Mars Hill Review: In your last two books, you have... [... ] What were your intentions in doing so?
Scott Cairns: First, let me say a little something about intentions. I don't have that many. And I usually come up with them long after I've finished the work. So, for me, intentions are more like "likely stories." I think writers with actual intentions generally end up saying things they already thought they knew, and I'm not much interested in reducing my vocation as a poet to something like propagandist. I write poems to find things out, not to communicate some previously ossified conclusion....
MHR: As a teacher of creative writing, do you have any specific goals for your students?
SC: Yes. I want them to see themselves, and what they create, as part of an ongoing, vital tradition. I want them to turn away from the modernist, personal mode and its taste for ennui. I want them to find in poetry a means of consoling their losses, a way of witnessing grace, and an access to living, even now, in what we still might call the Kingdom of God. I want us all to be free of petty passions, and freed into serving enormous passions. I know that's pretty big talk, but I think poetry has the power to effect just such pleasures. I think the writer of John's gospel was onto something when he chose Logos as a metaphor for the Christ. I like also the Hebrew notion of word, davhar, a word which is also a thing, a power, an agent instigating other, subsequent words.
the rest of the interview is here.
