott drops a hammer and a falcon feather,                 and we learn nothing                                      we didnt already know.                                                               —from “Ancient Theories”

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 Dont Know We Dont 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 Lantzs 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 Dont Know We Dont

Nick Lantz is the author of a second collection, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors House, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.