Interview: Missouri USA poet Scott Cairns tells about his work

An advocate for the mentally ill, Doctor C, as he is affectionately known, bent his comments to let the listener know of his favorable sense of hope for mentally ill people and their treatment. For some time I have thought about and even meditated on the work of poetry recent to the body of this interview series, as created by the excellent Roman Catholic Christian poet Philip Kolin, of Mississippi, USA. His recent collection is titled "Reading God's Handwriting: Poems," as published by Kaufmann Publishing. We talked by phone between my home in Mill Valley, California and his home in Missouri; the interview follows.

Though Scott Cairns wrote his answers after a background conversation, there was one follow-up to his answers to the questions. That was asked in writing by email and answered in writing by email. Showing results by narrator "Scott Bishop". Under 1 Hour 5. This collection of 53 poems continues to explore Cairns's Eastern Orthodox faith, including his experiences at Orthodox monasteries like those on the on the Holy Mountain of Athos.

In theological parlance, Cairns's poems exemplify the Orthodox apophatic tradition that begins by confessing our unknowing. They are a marvelous correction to the many ways that we trivialize the divine. Our Father in heaven is intimate, and sometimes even too close for comfort, but he is also infinite, and so beyond the fallen and finite knowledge of mere mortals. To what might we compare The Vast and Inexplicable when full none of [our words] quite seem to satisfy?

Idiot Psalms

So, our speech about the divine is never exact, always provisional, insufficient for its task. Our hearts are dull, our presumptions are many, our minds are cluttered, our spiritual impediments almost countless. Thus our fraught perplexities accrue. And yet sometimes we have inklings of awareness that are no less real. Even though we ricochet between futility and audacity, it is good and right to pray: The poem and its placement before the beginning of the IV sections give us a preface and a hint of the poetic questionings yet to come.

In the first poem of the first section, for example, Parable asks To what might this slow puzzle be compared? As we near the end of the book, the poem Draw Near concludes with this admission: The title of his new book, Idiot Psalms, shows his ability to combine biblical study with humility. Fourteen invented psalms, spread throughout the book, have a grieving narrator, the Idiot, who regrets his imperfections. The first of this sequence shows a servant who seeks spiritual connection with his God.

Recensie(s)

After self-examination, he turns to faith. Most of these invented psalms follow the same pattern. The 12th one ends with a prayerful petition, grant in this obscurity a little light. In this era of flash media frenzies, Cairns, like Stewart, takes readers back to a time of reflection. Little popular culture appears, but instead more sedate, thoughtful settings where the true action is interior struggles.

Cairns creates his own poetics to pursue the difficult goal of writing about the Bible without being preachy. He uses Greek, both modern and New Testament vernacular, phrases to amplify his religious motifs. Indeed, the poet sets some poems in Greece, which creates an immediacy for the entire collection.

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The writing life is primarily a reading life, so you just keep reading. The writing life is healthy so long as you keep reading. As soon as you stop reading and imagine that you are on your own, you are pretty much done. Even if you keep turning out books. Literature is really a conversation and when you are a writer you have to understand that you are now taking up your part of the conversation.

www.newyorkethnicfood.com | Idiot Psalms (ebook), Scott Cairns | | Boeken

That is how literary study is. You engage the conversation and find out what we are talking about, how we are talking about it, what are the ways that we might talk about it. How do you live the writing life in the real world? We have to learn not to say things like that. I have children and dogs, a mortgage. I guess the question is how do you make time for writing? How do you make time for writing now? Do you have a prayer life? How do you make time for that? You just make time for it. So you have a discipline? Well maybe that could be the answer. I think in many ways a scattered, distracted business world is a lot less real than one in which you are paying attention to your heart and your soul and your mind, and nurturing those things.

To be disciplined and read with your yellow legal pad handy to write down whatever provokes you. It is sort of like writing poems. When it is time to work on writing a poem I always begin with my legal pad and my pencils and I read until something provokes a response. Then I chase that on the page until I run out of gas there and then turn back to reading. It really is a dialogue and conversation which you establish with the text. But it is not the prior authors intentions that you are so intent upon as developing a sense of how whatever it is you are reading provokes you into further creating.

It is not like you are going to get through his text some ossified mean it is rather that you honor the text in front of you as vital and as having agency and power. It sounds like you are saying that in order to be original you have to be firmly grounded in others original work. My sense of original writing is writing that bears the marks of its origins.

• Loves Origins - A Five-Story Collection;
• Conversations with God;
• Samenvatting.
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The Greek word from which we get authenticity is authentes is an old word that has to do with ceramic work and the mark of the hand. And authentic work has the mark of the hand that shaped it. You have to think of it as a collaborative endeavor. There is an understanding of what the word original means that arises out of prohibitions against plagiarism that puts a separation between what anyone else has done and now what I am putting forth.

He was influenced and then kept the river flowing. Every art has a tradition.

The really interesting artists to me are the ones who know what came before them and have engaged it and take what they want from that tradition and employ it. Their own visions are influenced by the tradition. What is the relationship between talent and training? I kind of think not though. I prefer to think that we are all called to something and if we must pursue that with all of our energy. Discipline is required and perseverance and not really caring about what anyone else thinks about what you do. That dooms you to a certain kind of writing. I think that if there is such a thing as talent it is worthless unless it is accompanied by discipline.

I think those are some of the least happy people in the world, the ones who have a certain kind of gift and then squander it through laziness or whatever else gets in the way. I think everybody has something. What is it like for you to be in the process of writing a poem.