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What Does It Mean to Be a “Religious” Poet?

By Brian VolckNovember 22, 2019

What does it mean to be labeled a “religious poet” in the twenty-first century? The term’s undoubtedly fraught, but “fraught” is perhaps the best word to describe the current relationship between religion and pretty much everything. Small wonder, though, if one accepts the argument of scholars such as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Talal Asad, and Brent…

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Poetry Friday: “Articulation”

By Scott CairnsMay 24, 2019

It’s a truism that the writer’s material is words. We rely on our words to do their work: to “mean” something. But in his poem “Articulation,” Scott Cairns questions this reliance. The poem’s speaker says that his only “certainty,” paradoxically, is that his language “falls / ever short.” What he has “come to trust” is…

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Poetry Friday: “Speculation: Along the Way”

By Scott CairnsNovember 3, 2017

Did you ever try finding words for the experience of prayer? Or for the sense of mysterious contact with the divine? That’s what Scott Cairns is attempting in “Speculation: Along the Way.” He tries out a metaphor of a distant thunderstorm — which might however be within. “Might” is in fact a key word in…

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Always Becoming

By Scott CairnsApril 19, 2017

The following is adapted from an address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing commencement ceremony last month. For centuries, wise men and women of various traditions have troubled the terms being and becoming, without arriving at anything like conclusion. We affirm the beauty and joy of being—being writers, being Christians, being…

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A Conversation with Scott Cairns

By Mary Kenagy MitchellOctober 13, 2016

This post originally appeared as web-exclusive content in Image issue 68. Scott Cairns, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as do something. Mary Kenagy Mitchell interviewed Scott Cairns…

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Poems are People Too

By Dyana HerronFebruary 24, 2010

Last weekend I found myself having breakfast at the Sorrento Hotel in Seattle with Kathleen Norris and Scott Cairns. That Kathleen Norris was there was no surprise to me—she was in town to give a reading at Seattle University, and Greg Wolfe and I had met her to talk about Image’s Oahu Seminar. Scott Cairns…

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