Weekly Poem: Nick Lantz uses ‘how-to’ guides as inspiration

If you pick up Nick Lantz’s new poetry collection, “How to Dance as the Roof Caves in,” you’ll recognize the “self-help” theme running through the titles. To name a few: “How to Travel Alone,” “How to Forgive a Promise Breaker,” “How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance” and even “How to Appreciate Inorganic Matter.”

When he first started composing poems for this book, he found a website with a bunch of “how-to” articles. Always on the lookout for a new project, Lantz was inspired.

“I was just struck by so many of the titles because they were things as simple as ‘How to Boil Water,’ but then some of them were very specific like ‘How to Choose a Wedding Chapel in Gatlinburg, Tenn.,’ Lantz told Art Beat.

He used the titles as the starting point for many of his poems, but when he got to the end of the writing process, he still had a long list of how-to titles that he wanted to use.

And so he gathered several of the titles together into one poem called “Help,” often juxtaposing their meanings to create a narrative.

Hear Nick Lantz read “Help”

“There’s an interesting way in which stories or narratives can emerge through implications and juxtapositions.”

Lantz pointed to one sequence in particular: “How to be popular”/”How to confident”/”How to be attractive”/”How to make a meal plan for one.”

“You start to get a sense of a character trying to cheer themselves up or bolster their confidence and then falling back on their meal plan for one.”

Lantz found a kind of character among the titles and the articles. He explained that the very existence of the guides — that someone felt they were necessary — implied a story.

One title he brought up was “How Not to Always Talk about the Same Things.”

“It was very clear that the person who had written it had someone in mind when they wrote it … and that this resentment was sort of spilling over into the how-to guide. Even though it was ostensibly for anyone, it was clearly (the author) venting in a passive aggressive way at this one person who they found really annoying.”

As a poetry teacher, Lantz helps others discover the meaning that he can illuminate in a title or a poem. His experience is that people who don’t know poetry as well are nervous. They expect it to be impenetrable, when really it’s much more “accessible.”

“People expect that the interpretation of a poem is more complex than it really is … they think there is something more to it, that it’s a puzzle that has to be unlocked, some sort of Di Vinci code cryptography where it’s going to explain the nature of the universe once we crack the code of this particular poem.”

But, poetry for Lantz isn’t about the final conclusion. It’s about the discovering.

“I like to say that poems are about giving the reader an experience and interpretation as such isn’t necessary.”

Nick Lantz. “Help,” from How to Dance as the Roof Caves In.” Copyright © 2014 by Nick Lantz. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.