MIZZOU NEWS

MU Professor Wins Guggenheim Fellowship

By Katherine Harben

As Scott Cairns sips his coffee on a spring afternoon he is a poet without pen and paper, putting into words the way he feels about God. The prayer rope wound around his left wrist is there to train him to be constantly aware of God’s presence, he says, a way to keep the divine in the daily discussion. It is an age-old conversation between language and faith, a narrative that Cairns negotiates through his writing.

“I'm seeking to articulate a faith that isn't eclipsed by a meager expression of that faith,” Cairns said.

But it is not a private dialogue between a man and his god. In addition to teaching at MU since the fall of 1999, Cairns has published six volumes of poetry and written a prose memoir, “Short Trip to the Edge: A Pilgrimage to Where Earth Meets Heaven,” to be released in February 2007 by HarperSanFrancisco. His work has been included in publications such as the The New Republic and The Paris Review.

That work has also recently earned Cairns a Guggenheim Fellowship. The prestigious award is given to recognize a recipient’s exceptional achievements and promise. The accompanying cash prize — which fluctuates based on need but in 2005 averaged at $38,236 — is intended to allow winners to further develop their talents, abilities and interests with as little constraint as possible.

Cairns is one of three current faculty members in the creative writing program at MU to win a Guggenheim. He was one among 187 artists, scholars and scientists in the U.S. and Canadian competition to receive the distinguished fellowships in 2006. Almost 3,000 applied.

“The competition for Guggenheims is keen in the extreme,” said Richard Schwartz, dean of MU's College of Arts and Science. “The daunting ratio between applicants and recipients actually understates the reality, since this is the most coveted of awards and individuals propose their strongest possible research/creative endeavors for the competition, knowing all others are doing the same.”

Cairns will use the award money to make several trips to the Holy Mountain, or Mount Athos, an Orthodox monastic community in Greece he has traveled to three times before. It is the same place he acquired his prayer rope. Cairns said his first three visits were integral to starting and finishing his coming prose memoir.

Life on Mount Athos, like life at many secluded monasteries, is not for the casual observer, but for the individual looking to experience what Cairns calls the contemplative life. Although some do get permission to visit or hike the peninsula, which is known for its great beauty, most who go do so to experience the all-consuming faith and devotion that marks the life of a monk.

When Cairns returns there, he will travel between some of the 20 monasteries and other monastic establishments on the peninsula, visiting with the monks who have become friends. His family will accompany him for his first trip back to Greece during the summer, but his wife, Marcia Vanderlip, who is a staff writer for the Columbia Daily Tribune, along with his daughter will not go on to Mount Athos because women are not allowed on the monastic republic.

He will wake each day at about 2 a.m. and attend service for about four hours. He will then have the main vegetarian meal of the day and one at which Cairns said he learned to appreciate wine with breakfast. Next he will move to the next monastery or engage in the work that needs to be completed with the monks, such as washing dishes, digging irrigation ditches or cooking. At 3 or 4 in the afternoon, he will attend vespers, or evening service, until 6 or 7 p.m., after which a light dinner will be served. It is then time to venerate the many relics at the monasteries and turn in early because the next day will begin again at 2 a.m.

In the midst of it all, the author hopes to begin penning a new volume of poems. He sees his writing as his way of understanding God’s presence in everything and everyone.

And for his peers, it is that ability Cairns has to sense the divine and convey it that makes him such an important American poet.

“I am struck by the almost prophetic voice of Scott Cairns,” said Paul Mariani, who holds a chair in English at Boston College. “He is someone for whom God is a real presence. There’s not a poem of his that has not been a revelation of some kind for me.”

Mariani, who is also a poet, met Cairns at an Image Conference in Colorado six years ago, an event that connects writing, art and spirituality. He also wrote one of the recommendation letters for Cairns for the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded.

Much of Cairns' work is religious in tone or inspiration, owing to the fact that he is a former Baptist and Presbyterian who converted to Orthodox Christianity. However, his poems are anything but safe. His work blends the religious and sensual with humor and fierceness in what he describes as his desire to glimpse God in creation and other people. Instead of asserting that body and sin are synonymous and that only in rejection of the body can one find salvation, Cairns believes that the spiritual needs to be reinstated in the body so that one may become holy again. He said when God became flesh as Christ, flesh was infused with divine potential. He said the belief that with the incarnation of Christ all matter — human beings included — was redeemed and sanctified is the major distinction between Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity.

“The idea is not to transcend the body but to infuse the body with spirit,” Cairns said. “Human is a fleshy thing. We can’t escape our bodies and desire. Giving into shame, we can’t even be honest with our brothers and sisters about what is hurting us, and so can’t heal.”

Cairns, who is 51, has been “God-obsessive” since he was a kid. He converted to orthodoxy about 10 years ago when he began digging into more ancient faiths in order, he said, to finally learn how to pray. He found in orthodoxy a satisfying sense of Scripture and language. He has since helped found St. Luke the Evangelist Orthodox Church in Columbia, which began in a small house on East Broadway but now includes a parish of about 150 regular members in a larger building on Audubon Drive. The congregation swells to 300 or 400 members during holiday services such as the coming Easter service, which takes place this Sunday, a week later than Western calendar Easter services. The church has members from a world of backgrounds, including Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian to name only a few.

Cairns said that as an orthodox, he has a sacramental view of the whole world as holy — and holy to him means the possibility to become absolutely connected to God and every other person. He believes every person has this potential.

As a teacher and mentor, Cairns has gained the respect and friendship of his students through his work and the discipline and humility he applies to his life.

“He is always on the side of the stranger, and every student begins as a stranger,” said Jeffrey Pethybridge, a doctoral student in poetry at MU. He came to the school in large part because of Cairns, whom he has known for 10 years since studying his undergraduate degree with him at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. “He is what people mean when they say mentor.”

In the fall, Cairns will succeed retiring faculty member and fellow Guggenheim winner Sherod Santos as director of both the creative writing program and the Center for the Literary Arts, an organization that seeks to connect campus departments, community organizations and students who have an interest in writing. Between those new duties and his time at Mount Athos, he will not teach again until a year from now.

Although Cairns' writing engages a variety of subjects besides religion, such as his family, many of his poems look at religious texts and ideas and attempt to interrogate the language and imagery used within them. He tries to engage what he calls the haunted nature of language, and press it for revelation. In essence, Cairns wants to get at the hidden meanings and connotations implied by words and break them open, expose their secret meanings. This includes looking at where words come from and where they are going.

“If you spend time with poetry you get to see language operating, the more time you spend the more attuned to it you are,” Cairns said. “Words are loaded; you become alert to those eruptions and disruptions.”

He writes to articulate those things for himself but is delighted if others can share in the experience, and said one does not have to be orthodox to be aware of the divine.

“You can say where the church is, but not where it isn't,” Cairns said, quoting the Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware. “One can never know such a thing; there is no such thing as outside the pale.”

Replies to the Immediate

No, he mumbled from the podium, the poems
are not my songs. A breeze
troubled the papers in his hands, and a shift
in the air also sent
a wave across those seated, tossing their hair,
their broad lapels, their scarves.
The programs in their hands also whispered. Nor,
the man continued, nor
are they my prayers. At that word, the air grew still,
and across his face passed both
a tremor and a calm. Song, he said, attains
to a condition the poem
dare not attend. And prayer? Who would frame a poem
when he had better find
his knees, in silence, having put his art away?

— Scott Cairns

Archives | Comments | Home

SUBSCRIPTIONS
Subscribe | Change Your Address | Unsubscribe

Copyright © 2007 — Curators of the University of Missouri
DMCA and other copyright information.
All rights reserved. An equal opportunity/ADA institution.
Published by the Mizzou Alumni Association
Questions? Comments? E-mail comments@mizzoualumni.org

Last Update: November 15, 2007