Poetic Pilgrim | Illumination

Poetic Pilgrim. Story by Anita Neal Harrison.

Such logic leads to the conclusion that any power words might carry comes from the ideas behind them, not from the words themselves. This view contrasts sharply with what Cairns describes as an Hebraic view of language.

According to this tradition, words don't just signify other things, they are things themselves; they not only convey power, they are powers. On the page words become "live and powerful things" -- things capable, Cairns says, "of provoking endless response, endless new production." They are generative.

After Cairns embraced this notion of words, he decided he had been reading literature all wrong. Instead of trying to see through the words to the author's meaning, he started paying close attention to the effects of the words themselves. He began, he says, to see the words "as opacities to be observed and engaged, rather than as transparencies to be moved through." And he realized that words spark more words.

Cairns explains how this works: "So you're reading a novel by Dostoyevsky, and in the middle of a passage, something about the language there provokes an idea that really may not have much to do with the story. But you notice it, even so. If you're a writer, you learn to be attentive to such events. And in my experience, very often that's when I put the book down for the day, and I start writing."

In the classroom, Cairns' strives to develop this same attentiveness in his students. "I try to teach my students to stop thinking about poetry as the result of their sitting at a window and looking out and recording what they see," he says. "The first thing they need to know is that it's not really about sharing what they already know. It's about acquiring a new kind of relationship with the books that preceded them, a conversational relationship, and it's about understanding literature not as a sort of static museum of ideas but as a dynamic and ongoing conversation between the living and the dead."

Instead of teaching his students how to express themselves, or how to put their ideas and feelings onto paper, Cairns encourages budding creative writers to trust language itself to lead them into discoveries and inspiration. He advises students to be alert to words and phrases that provoke an emotional or intellectual response, and then to explore that response by unraveling layers of meaning and chasing associations.

"A really good word is one that is haunted by other words," he explains. Cairns offers gibbous as an example. Look up the etymology of gibbous, he says, and you'll see that it's haunted by French and Latin, and you'll see a list of words derived from the same root that have gone in other directions.

"You have on one dictionary page all of these interestingly connected words that we've forgotten were connected, and that's how you start writing things you didn't already know," Cairns says. "Because this activity provokes new thought. And before the day is over, you have pages and pages of material. You may wind up throwing much of it away, but it's not a waste. It's a generative engagement of language, which is primarily what poets pursue."

Published by the Office of Research.