Tag: Scott Cairns
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#8–Saint Agnostica–2021 Best Reads
“My poetry got a lot better,” Anya Krugovoy Silver told Macon Magazine in 2010. “Nothing focuses your mind and helps you see clearly what’s important quite like cancer. It made me want to explore, even more, the beauty and divinity of the ordinary world.” The breast cancer diagnosis came in 2004 when she was in…
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The Embodied Poetics of Scott Cairns
Just as the world shut down last March, Paraclete Press released a small chapbook of new poems by Scott Cairns, A School of Embodied Poetics: New Poems. Cairns is a Heartlands favorite and we’ve checked in on several of his earlier collections, most recently the luminous Anaphora. He invites settled and repeated reading, something that…
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Aging Well with Scott Cairns
Scott Cairns is still carrying on his affair with Erato, the Greek muse he addresses throughout his poetry. “I wanted very much/ to find a word to grant us both assurance” he says in the poem “Erato at 64.” At such an age, lovers and poets know that the beloved is as much within them…
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Recovering the Body: Another Visit with Scott Cairns
A brief word of thanks for an old collection of poems by Scott Cairns. Twenty years has passed since the first publication of Recovered Body, a small collection of Cairns’ poetry. It doesn’t have the warmth of some of his later work, (despite the passionate interludes with Erato, the muse), but it is fun to…
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Burning from Beginning to End with Scott Cairns
It’s all here. Beginnings and endings. Heaven and hell. Divine intentions and bodily appetites. That’s what you get with the poet Scott Cairns. Look for the kitchen sink. I’m sure it’s in there, too. Recently I came back for a season to Philokalia: New & Selected Poems, Cairns’ 2002 collection. It’s as rich and evocative…
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Sitting Beneath the Michigan Tree: Back at the Festival of Faith & Writing
Kwame Alexander, Newberry Award-winning author of The Crossover, looked out across the sea of 2,000 introverts and defied every tenet of writerly reserve. “Say ‘yes,’” he said. Say ‘yes’ to the opportunity, the challenge, even to the indignities of selling your work. There is power in your words. Kwame has a bus now with a…
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Squinting Through This Latent, Bleak Obscurity with Scott Cairns
“Just now, we squint to see the Image through this latent, bleak obscurity. One day, we’ll see the Image— as Himself—gleaming from each face. Just now, I puzzle through a range of incoherencies; but on that day, the scattered fragments will cohere.” If you don’t recognize 1 Corinthians 13 in this translation, perhaps that good. …
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Beloved Numbskulls – Athanasius on Saving Face
‘Here, belovéd numbskulls, is a little picture: You gather, one presumes, what must be done when a portrait on a panel becomes obscured—maybe even lost—to external stain. The artist does not discard the panel, though the subject must return to sit for it again, whereupon the likeness is etched once more upon the same material. …
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Shhh! Do You Taste This in Prayer?
I understand the desire to lift up our neighbors in their difficulties in prayer. In fact, it’s what we’re told to do. Paul tells the Philippian church to do just this at the close of his letter: ”Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be…
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