Poetic Pilgrim | Illumination

Poetic Pilgrim. Story by Anita Neal Harrison.

Jonathan Holden, professor of English and poet-in-residence at Kansas State University, says that Cairns has been successful because he explores his faith without forcing his readers to arrive at his conclusions.

"It's his vision," says Holden, who has served as Kansas' poet laureate. "His vision of humanity is a very kindly vision. He's for us. It's a moral vision but not moralistic. That's the trick: How to be a moral person but not too preachy. That's the delicate balance Scott Cairns keeps, and he does it beautifully."

Richard Howard, poetry editor for the Western Humanities Review and a professor at Columbia University's School of the Arts, also sees these elements as keys to Cairns' success.

"He's been able to combine an ironic, jocular and very contemporary idiom with interests, passions and convictions that are terribly serious and deep," Howard says. "It keeps the work from being stuffy and rhetorical, and it keeps the tone down, as it were. His poetry is remarkably funny and even goofy sometimes. It's a remarkable way to keep the batter from rising too fast or too high. Because of the jokiness, the seriousness comes through a more splendid expression, as if it were won against a certain effort or obstacle."

Sarah Barber, an MU doctoral student, puts it another way. "Scott's poems are both serious and they're not serious," she says. "They're serious without taking themselves too seriously. It's always nice to study with someone like that, especially because so many poets do take themselves so desperately seriously."

Cairns did not always know he wanted to be a poet. As a freshman at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., he thought he would like to be either a veterinarian or a lawyer. But English classes turned out to be unexpectedly easy for him. Growing up Baptist in Tacoma, Wash., he had spent much of his childhood studying the Bible, both at home and at church. As a result, he picked up on scriptural references that most undergrads never saw coming. He looked at his effort and his grades and decided English would be a good major.

After earning his bachelor of arts, he went to Hollins College (now university) in Virginia to earn his Master of Arts degree, then to Bowling Green State University in Ohio for a master of fine arts. At the University of Utah, where he earned his doctorate, Cairns studied with poets Mark Strand and Larry Levis. It was at Utah that Cairns recalls developing an understanding of words that transformed the way he read, wrote and even worshipped.

Until that time, he had, like most Western speakers and readers, viewed words in the Hellenic, or Neoplatonic tradition. According to this view, as Cairns explains it in his essay, "Elemental Confusion: Towards a Sacramental Poetics," the written word is always a sorry substitute for the spoken word; the spoken word is a poor stand-in for thought; and thought can't measure up to an "objective reality to which we have no real access, save through [a] tortured ontology of diminishing returns, or by some act of transcendence."

Published by the Office of Research.