We recently spoke with author Scott Cairns about his new Slant book, Against Certainty.

You titled your collection Against Certainty. Why this title?

During much of the writing and most of the manuscript arrangement, I had thought to call the book Makarios, which is a reference to the beautiful, opening words of many Psalms in the Greek Septuagint, Μακάριος ανήρ, words that are most often translated as “blessed is the man.” Most people with whom I shared that title asked, “So, who’s this guy Makarios?” So, I decided that maybe I should find something more immediately recognizable and helpful.

For a while, then, I thought to call the book Chemo with Coleridge, which would have been clear enough, but perhaps an unduly somber gesture, and too narrowly focused on but one thematic thread.

Greg Wolfe, Slant’s publisher and editor, is the one who suggested Against Certainty, the title of one of the included poems. In his estimation, the gesture identified the gist of most poems in the book, and most of my written works over many years; he was right, of course. After all, my first book—published in 1985—was The Theology of Doubt. I guess I have for many years both resisted and attempted to recover from much of the cataphatic nonsense that permeated my religious experience prior to my beginning my journey to the apophatic East, so Against Certainty seemed a very likely way to go.

In addition to the question of certainty, in this collection you’re wrestling with a lot of problems related to faith—you have a poem titled “The Efficacy of Prayer,” where you express that sometimes it feels like prayer goes unanswered, at least in any obvious way. At the risk of posing too broad a question to ever be answered, how does your poetry relate to your faith life?

I’d say that a good many poems in this book and previous books wrestle with prayer. I wouldn’t characterize my disposition as suggesting that prayer ever goes unanswered, but I would say that prayer as petition has come to seem a waste of time, and perhaps a waste of prayer. If prayer does anything, I’d say it offers brief moments of communion.

Among the several perplexities that trouble my faith is my ongoing puzzlement about why we’re invited to make our desires known to God. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine that the God needs me to make anything known to him; for another, I’ve yet to see much that is manifestly altered by such sharing.

I suppose that my poetry has become my way to wrestle with that invisible and mostly unknowable God.

Your poetry is deeply entwined with the Greek Orthodox faith, and with the language of Greek. What is the influence of Greek culture on your work?

Well, it’s fairly complicated. Oddly enough, I would say that my approach to language is more deeply entwined with Jewish approaches to words, rabbinic approaches to scripture—pressing language for glimpses of truth, that actual reality to which we, necessarily, have sorely limited access. My move toward the Eastern Church—the Greek Church, specifically—is largely due to my realizing in my early forties that Greek Orthodoxy is the most Jewish of Christian expressions. Patristic texts are very nearly Talmudic in their honest grappling with mystery, and the ones that speak to me most convincingly are those that also proceed with a recognizably midrashic humility.

As for the influence of Greek language and culture on my work, I would say that my slow acquisition of Greek has profoundly enhanced my apprehension of English words, my ability to see and savor the Greek words haunting my English words. I am in love with the vertiginous effects that rich and suggestive ambiguity avails in a poetic text.

Also, I love Greece, and I love Greeks. After thirty-some visits to that endlessly amazing land, I have come to the conclusion that my heart is a Greek heart—a fiercely loving heart that beats with a bass note of joy.

Scenes of travel appear throughout the collection—“Venetian Vespers,” “Xarmolypi,” “Saint Simon’s Cave.” What is the role of travel in the life of a poet?

As folks like to say, “life is a journey”; I guess I would add the corollary, that “journey is life.” I’m not the first writer to notice the benefits of getting out and about, nor the first to register the eye-opening delight discovered in waking up in another place among other people. I dare say that my disposition against certainty has been assisted by my travel. One of Mark Twain’s most compelling observations on the matter asserts “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” I suspect that, for Americans, this is probably truer now than ever.

In addition to your own poetic career, you have also mentored and taught other poets along the way, at universities across the United States. As you publish your twelfth collection of poetry, and your fifteenth book, what do you think are the most important lessons for a beginning poet to learn? What do you know now about poetry that you didn’t know at the outset?

I wish I had known a little earlier that poetry was not an expressive art, per se. I didn’t suffer that common misunderstanding for too great a time; thanks to some very gracious mentors—Annie Dillard, Richard Dillard, Mark Strand, and Richard Howard, to name the most helpful—I believe that I managed to shed the error sometime during the composition of my first book—given that some of the poems in that book are actual poems but many are just verse anecdotes. I’m hoping that the poems in the books thereafter do more than refer to events or ideas that preceded the poems’ being written.

My own writing—as well as my pedagogy—began to be shaped by a relatively late understanding that true poeticcomposition had to be a matter of discovery, a way of coming to terms, if provisional terms, with what it is one desires to see, desires to say. Related to that understanding of the practice is an understanding that all of poetry—all of literature, frankly—is dialogic, responsive. My poems are my contributions to what is best apprehended as a longstanding and ongoing conversation.

The book is divided into three parts: “A Late Ambivalence,” “Aphorisms at the Edge,” and “Xarmolypi.” How did you choose the poems’ arrangement? Is there a plot arc, so to speak, as the reader moves through the collection?

Yes, as with all of my books, there is an arc—something of a beginning puzzlement, a grappling, and a provisional arrival at some manner of resolution. That said, it would be pretty wrongminded of me to intrude upon the imagined reader’s reading of the poems to assert much more than that.

I’m hoping that the section titles offer enough of a map of the arc’s development to serve the reader’s making somethingof the matter at hand. I want my readers to be as involved in the making of these poems’ meanings as I believe that I am involved in the meaning that I make with all the books that I read.

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