The Fare Forward Interview with Scott Cairns
Poet, essayist, and translator Scott Cairns is the author of nine books of poetry, a book-length essay, and a spiritual memoir. His poetry books include Anaphora: New Poems, Slow Pilgrimage: The Collected Poems, and Idiot Psalms. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Denise Levertov Award. Cairns is Professor of English and Director of the Low-Residence MFA Program at Seattle Pacific University.
After becoming Orthodox and craving spiritual direction, Cairns took what would become one of many pilgrimages to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain. In his spiritual memoir, A Short Trip to the Edge, Cairns recounts his first three pilgrimages to Mount Athos and his life between them. We talked to him about his journeys, prayer, poetry, and how to live as pilgrims in all we do. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Interview Conducted by Whitney Rio-Ross
Fare Forward: What brought about your first pilgrimage to Mount Athos?
Scott Cairns: I suppose it was a series of circumstances that led to my having to confront that I had—though I’d been a Christian person all my conscious life—I had never acquired a life of prayer. And you know, the job I had before the job where I had that sort of confrontation with myself was a really difficult job. So I used that as an excuse for having been impeded from progress, and so I used the difficulty of a work situation to justify my lack of progress. But then when I came to a really beautiful, lush, loving community for that subsequent job, I had a beach and a Labrador, and life was really, really good. And I just had no excuses. I wasn’t making any progress even then, so I set out to learn to pray.
I’d read plenty to give me an idea of what I needed to start doing. I just needed to start doing it. And so I began the Jesus prayer, and I was making some progress, and then I guess about ten years into it, it occurred to me I wasn’t making that much progress. By then I was teaching at University of Missouri and had a research leave coming up. I thought I needed a spiritual guide, a spiritual father. I thought that would assist my progress. So I decided I would, on the University of Missouri’s dime, go to Greece and go to Mount Athos and search for a father, or at least search for some guidance. And so I did.
FF: How did your first journey change your prayer life? Did you see tangible change?
SC: Yeah. I think my first trip to Mount Athos was probably the most profound. The first couple nights actually at Mount Athos were profoundly moving. I went with a friend, a colleague from Missouri who’s also an Orthodox Christian and a friend from church, and we decided to make the pilgrimage together, that first one. I remember coming into the katholikón—the main church for services—in the middle of the night. There was a little bit of light outside, but when you opened it—the doors to the katholikón, into the exonarthex—it was darker inside than it was outside. I just stood there for a while trying to get my bearings and moved into the darkness, saw the candles in the narthex proper and then kind of wound my way into there and probably stepped on a monk or two on the way. And then it was all in Greek, so it was kind of vertiginous. And I guess that’s one thing that I’ve developed over the years writing poetry, is a taste for the vertiginous, this lack of comprehension I take as a blessing. I felt, “I don’t have any idea what was going on here. This is exactly what I want.” And so I moved in that darkness and experienced the liturgy in that circumstance and just had a palpable sense of being surrounded by saints. That sensation has never left me.
There was a time when I really resisted the conflation of poetry and prayer because it’s sort of a ubiquitous slippage between poetry and prayer and prayer and poetry.
FF: You write in the book that after you came back from your first pilgrimage, you started thinking about poetry and prayer. How would you say that your deepening understanding of prayer affected your poetry? Do you think it’s affected it?
SC: I’d say this has been a long road for me. I was writing poems pretty young, and I think slowly my sense of poetry led me to understand that we write in order to find out things, not so much to express things we think we know. I think there may be some analogy there to my young idea about poetry, and my young idea about prayer, was that both of those are primarily modes of expression. My early poems were about writing what I thought I knew. My early prayers were probably petitions expressing to God something I desired or expressing to God some joy. So I don’t know which happened first, but one of those—I think probably the poetry—led me into my prayer life because in my writing of poems I began to see that I would trust the language into saying what I didn’t know to say and thereafter seeing what I didn’t know to even look for. And slowly, slowly, slowly through those years I began to apprehend that prayer properly understood was similarly a leaning in to trusting that the words of the prayer would lead you into seeing what you couldn’t see or wouldn’t know to look for, wouldn’t know to ask for. So prayer became more of a communion with the God who is rather than a list of chores for him to do.
There was a time when I really resisted the conflation of poetry and prayer because it’s sort of a ubiquitous slippage between poetry and prayer and prayer and poetry. I resisted it for the longest time, but it was only really relatively recently that—though I still don’t think all poems are prayers and all prayers are poems, and I don’t even know if people who say that know about much of either—I do sort of glimpse there’s something about that offering words and listening to the words you offer. There’s a dynamic there which suggests an analogy, perhaps, or a similarity. But I still don’t think they’re interchangeable.
FF: I have noticed that in your poetry throughout the years you use the word “pilgrim” a lot, and there seem to be themes of pilgrimage or journeying. When do you think that happened? Did your pilgrimage inspire that kind of language, or were those already lurking?
SC: The trope precedes the literal pilgrimages. And someone asked me the other day how many times I’ve been to Mount Athos, and I actually counted, I guess twenty-five times. Granted there was a frontloading there. In a span of two years I went six times to Mount Athos just because I had the research leave, and then I got a Guggenheim the next year. Then I sort of returned to all the places I’d gone to, sort of double-checked my prose, my memory. But thereafter about once a year, though not this past year because of the current travel bans or restrictions. But every year, at least once or twice I’ve gone to Mount Athos. But I think my sense of life has long been, I think, a likely figure. My understanding of what a life is, is a journey or a pilgrimage. That’s been the case for a long time. Certainly it’s what led me into Orthodoxy, capital “O” Orthodoxy. But, you know, prior to becoming Orthodox I read a good bit of the fathers, and I had a good sense of a sort of a spiritual development model rather than an arrival model and a payoff, you know, for having arrived. So that notion of incremental becoming who we’re called to become and the notion that that is in fact an endless prospect—I guess that’s been operative in my thinking for decades.
FF: So what keeps drawing you back to Mount Athos? Because if you’ve been twenty-five times…
SC: Well, because I make a little progress when I’m there, and then I come back and go back to the university, whichever one it is, and slowly, slowly lose much of what was gained, holding on to a little bit at a time. But I think it’s a matter of recovery for me. My prayer life is always enhanced by a trip to Mount Athos.
FF: So one of the difficulties that comes with any pilgrimage is the return home, as you were saying. Do you have advice for a pilgrim as they return home to their relationships and work, their usual communities?
SC: I guess one thing that I’ve learned is that I don’t have to go to Greece. I can just get really serious and intentional about the interior journey and go into my little chapel here and spend time there, pray. I do continue to return to Mount Athos, mostly because my spiritual father is there, and over the years I’ve done most of my confession annually or twice annually on Mount Athos with him, to receive that sacrament with my spiritual father, who is a priest. But the return home—it really is tough. And sometimes even just getting on the bus to go down to the port to get on the boat back to the world, you can lose two weeks of progress in an exchange with some schmuck, you know. It happens and has happened to me. I think that the lesson is to expect that you’re not completely healed by a pilgrimage, but that you get a glimpse of where you might continue, of what you might continue to approach, which is an interior solidity and an awareness of God’s presence in your heart, which requires some deliberate attention to maintain. That awareness—not God’s presence in your heart, because God’s presence maintains by God’s grace, but our cognizance of that is what wanes—requires a discipline: processes, a rule of prayer, some mechanism, some habit that we develop that will allow us to remember that and hold on to it. You know, I think I made some progress. I used to get really angry. And these days instead of getting angry, I just get embarrassed at what a mess we’re making of things. So I guess that’s progress, embarrassment over rage. It’s a start.
There’s lots of assistance to be had from the books we can get our hands on without going anywhere.
FF: You write about your first three pilgrimages, and on the third one your son came with you. And reflecting on your first communion together there, you wrote, “It is a wonderful thing to pursue the prayer of the heart, a wonderful thing to proceed along the way of a pilgrim. It is far better to proceed along that way with another.” How has that realization affected you both on future journeys to Mount Athos and in daily life?
SC: So personhood, as we all can probably attest, requires relationship. Even our theology attests to the fact that we’re made in the image of a God who we apprehend as being a relationship, a circling dance of three. And our personhood is imaged in that way, and so I think to be a human person is to be in relationship. I met some of the very ascetic monks who live in isolation, the hermits. You know, they know better than I what they need for their progress. I, however—that’s my great sin. I could probably be a hermit and cut myself off and live in my head. I think that’s been my great temptation in my life, recognizing that as not good and recognizing that I need to be more consciously and deliberately in relationship with my family immediately, but then beyond my family, because the family itself can become kind of an island, something of an idolatrous isolation.
So the great challenge in my life as a Christian has been to expand that circle intentionally. Because my inclination is to go live in a cabin someplace with a dog and call it good. But my life with my children and my life with my wife and our screwy old dogs—that’s real life. And then I still work—the whole past year or so not so much—on expanding that circle to include others at our table and in our lives. So that’s a challenge right now. I am a big fan of traveling on this way literally or in the broad sense of our journey accompanied by others, because that’s where our personhood is potentially realized. Always in potential. There’s always more. And so I think that trip with Ben—he’s gone with me at least two other, maybe three other, times since—each of those is really sweet because when we’re in the stasidia (they’re stalls), sitting or standing in one of those alone is one thing, not a bad thing. But having your son next to you for those hours in a vigil, say, is quite delicious. And hearing his voice join into the song sometimes is—it’s profoundly good.
FF: A lot of people can’t travel very much, and right now none of us can travel much. Are there daily practices that you would recommend for those who are craving pilgrimage, who maybe were thinking, “This year I’m going to Mount Athos” or wherever it was?
SC: Well, I’ll tell you, if one were to go to Mount Athos, or if a woman were to go to, say, to the Convent of the Annunciation, you would be surrounded by people who have ingested and have incrementally become witnesses of the whole patristic tradition and the spirituality that is expressed in those texts. So, instead of getting on a plane and going to Greece, you might open a book. I mean, just spend an hour in Saint Symeon the New Theologian, and you’ll get what you need. I think time with the gospels, time with Saint Isaak of Syria, my name saint—I can’t imagine that even a pilgrimage would be of much use unless you were also doing that. But in lieu of pilgrimage, you can certainly do that. You could crack one of these books, even reading the lives of the saints, though they’re sometimes kind of comic. Reading Saint Basil the Great, reading Julian of Norwich—I think there are so many wonderful saints who have left us some wonderful assistance. And I think that a pilgrimage into one of those books is every bit as efficacious as a trip to Greece. And to be honest the trip to Greece will be more efficacious if you’re also spending time with one of those books. Because then you hear what the monks are saying to you, basically they’re saying what you can find in those books. It’s an ongoing witness to the God who is. There’s lots of assistance to be had from the books we can get our hands on without going anywhere.
I can’t imagine a poet who didn’t already develop an intimate relationship with a stack of other poets.
FF: You talk about poetry in kind of a similar way. I’ve heard you say that it’s a conversation with other texts and other poets who have to come along the way. Are there any poetic companions that you suggest to writers who are maybe feeling alone these days or isolated?
SC: You know, even circumstances aside, I can’t imagine a poet who didn’t already develop an intimate relationship with a stack of other poets. I mean, we all have the people that help shape us, whose poems help shape our poetry. I happen to continue to have a conversation with those poets, about a dozen of them or so at this point. There are probably about six or eight who are always on the stack and a few dozen or so who make regular appearances and then others who come and go. But I would just say in our isolation, as Saint Isaak says, “Dive deep into yourself, and there you will find the ladder by which you might ascend.” So dive deep into yourself, dive deep into those people who have shaped you. Whether or not you do deliberately return to those texts, when you do accidently come upon a text you’ve read before, that fed you before, you notice it feeds you again. But maybe it feeds you differently. Then you realize the model there is that the conversation continues. You may have read that poem a thousand times, but you read it a thousand and one times, and on that thousand and first time, you see something else that you for some reason or the other—probably because of your experiences in the interim—but you’re now seeing different. You’re seeing those lines differently, and they’re provocative, and then you respond.
I think I wrote my first book on my own under my own steam, which is why it’s so bad. It was basically what all of us were doing then, which was having experiences and then sort of writing little anecdotal notes about them. Calling them poems. I don’t think that that’s what poems are any longer. I think poems are necessarily continuances of a conversation, and they’re our side of a conversation at that moment. So, I’d say to the poet who’s feeling isolated or the person who’s feeling isolated, just dig into those texts that shaped you and brought you here. Return to them and continue the conversation and see where they bring you next. I have my handful of people, and I haven’t been without them for many, many years, and I’d say that I can’t imagine still being a writer without them.
FF: Can I ask who some of those are for you?
SC: Coleridge is pretty much a mainstay, the prose and the verse. Auden, Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson. You know, pretty obvious people I would guess. Robert Frost is still on the stack. Isaak of Syria I read as if it were poetry. But then there are other people who come and go. Adam Zagajewski I like quite a bit. Ilya Kaminsky. Carolyn Forché is a friend, so I always pour over her stuff. I can’t forget Wallace Stevens, though, you know, I don’t think I would have liked him if I knew him. But I really love his poems, and he always lights me up. He always provokes me into saying something that I wouldn’t have known to say.
FF: So many great pilgrimages are recounted in poetic text, be they in verse or not in verse. You talked about this a little bit—but could you maybe say a bit more on the relationship between writing poetry and a journey, like the actual writing of the poems?
SC: Well, on a pilgrimage, you start walking. You have a general sense of where you want to go. But you have no idea what you’ll meet along the way, and you have to respond to what you meet along the way, at every turn. At every step. And it could well be that where you thought you’d end up that day isn’t where you end up that day. That happened to me a number of times. I imagine it’ll happen again. Whether because of flooding or impassable paths, you have to change direction. Anyway, things come up. I think that in my writing, that’s no longer just a possibility, that’s a practice. You know, to be aware at every moment of the utterance, to be alert to the language of that utterance and listen. You know, English is the best of all languages to write poetry in. Don’t tell the other people who don’t write in English, but it’s true. And one of the reasons that is, probably the reason it is, is because it’s a museum of other languages. It has all these ghosts. Virtually every substantive English word is just a treasure trove of implications. Suggestions. Echoes. And the more you know, if you know a little Latin, if you know a little Greek, you’re so loaded for bear, you can hardly write a sentence in English without going, “Ah, I hadn’t thought of that word that way!” And so as in the pilgrimage, take that side trail. Press that direction, see where it leads. You may have to circle back, probably will, but I just think that whole notion of being eyes-wide-open to every turn on the road, to every person you might engage along the way, that’s the pilgrimage.
You know that wonderful poem by Cavafy, “Ithaka”? As you make your way to Ithaka, hope for a long journey. It ends up talking about all the things you’ll see, and then the poem comes to end, and if you arrive at Ithaka, she won’t have let you down, even if there’s nothing there. If what you expected to find is maybe not there, she was the reason for your journey, for all that you acquired along the way, all that you experienced along the way. This is what these Ithakas mean. So we have these goals, we have these destinations, but the poem is all about the destination just giving you the journey. That’s the gift of the destination.
The interruptions are the journey. When I teach a poem, we’ll spend hours unpacking a single poem just because we’ll chase all the provocations, because a great poem has endless provocations. That’s what makes it a great poem. That’s really how I teach, and how I read, so it takes me forever to get through a new book of poems by someone who’s really good. But it’s because I spend all my time in the Oxford English Dictionary looking at all the hauntings of the lines. But you know, that’s the joy of the journey. The joy of reading the poem or writing the poem. Or taking the journey, the literal pilgrimage. Of being aware of what you come upon as you move, and don’t dismiss any of it. Although admittedly you know, we get tired and we want the bed or the meal at the end of the day. Sometimes we’re a little less aware of what we come upon on the way to the bed or the meal. But to the extent that we can maintain a welcoming disposition, whether in a pilgrimage or in the writing of a poem or any text, I think that we benefit. And maybe others will benefit from us having seen what we wouldn’t have, what we would have hurried past otherwise.