Nick began We Don’t Know We Don’t Know during his time as Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow (2007-2008) at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
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 Know is the debut of a wide-ranging, audacious new voice.
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Praise for We Don’t Know We Don’t Know
Of difficult subjects—the structures of cognition, the structures of social exclusion, the promptings to love—Nick Lantz writes with elegant simplicity. Most poets take a lifetime to learn as much . . . We Don't Know We Don't Know is a brilliant book about the brutal limits of sympathy and imagination. Which is to say, it nurtures, brilliantly, the sympathy and imagination that might restore us.
—Linda Gregerson, from her Introduction
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Sample Poems
“Of the Parrat and other birds that can speake”
What Is Not Inside the Head-Sized Box
More praise for We Don’t Know We Don’t Know
Drawing upon the dangerous obfuscations of Donald Rumsfeld and the quaint observations of Pliny the Elder, Nick Lantz questions the “known knowns,” the “known unknowns,” “the unknown unknowns,” and the “unknown knowns” that seem to permeate our daily lives. If this remarkably ambitious collection is in some ways an ontological quest exploring the limits of optics and epistemology with reference to Darwin and Aristotle, Petrarch and Christ, Plato and Tutankhamen, it is also a celebration of bees and eels and finches, of wildfires and crickets and light. Moving seamlessly from fable and folk tale to history and mathematics and physics, these exquisitely speculative pieces continually tug at the heart and tease the reader into thought. Having read Nick Lantz’s wonderful poetry, no matter what I don’t know I don’t know, I do know I know: this is truly a book of marvels, a marvel of a book.
—Ronald Wallace, author of For a Limited Time Only
Nick Lantz’s wonderful collection We Don’t Know We Don’t Know makes liberal use of quotes from Donald Rumsfeld and Pliny the Elder. Yes, I said Rumsfeld and Pliny—whose words, in Lantz’s hands, work beautifully to frame the poet’s exploration of the life and times of all things transient, including ourselves. The title We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, taken from the most famous Rumsfeld quote, contributes the section titles as well, dividing the book and the world into “Known Knowns,” with its Pliny-inspired “The order that Bees Keepe in their worke”; the “Known Unknowns,” with its single stunning poem about torture “Will There Be More Than One ‘Questioner’?”; the “Unknown Unknowns,” with darker poems like “What We Know About Death by Drowning” and “Harry Harlow in the Pit of Despair”; and the final “Unknown Knowns,” where the book closes with “Of the last peeces of Painters,” a transcendent meditation on the nature of art. We Don’t Know We Don’t Know is an expansive and magnanimous book, one that will renew your appreciation of the value of poetry—and life.
—Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto
