by Nick Lantz,
Graywolf Press, 2010,
96 pages, paperback, $15.00,
ISBN: 978 -1 – 55597 – 552 – 4
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During the years of Bush the younger, you may remember, verse arose from an unlikely source: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose evasive rationalizations for the war in Iraq were ironically, angrily circulated as “poetry.”  Most infamous was his breakdown of intelligence into three categories: Known knowns, or what we know we know; known unknowns, the things we know we don’t know; and finally, the key to his defense: unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

The thing is, from a general ontological standpoint, the man’s right: There are limits to our understanding, so much so that we aren’t even aware we aren’t aware.  The outrage of Rumsfeld’s formulation was that he used it to brazenly conceal the truth, rather than illuminate it — used it, you might say, in service to the dark side instead of the light.  His notorious quote is one of two epigraphs that preface a fine first book by Nick Lantz, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Prize.

In deeply empathetic poems, Lantz mulls on the confusion, chaos and fallacy that are so often mankind’s lot, and tries to raise them toward the light.  In unlikely juxtapositions, he poses the hubris of Rumsfeld against the humility of, of all people, Pliny the Elder, ancient Roman author of Natural History and the source of this book’s other headlining observation, that man knoweth nothing unlesse he be taught.  But we can learn our way against the darkness, Lantz thinks.  Clear of voice and generous in spirit, We Don’t Know We Don’t Know is a volume both clever and very wise, its title at once riddle, lament, and mantra.

Lantz begins with a chapter of “Known Knowns.”  In “Ancient Theories,” he lists “knowledge” dubious or disproved: Aristotle’s theory that frogs / formed from mud; the author’s childhood belief that the world spoke / in code through flashing streetlights. In “List of Things We Know,” he details arbitrary and questionable factoids (Kindness / is correlated / to detached / earlobes) and vertiginous exceptions to rules: Unlike most substances, water expands when frozen, and for this reason / . . . we can / go on living.

But beneath the bewildering fortuities, absurdities, and errors, there burns our persistent urge to understand and explain ourselves — to enlighten — and Lantz treats this desperate instinct lovingly, even as it falls short or fails again and again.

The failures are often ominous.  The chapter “Known Unknowns” consists of one long poem called “Will There Be More Than One ‘Questioner’?” — a quote Lantz cites from the 1983 CIA Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual.  What follows is a series of obsessive questions directed to an interrogator.  Some questions are mundane (Have provisions been made for refreshments?), some are horrific (Will you have an unconscious man dragged past the open door at a pre – determined time?), and some hint at an involuntary intimacy (Will you think of him while you eat dark honey smeared on dark bread in a cafe?).

Haunting the “questioner” are the “known unknowns” of fear, dread, and uncertainty about how he will act and respond, how his prisoner will respond and act, and what will come of their humanity.  Ironically, much in those unknowns — Will you risk everything to say [to the prisoner’s wife], He is alive, he is alive? / Will it be true? — is actually within the questioner’s power to decide.

Our very systems of knowing and expressing are inadequate in the chapter “Unknown Unknowns.”  Language is insufficient: In “[                     ],” Eve laments the birth of words and metaphors, how Adam pointed like a retarded child to name creatures and things.  They grow smaller, Lantz writes, each time / she repeats their names.  Truth is precarious, an ironic hazard: A verbal tic makes his aging mother preface her lies with in fact, which her parrot repeats over and over as infect.

But we also might know more than we know.  To Rumsfeld’s three categories, Lantz adds a fourth: Unknown Knowns.  There’s some redemption here, despite so much pathos and futility, as when in “The Sad Truth About Rilke’s Poems,” Lantz assures us that [i]n translation / something / of beauty always dies, but something also is carried over.  In this poem, a purer appreciation of that something might call for a simple shift in awareness:

                                Too many

                                                         people close

          their eyes to listen to your singing, as if it was the light

                      of the fire that burns

                                   and not the heat at the heart of it. 

The final, promising irony is that in exploring the limits of how we grasp that heat, we might, with a little work and grace, know better.

                                                                 — Megan Grumbling

by George Wallace,
Three Rooms Press, 2009,
116 pages, paperback, $15.00,
ISBN: 978-0-9840700-2-2
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I’ve often thought of George Wallace as a sort of psychic channeler, so thoroughly does he inhabit the zeitgeist of this age. Fittingly for a poet well – steeped in Walt Whitman, Wallace writes in the voices of multitudes, a sometimes – risky choice, but one Wallace pulls off with credibility and near – perfect pitch.  His characters are not caricatures.  Though at times broadly drawn, the people who inhabit these poems are accorded respect, even reverence, by a poet whose clear sight is balanced with a deep compassion for the factory worker, the deli clerk, the bartender; for Sally:

          waiting for the number eleven downtown which will take

          her from that waitress job which even with tips and

          kissing ass it doesn’t cover the cost of rent gas groceries

          and electric not to mention a babysitter.

Wallace is not and never has been a “political poet” in the naysaying, finger – wagging, sense of the phrase; neither is he a purveyor of the tiresomely introspective, unstructured work incomprehensible to any but the cognoscenti.  He is, in the spirit of Whitman, the quintessential populist troubadour; a culturally rich historical context pervades his poems; a seemingly organic understanding of the times, the times of our parents and grandparents.

This poetry flowers forth from the real world, though sometimes the “flowers” are scraps of trash blowing along in the exhaust fumes and gutters of a down – and – out city street.  You can almost hear Tom Waits or even Frank Sinatra as a ghostly accompaniment behind these lines:

          This is for the guy on nightshift who never knew

          a minute of financial peace just a working stiff

          sweeping it all up gum sticks candy wrappers

          and white plastic knives sweeping it all up in 

          the rich american night penniless as the day

          he was born smoking too many cigarettes.

With his audacious take on American mythology and the overflowing abundance of his painterly imagination, in his poem “That’s You, Man” Wallace re – contexutalizes characters from American popular culture in the jazziest of recitations:

          see that kid staring into the midway lights?

          see that farm boy hopping off the greyhound?  you!  you

          you you!  you are sexy as a stick of dynamite you are

          tasty as a ballpark wiener you got plenty of mustard on 

          you.  you are stronger than demolition dust you are

          happiest when closed before striking you are horniest

          when your lungs fill up with high grade petroleum 

Wallace writes a hell of a love poem, too — his work can be dizzyingly erotic:

          i loved you once like a fisherman on the edge of

          a river, with his fingers to his lips, tasting the

          morning air for salmon.  i loved you like man

          on a horse entering an undisturbed cove.  like a

          whaler in his scrimshaw dream of hearts and 

          flowers.  like a ship’s mate who catches first

          sight of land.

Wallace’s “New World Love Song” echoes the Song of Songs, with a little Pablo Neruda swirled in:

          i am breaking bread with the angels

          i am walking in the promised 

          land and o my love she is

          a grove of almond trees 

          she is exotic she

          climbs like a

          gypsy wagon

Aptly subtitled, these poems are “new” — so fresh, you can smell the rich, complex soil clinging to their roots — American soil, indeed.  Highly recommended.

                                                                    — Nancy A. Henry

by Reetika Vazirani,
edited by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar,
Drunken Boat Books, 2010,
86 pages, paperback, $14.95,
ISBN -13: 978 – 0 – 578 – 01465 – 4
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These last poems by Reetika Vazirani, written before her death in 2003, are meditations on transience and impermeability.  Her language is free; lyrical, playful, bittersweet at times, rich in scholarly references, and with an ability to soar and dive within mere syllables.  Now, that’s her language alone.  What’s under the surface, the bedrock of her poems, is a different story.  Barriers are Saturnian, impossible to navigate without pain.  Ancient ghosts and guardians loom over us, the readers.  Women can share the fate of their own mothers, often unwillingly, ground down by menial chores and misery caused by a father, lover, or husband.  And absolutely no one is a god or goddess on this earth.

This is Vazirani’s warning, even as the poems lilt and sparkle.  The contrast between her exquisite language and negotiations with shadows create poetic tensions that are powerful, impossible to forget.  It’s what Federico García Lorca called “duende”: an urgent dance on the edge of danger, being gripped by primeval forces.  Add to this the way Vazirani speaks of cultural or political barriers, their complex negotiations, and we feel an authentic, hard – earned voice.

The “Radha” of the title — she is the mythical Hindu Radha, beloved consort of Krishna — comes in many guises and personas within this book, alternately vain, ambitious, and ambivalent: a bored guest at banquets, a foil for the fickle and elusive Krishna – like man frequently mentioned, and even, in one poem, Doris Snyder, a hat – check girl on Radha Street.  While the poems’ narrators often glimpse divine energies, as in “Nuptials” and “Territory,” they rarely realize wholeness completely.  Sharp questioning and fragmentations intrude in “Born,” which concludes the book:

          I say god to be wed to the dream

          of an avatar    what could be worse?

          listen it could be if god sent no money

Like an illustrious predecessor — the 16^th century poet Mirabai, from Rajasthan — Vazirani alternates praise and complaints within her poems.  She is done with worldly vanity, as in the disillusionment of the narrator in “Swamp Green,” and in these lines from “Born”:

          forget every bit of floral lace lipstick and any other

          buffer between glamour and being done for

And even in the achievement of long – held professional dreams, in a contemporary setting, comes the realization that the world for Vazirani’s poetic narrators can be full of cruelty, envious rivals, and hypocrites.  A line from the title poem, “Radha Says,” makes this clear:

                    the suburban stepinfechit smiles

          of realtors laughing at your tribe

Surely for Vazirani, an immigrant who was born in India, this aspect of the American dream was painful to live deal with.  Yet using the “stepinfechit” metaphor makes it clear that she knows the lackeys of culture, money, and power to be more insidious than all of us even know.  All of us, especially women, can turn lackey, as in the narrator from “Born” who says bluntly that “he’s a god and I’m errands” or in the last two lines of “Ambient:”

                    mother what you lived I learned

          smiling at the list of chores 

Reading these poems, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the Radha persona.  It is like a mask that cannot be removed, with its crimson and gold paint turned toxic, its scholarly allusions useless in a world of fragmentations and harsh choices.  I was reminded, more than once, of Muriel Ruykeyser’s “The Poem as Mask,” with its cry of “No more mythologies!” and how it once entreated poets to reject anything that blocked telling their own real experiences.  When Vazirani speaks of the life of a single mother, the details themselves, such as a visit to a public health clinic in “Born,” have true clarity, are authentic and compelling enough without the lure of a myth.

In conclusion, what is Vazirani really saying to us?  The same thing Rukeyser told us — No more masks! — but with her own painful truths.  May a new generation of poets arise, particularly women poets, who really do not need or choose the old masks in any way whatsoever.  That’s still my wish.

                                                                      — Sharon Olinka