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About Scott Cairns
Scott Cairns
Librettist, essayist, translator, and poet, Scott Cairns is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at University of Missouri, where he previously directed The Center for Literary Arts and the creative writing program. He currently directs the low-residency MFA Program at Seattle Pacific University, and is assisting in the migration of that program to a more affirming host institution—Whitworth University in Spokane. His poetry and essays have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. He has blogged for the Religion Section of The Huffington Post. His prose books, Short Trip to the Edge (spiritual memoir) and The End of Suffering (look-length essay) appeared in multiple printings and in Greek and Romanian translations. His recent books include Correspondence with My Greeks (2024), Lacunae (2023), Anaphora (2019), Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems (2015), and Idiot Psalms (2014). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and the Denise Levertov Award in 2014.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/scott-cairns
Correspondence with my greeks
Correspondence with My Greeks is a work at once deeply human and hauntingly transcendent, the full flowering of the poet’s lifelong devotion to the generative power of the word.
[Cairns] weaves his correspondences so artfully, and with such somber joy, that I was left in awe of this accomplished poet’s sprezzatura. He makes it look easy, even if poems this finely crafted are clearly the product of a lifetime of practice. Each poem in the collection rewards re-reading. We recall Cavafy, but through the words of Cairns, who is working his own way back to Greece with every line—leaving a trail of new resonances, new connections, and a new way of thinking about influence. There’s not a whiff of what Harold Bloom called “the anxiety of influence” here; instead, we see a whole-hearted embrace of influence: the many ways that Greece, the Greek language, and Greek poets have influenced Cairns’s sense of himself in the world and on the page.
--Anastasios Mihalopoulos, in Ergon: Greek/American & Diaspora Arts & Letters
Lacunae
Cairns is here focused upon how an image, a word, or—in the case of the Theotokos—a womb can contain the uncontainable. As Orthodox hymnography avers, she is more spacious than the heavens. So, too, the poet suggests, in its own, modest way, the poem might give birth to more, and more, and yet more than even the poet supposes.
“Scott Cairns is the wisest of poets, a courageous figure who maps the contours and textures of the spiritual life with an exacting eye and ear for the music at the questioning heart of faith. His new book, Lacunae, is not only his most ambitious and formally various to date but also the most affecting. “Every/ word proves every bit as mysterious as/ the Word himself,” he writes, “and every term proves crux—// both terminus and new departure.” Here is a poet who daily finds in the quotidian inventive means of charting our ever-evolving relationship to the divine. This is a book for the ages.” —Christopher Merrill
Anaphora
Anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase, draws our attention in new ways to the repeated term, and can lead us to moments of epiphany. In Eucharistic settings, anaphora also indicates the specific liturgical moment when the bread and wine are consecrated, becoming what the Eastern Church calls “the Holy Mysteries.” Cairns’ use of anaphora invites us to see words as doing more than naming, more than serving as arrows pointing to prior substance, but acquiring substance of their own.
