Levis Prize-winning poet lists as inspiration Donald Rumsfeld, Pliny the Elder
Nick Lantz, the Pennsylvania-based writer and winner of this year's Levis Reading Prize, titled his winning poetry collection after a line from a 2002 speech by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Brian Charlton
Contributing Writer
The VCU Department of English welcomed this year’s Levis Reading Prize winner, Pennsylvania writer and teacher Nick Lantz, for a reading at Grace Street Theater last Thursday.
The Department of English presents the Levis Reading Prize each year to an outstanding first- or second-published book of poetry, encouraging writers early on in their career to emerge from obscurity.
Set up by a committee of colleagues and friends of the department, the prize was named in honor of the late Larry Levis, a former VCU professor and distinguished poet, whose death at age 50 in 1996 shocked the community.
The prize consists of an honorarium of $1,500 and an all-expenses-paid trip to Richmond, which includes a public reading.
Among emerging poets, Lantz – who works out of Lancaster, Penn. – seems somewhat of a prodigy, coming out with two published books in a single year. Lantz’s Levis Prize-winning collection, “We Don’t Know We Don’t Know,” is in part a homage to the political rhetoric of Donald Rumsfeld, the 16th and 21st Secretary of Defense. Scattered Rumsfeld quotes are intertwined with poems pertaining to the astute observations of first century philosophers, such as Pliny the Elder.
The title, for example, draws from Rumsfeld’s address at a Department of Defense news briefing on Feb. 12, 2002: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Lantz described his reaction to Rumsfeld’s prosody in a discussion before his reading on Thursday night.
“I was amazed at the wordplay, how poetic it was, but at the same time, what it represented of America at the time,” he said.
Noting that Thursday night’s turnout was the weightiest group of people he had seen since beginning public readings from his book, Lantz said his best advice for aspiring writers and poets was “(to) read broadly, not just poetry,” and to “make skillful observations of the environment around you … I had a Hawk living behind my house eating all these rabbits it picked up day to day; it was only later I realized I had a morbidly humorous poem on my hands.”
Finalists for the 2011 Levis Reading Prize included Nicky Beer for her collection “The Diminishing House” (2010) and Daniel Johnson for “How to Catch a Falling Knife” (2010). For more information on Nick Lantz, his books and other projects, visit his website at www.nick-lantz.com.
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Photos by Mel Kobran
