Interview with the poet Scott Cairns, conducted during the Festival of Faith and Writing 2002 by Phil Christman ('01) and Tim Thompson ('02). The full interview, which contains more matter of specific interest to writers and English major-types, will appear in the final issue of Dialogue, to be released during the first week in May.

Thinking about poetry in terms of an aspect of vocation and relating it to the whole idea of faith and writing, I keep thinking of what Rilke says in his Letters to a Young Poet: ``This above all, ask yourself in the stillest hours of your night, must I write?'' Is writing poetry, does it involve a kind of existential leap of faith? Would you wither and die if you couldn't write anymore?

Hmm. I don't think I would wither and die if I couldn't write anymore, and I don't think it involves an existential leap of faith. Maybe it once did; maybe initially, what is required is a kind of tilt -- turn of the head -- wherein you imagine a kind of level of authority you don't really believe you have. You adopt a sort of fictive disposition in which you know whatever you say must be interesting. I think you do need that kind of arrogance, initially, to start writing. But once you start writing habitually, a lot of the angst and agonistic relationship to your own texts, I think, it diminishes over time. And it becomes more playful and more pleasurable to make, to make, well, in my case, poems. Or, you know, on those few occasions when I write essays or something, to make good sentences. Those become, in and of themselves, pleasurable, whether or not anyone will see them, or anyone will know of them. The act itself becomes a pleasure. And maybe I would -- you know, the life would become less if I stopped doing that, but I guess I don't believe that I would ... I can't imagine that I would stop doing that. It's hard to imagine the result of my stopping.

Is part of your perspective on that the sense that there is transcendence, that the poetry isn't the only thing we have faith in?

Exactly, yeah. The poetry is in my case a means by which I apprehend -- I think I've probably said this in other interviews so forgive me -- it really is for me a means by which I apprehend a faith I suspect and a presence, a nearness of God that I suspect. But I suppose if I didn't have poetry there would be -- I mean worship does that even better. So I would just maybe go to church more.

All right, let me ask you something about some of your new poems in your new volume, Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. You talk a lot regarding your poetry about a sacramental view of language, about the agency of words themselves, that they can engender further making, and you have a series of poems, the ``Adventures in New Testament Greek,'' which focus on various Greek words, such as mysterion, hairesis, and that one I can never pronounce, apoc-

Apocatastasis?

And especially in a poem like the one on hairesis [heresy], where you're talking about the free range, the freedom that we have, within a wider context of belief. Could you relate the freedom that you experience as a poet within a context of belief -- do you feel freer because you have an anchor, or do you ever experience a tension, especially in your Eastern Orthodox tradition, where some adherents of the faith would say that this is the ``one true church'' and any departure from it is dangerous. Or is that an incorrect characterization?

Well, I don't know a lot of people who'd say that, inside the church. More likely you'd hear something like what Bishop Kallistos Ware says, which is, ``We know where the church is; we cannot say where the church is not.'' So that he makes very clear that people have a -- I do have an anchor, in fact, in Orthodoxy, in the Orthodox Church. Because it's there, because the faith is full there, I can be confident in it, but that doesn't mean that outside of that, the church does not exist. And that's more Orthodox than the other characterization, of the ``one true church'' negating every other. But there is one true church, and it's the one holy catholic and apostolic church, which every believer belongs to. But in fact the freedom -- I really have made this my, I've spoken about this before, that it strikes me as faithless to worry about where your art will lead you. If there is, if one has faith in a God who loves him and trusts the Holy Spirit in him, then really the outcome of one's labors in this or any art are assuredly discoveries of something that needs discovery. And to sort of edit out everything that surprises you or disturbs you is faithless. So yeah, I think that to have a faith grants greater freedom. All things are lawful, all things may not be expedient. But certainly lawful.

So in the poem on hairesis, would you posit heresy or its manifestations as a more poetic form of freedom?

Well, I don't know that I'd talk about it that way, but I do see heresy as a genuine -- it's the result of unorthodox emphases, or an unorthodox emphasis on one element of the truth. That's how you come up with a heresy, is you overemphasize or tear out, excise -- from the fullness of your faith -- you excise a necessary element, and then the faith becomes unbalanced. Or you foreground an element and your faith becomes unbalanced. And that's how heterodoxy occurs.

In talking about your poetry, you speak of writing as a process of discovery, or of poems as discoveries. In a previous interview, when asked a question about examples of those moments in your poetry, you quoted from your poem ``Loves: Magdalene's Epistle,'' from your volume Recovered Body: ``All loves are bodily, require/ that the lips part, and press their trace/ of secrecy upon the one// beloved.'' Would you cite any similar moments in your new poems?

There's one in ``Memento,'' where I'm talking about the little altar space with the icons where I pray, and there's a little discovery in that one: ``These surround the shallow altar// where I say my prayers and, if I'm lucky,/ where I pray.'' I think I discovered that the moment I read that. [The poem continues:] ``When I say my prayers, of course,/ there is much to remember; when I begin to pray,/ far more to forget.'' That was something I don't think I actually had put into that sort of consciousness until I saw that I'd written it. These are the sorts of things that language leads you to and you just have to trust language to lead you to those. And I'd say that every poem, you know -- every poem has a little passing moment like that, where I just sort of startle, half-startle ... as in ``Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion,'' the observation which I'd, you know, been, I'd sort of been meditating on the Mysteries, the Holy Mysteries, is how we call the sacrament, the communion, and I was thinking about how ... well, this was one: ``The problem at the heart/ of metaphor is how neatly it breaks down/ to this and that. Imagine one that held/ entirely across the play of image/ and its likenesses.'' That was a discovery. ...

So, then, in terms of describing this process of discovery, you, you're just reading, or life is happening to you, and something sort of catches your attention, but you don't know exactly what you're going to say about it yet, and you just start to write whatever about it?

Well, see, I'd say all of that except that something grabs your attention. I don't think --

That's too Romantic for you?

Yeah. An artist doesn't have the -- the real artist, the working artist -- doesn't have the luxury of waiting for something to grab your attention. You develop a habit of paying attention. And then you say, well, now I'm going to attend, I'm going to attend, to this! And the act of attending is what enables the discovery. It's not, kind of, ``Man, I wish someone would grab my attention!''

Like, ``Nothing interesting ever happens here!'' Yeah, I think one of the most helpful things I think I've heard you say is: ``There's no such thing as a poem waiting to happen. Such fictions are fabricated by non-poets. You will find your subject matter in your obsessions. Only there.''

Yeah. I might rephrase that; I might characterize it today as, you'll find it in your loves, because I'm starting to think that love of all kinds is utterly a matter of attention. Honoring someone or something with attention, with your full attention. And that's what yields, in the various ways that that word means, that's what yields the discovery, that's what yields into discovery, that's what enables -- it enables love. It enables language. It enables art.

How do you keep the distance that keeps you from over-attending and suffocating?

Sin is what keeps you from over-attending! If I were to say that ... I realize that there's no such thing as over-attending! My problem is not over-attending, my problem's under-attending! And it's a discipline to turn oneself to sufficiently attend. And poetry's just part of it. The life is the artifact to be well-made. And that involves not just attending to one's art, but attending to one's loved ones sufficiently, and attending to one's friends sufficiently, and actually attending to one's enemies sufficiently so as to see through the enmity and realize a love even there. So I think that it has everything -- there's no such thing as over-attending. Would that we had that problem!

I really appreciate what you just said there. I think it gets at a greater concept of vocation, living your whole life before God. There isn't this romantic idea of poetry --

That not only wrecks your life, it wrecks your art to think of art as this thing that you, you mess your personal life up for. You know? If you ignore your children because you're an artist, you know, the result of that is not just a bad life, the result of that is really not very good art. Small art comes out of that. Big art comes out of seeing art as a part of a life. Or seeing your whole life as one's art.

Okay. One last question: I'd like to hear more about how -- as far as I know, you used to be primarily a sort of a Reformed Christian with ``a couple of pet heresies on the side'' (I'm a big fan of that phrase). And I'd like to know how you, how your turning to Orthodoxy happened, and the reason I'm asking is because I'm kind of partly attracted to and partly repelled by Orthodoxy.

Uh-huh. That's a healthy disposition to have towards it. You know, writing poems -- reading the Fathers, of course, which I did even when I was -- well, I didn't do it when I was a Baptist, but shortly after I became a Presbyterian. I actually started reading Irenaeus, I think, initially; Irenaeus and then Athanasius, and ... I can't remember if there were any other Church Fathers I read besides the Gospel. I read The Philokalia. ... I read The Way of the Pilgrim, which is not a patristic writing, but it's sort of a little 19th-century Russian story --

Yeah, the thing from Franny and Zooey.

Well, I read Franny and Zooey when I was in high school, and I loved that. It was later in college that I discovered what that little pea-green book was. ... And then I read that. And then I read The Philokalia after that. That was all in college. And I actually do remember thinking, ``Man, I wish ... I would like to go to that church where those people are. I would like to worship as those people do,'' and I was completely ignorant of the fact that maybe down the street there was such a place. It never occurred to me that there was such a place. And it wasn't until much later that it occurred to me that there was such a place. And I was probably -- how old am I? -- I was probably 35 before I was even familiar with modern-day Orthodoxy. And I didn't become Orthodox, actually, until -- I'd been writing poems and, you know, sort of thinking of myself as a kind of heretic, but then discovering that much of what I perceived as heresy was actually Orthodox. So, you know, I would write things that didn't really jibe with my own deliberate or intentional Reformed theology, out of sort of wishful thinking --

Such as?

Well, like, oh, the body, you know, how really. ... You know, I never could come to terms with a notion of human perfection as somehow a transcendence of the body, a spiritual transcendence of the body, even though this is what I always believed was what human perfection entails. I was never happy with it, and received my own sort of joy in bodiliness and animality. I love walking with my dogs; I love, you know, playing with my wife, we just have a great time! I love my kids; I love bathing my children, laughing with them, wrestling with them -- I love stuff! I used to backpack all the time -- I just love it! Lying down in the pine needles, you know, just inhaling. I've always really felt that that was somehow pagan and wrong of me, but then the poems, of course, were kind of undoing that thought and leading me away from thinking that way about the joy of those sensations. ... And then I started reading the Fathers. [The body] gets resurrected, and grows into divinity. But I'm not talking about some Mormon notion of ``I become a God of my own little planet,'' it's more like --

Orthodox ``theosis.''

Theosis -- yeah! As you become more fully godlike, your apprehension of who God is becomes increased, so that it's like this forever! [Gestures, moving hands through the air, maintaining a steady distance between them as they move.] It's a really wonderful, desirable circumstance. And I just --

Things never get boring that way.

Never! You don't stop, there's no static situation. It's all a dynamic forever. And also, I used to play with ideas about time, because I used to think that God knows all and so the future's done, and we just sort of catch up to it. And that's so stupid! That's infantile! There is no future, yet. We're co-creators of what's to come. We make, through our choices, and the power of the Holy Spirit in us, things better or worse for other people and ourselves. And it's not a done deal!

Definitely seems to free God of any --

Culpability! [Laughs.]