Scott Cairns has been around. Born in Washington, Cairns studied in Virginia and Utah and taught in Ohio, Texas and now Missouri; and while he grew up Baptist, he turned to Presbyterianism and the Episcopal church before joining the Greek Orthodox. His work shows a mind sensitive to life’s manifold sufferings and joys.

In 2009, I described Cairns as taking on the role of a “slow pilgrim” in his poems. He is “slow to hear, slow to believe,”  a “‘slow learner’ who, like a tortoise that cannot be paper trained, either admits his own slowness “utterly / ashamed” or dismisses it with “an honest shrug”:

Elsewhere, he is a doubting Thomas. Echoing Emily Dickinson’s remark that “’Faith’ is a fine invention / For Gentlemen who see! / But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency,” Cairns writes: “I remember hearing that soft-soap / about faith being given / only to the faithful–mean trick, / if you believe it.” For Cairns, “fickleness / of belief is unavoidable.” This is both a fact and an indictment of our sinful nature.

Unlike Dickinson, however, Cairns’ response to this “fickleness / of belief” is not to propose a microscopic examination of the universe. Instead, he proposes a meditative repetition of, and reflection on, the words of Christ. For him, this produces a slowness of another kind–one that is not stubborn or dull but characterized by meticulous care. It is a slowness that allows him to see God, who, he recognizes, has been with him all along despite his doubts. As he writes good-naturedly in one of his later poems, “As We See,” which is clearly a response to his former self and to Dickinson:

Suppose the Holy One Whose Face We Seek
is not so much invisible as we
are ill-equipped to apprehend His grave
proximity. Suppose our fixed attention
serves mostly to make evident the gap
dividing what is seen and what is here.

For Cairns, too much time in the laboratory has left us blurry-eyed and ironically “ill-equipped” to “apprehend” God’s presence. In the end, the sort of scrutiny that Dickinson proposes becomes, according to Cairns, a form of looking away from God rather than looking to Him, “mindful” and “still.”

An example of this looking to God is found in one of Cairns’ best poems, “The Holy Ghost.” In the poem, Cairns describes an experience he had while out rowing in the Chesapeake: “There were so many distractions along that narrow bay, / so many nearly invisible coves you would not find unless your boat was slow enough to let you trace the seam.”

My fortune was the little coracle I had occasion
to row across the inlet. In retrospect, the chore
appears habitual, as if whole seasons had been measured
by my pulling against my grip on the chirping oars,
watching my wake’s dissolution, its twin arms opening
to a retreating shore. And, true enough, I may have crossed
that rolling gulf many times each day in fair weather. Still,
I suspect this part I remember best happened once:

I am rowing steadily enough, davening across
that bay and reaching the choppy center where I pause,
ostensibly to rest. But the breeze also stops, and a calm
settles upon those waters so suddenly I worry

for my breath, and can hardly take it in. And I am struck
by a fear so complete it seems a pleasure,
and I know if I were to look about—though I know better
than to try—I would find the circle of shoreline gone

For Cairns, his “habitual” rowing over the same waters day in and day out is akin to the believer’s habitual, meditative return to the “living water” of Christ. Most often, nothing happens. Every once in a while, however, or, perhaps, once in a lifetime, everything is trans-formed, and we feel that we are in the very presence of God Almighty. We become, like Cairns does here, Peter stepping out on the water to meet Jesus, or the woman at the well returning day after day to the same stinking well only to find Christ Himself, waiting there with the provocative offer of water without end. In both cases, the encounter with Christ, however brief or problematic, comes to pass only after Peter and the woman step out to meet Christ. Thus, refusing an absolute fissure between the material and spiritual worlds, Cairns suggests that faith is as much action as it is belief.

Such moments are, of course, rare, and Cairns ends “The Holy Ghost” with the frank admission that his experience of God’s presence was all too brief:

Well, it didn’t last. A little air got in, and I sucked it up,
and the boat lifted, almost rocking, across a passing swell.
The shoreline was called back to its place, its familiar shape,
and there were people on it, and I think a couple of dogs.

However, as Cairns writes in “Setting Out,” “even the slowest pil-grim might / articulate a turn. Given time enough, // the slowest pilgrim–even he–might / register some small measure of belated // progress” (130). In other words, no one ever said that following Christ would be easy. No one ever said that it would be painless. We are simply asked to “come,” follow Christ, and open ourselves to His transformative power.

I think this is still an accurate characterization of his work, but Cairns is also more than a fellow pilgrim; he is a prophet of sorts–not foretelling the future, of course, but speaking the truth of God’s sovereignty and grace to us backsliding followers. In “Bad Theology: A Quiz,” for example, Cairns begins with a few historically difficult propositions regarding God:

Whenever we aver “the God is nigh,”
do we imply that He is ever otherwise?

When, in scripture, God’s “anger” is said
to be aroused, just how do you take that?

He moves from these more academic questions to ones a bit closer to home. The poem, in this sense, shows us how we too often hide a selfish and unloving heart with “good” theology, which, as the title of the poem coyly announces, is indeed bad theology:

If another sins, what is that to you?
When the sinful suffer publicly, do you

find secret comfort in their grief, or will
you also weep? they are surely grieving;

are you weeping now? Assuming sin is sin,
whose do you condemn? Who is judge? Who

will feed the lambs? The sheep? Who, the goats?
Who will sell and give? Who will be denied?

Whose image haunts the mirror? And why
are you still here? What exactly do you hope

to become? When will you begin?

Hard questions, but ones Cairns rightly asks us to take to heart.

Resources:

Books of Poetry:

Compass of Affection: New and Selected Poems (2006)
Recovered Body (2006)
Philokalia (2002)
Figures for the Ghost (1994)
The Translation of Babel (1990)
 Theology of Doubt (1985)

Prose:

The End of Suffering (2009)
Short Trip to the Edge (2007)

Interviews:

Interview with Image
Interview with Chimes Online

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters on God, translated for the first time in English. Rilke was a gifted poet who rejected the Catholicism of his youth partly because of the empty formalism of his mother. (It seems she would take the young Rilke on pilgrimages, to shrines, and other places to improve the family’s standing in the eyes of others.) “I shudder,” Rilke once wrote, “at her absent-minded piety, her obstinate faith, at all those caricatures and distortions she has clung to, herself as empty as a dress, like a phantom, terrible.”

Instead of rejecting God entirely, however, Rilke did what we too often tend to do–he remade Christ in his own image. Christ was divine, but so are we all, according to Rilke. His death did not propitiate our sins; rather, it was simply the result of a life fully lived:

I cannot believe that the cross was meant to remain; rather, it was to mark the crossroads. It certainly was not meant to be something to brand us everywhere. It should have dissolved in him. Is it not something like this: he wanted to simply create a taller tree on which we could more easily mature?

And:

When I say the word “God,” I do so with great conviction and not by rote. It seems to me that people use this word without thought, even if doing so from deep pensiveness. It may be well and good if this Christ should have helped us say the word in a firmer, fuller, more convinced tone of voice; but let us put a stop to involving him all the time.

Christ was an original mind who followed his intuition (or his own “divinity” or “spirit”), not the directives of others. Thus, like Emerson, Rilke transforms Christ into a mere example. He is someone who rejected the small-minded morality of others in favor of what Rilke would call life or beauty. This, of course, allowed Rilke to do the same (especially regarding sexual morals) and, ironically enough, feel all the more spiritual for doing so.

In the end, Rilke’s artistic mysticism is just as self-centered as his mother’s formalism. He empties Christ’s death of its specific significance and uses the words and figures of Christianity, like his mother used its forms, to live more fully not for God but for himself.

Like Denis Johnson, Franz Wright is one of those literary figures who should have been found dead from a drug overdose in some motel room in California years ago. Wright’s father, the poet James Wright, left the family when Wright was eight. His mother remarried, and by Wright’s own account, her second husband was an abusive man, both towards Wright and his brother Marshall and their mother. Wright decided early on that he wanted to be a poet. He studied at Oberlin College, where he began taking drugs, and published his first book of poems at 21. After college, he made ends meet with odd jobs and his writing and translations, while continuing to struggle with drugs and, like his father, alcohol. Wright married briefly, continued to write, drink and take drugs. He suffered a number of mental breakdowns over the years and was hospitalized on five different occasions, his last at McClean Hospital in Belmont. In 1998, however, he met Elizabeth Oehlkers, married, and converted to Catholicism.

In an interview for Christianity and Literature, Wright speaks of his conversion like this:

You know, there was a time when I thought of Catholic churches as excellent places to drink. I liked to go in and sit, they’d be empty. That was when the doors were open. They keep them locked now. […] What happened was wherever I lived, wherever I happened to be; and I lived all over the place. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve found myself wandering into Catholic churches and sitting in the back and feeling really safe and happy for a while. You know, not always drinking. And I couldn’t participate. One of the things that is so poignant about the Eucharist celebration is that it represents human beings sitting down at a table and eating together and being a family. It’s not something that I experienced a lot of. I think that might have drawn me to it. It felt like a place of unqualified love and I hadn’t had that.

It’s this sense of unqualified love that Wright attempts to express in his work following his conversion. In “One Heart,” for example, which first appeared in Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2004), Wright’s strongest work to date, he writes:

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of the

sane; thank You for letting me know what this is
like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening
blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without
terror, and your loveless psychotic and hopelessly
lost
     with this love

A central characteristic of the poet’s early work is the tension between confession and construction. The clear narrative flow of his poems is often coupled with a constrained word choice, enjambment and large spaces between lines or stanzas, sudden shifts in diction, and absurd or pathetic imagery. Earlier in his career, and similar to other “confessional” poets, Wright viewed the poet as a “surgeon” who must cut up his life to save it, even if this self-salvation is at best uncertain.

This potential but temporal or partial salvation for Wright consists of restoring the invigoration we feel in the presence of something beautiful and of healing our alienation from the world and others with the communal act of art. Drawing from René Char’s practice of “enlèvement-embellissement” [“removing-beautifying”] and Rilke’s notion of the poet as a sort of Christ-figure, Wright would remove words, add spaces, shift diction, surprise with absurd or pathetic images or metaphors to build something beautiful out of his suffering—creating poems that have, as he puts it, a “mysterious commonplace.”

Yet, while many of these early poems are indeed beautiful, what is interesting is that during this period the poet continually remarks on his failure to accomplish what is needed. In “Initial,” for example, the poet longs for a concrete and vibrant existence:

To be able to say it: rose, oak, the stars.
And not to be blind!
Just to be here
for one day, only
to breathe and know when you lie down
you will keep on breathing;
to cast a reflection–,
oh, to have hands
even if they are a little damaged,
even if the fingers
leave no prints.

Yet, language is unable to provide him with this being. As he confesses in “Heaven,” “they are only words.” And while the poet is “tempted” by the language of the Lord’s Prayer and the beauty of churches, he decides that “no symbol is going to help us” because “There are no symbols / with the efficacy we require”—a view he later revises.

In his later poems, Wright discovers that the power of poetry’s redemptive potential is in its reflection of Christ’s redemption, not the poet’s self, as it was for Rilke. In “Thanks Prayer at the Cove,” for example, Wright writes:

A year ago today
I was unable to speak
one syntactically coherent
thought let alone write it down: today
in this dear and absurdly allegorical place
by your grace
I am here

In fact, for Wright, both beauty and metaphor are a testament of God’s existence. Poetry is no longer a means of salvation in Wright’s work but a testament of, and an apology for, our salvation in Christ.  In “Year One,” he writes:

   I was still standing
on a northern corner

   Moonlit winter clouds the color of the desperation of
wolves.

   Proof
of Your existence? There is nothing
but.

After Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Wright returned to the idea of silence in his work. In his earlier poems silence is death and a reminder of the meaninglessness of life. In God’s Silence (2006), however, it is a metaphor for peace and for God’s inscrutable nature. The recurrent phrase, “I have heard the silence of God,” from which the book gets its title, expresses the act of meditating on those element of God we cannot represent in language.

Yet, there is also a certain mysticism in Wright’s treatment of the topic of silence that unfortunately tends to dilute the power of the specific revealed nature of God and Christ in the Old and New Testaments. Because of this, God’s Silence lacks the power of Walking To Martha’s Vineyard.

Resources:

Books of poetry by Franz Wright:

Earlier Poems (2007). This volume contains the first four books of poems.
The Beforelife (2001)
Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2004)
God’s Silence (2006)
Wheeling Motel (2009)
Kindertotenwald (2011)

Essay:

“Language as a Sacrament in the New Testament,” Image Journal 57 (2008)

Interview:

With Ernest Hilbert, Contemporary Poetry Review (2006)

Reviews:

“A Writer Carries on His Father’s Legacy of Poetry and Pain,” New York Times (2004)
“Supper with the Infinite,” Books & Culture (2007)
“The Wright Stuff,” America Magazine (2010)

Over at Books & Culture, I have a piece on the late poet Reginald Shepherd, a gay African-American poet from the Bronx who was interested in what he called the “myth” of Christianity throughout his life. At the end, right before he died, his partner tells us he converted. The nature of that conversion is between Shepherd and God. Yet, as I note in the review, in his final poem “the cold power of mythology’s gods is contrasted with the humble power of grace”:

Here we have a God who descends to man, becoming a weak, suckling child, in order to save. This God is indeed different from the cruel, misanthropic Greco-Roman gods of pure force. In this final poem, Shepherd captures the essence of what makes the “star” of Christianity unlike the mythical “stars” of the Greco-Romans. And it is something that both attracts and repels Shepherd. It is “a pearl, an irritant.”

Whatever his final state with respect to God, Shepherd clearly understood the radical difference of the gospel, and it is this difference that made the gospel both so appealing and so repelling to him. I wonder if this is why Christ in Revelation expresses such loathing towards those that are “lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold.” Those who either love or hate the gospel have at least understood it is something different, something otherworldly. However, those that express either a tepid acceptance of Christ (such as in “cultural Christianity”) or a tepid rejection of Him (in what we could call “cultural agnosticism,” which often holds that Christ was good but not God) steadfastly refuse to acknowledge even this.

I was going to begin this series with Amit Majmudar, who writes from outside the Christian tradition but whose work, to borrow Flannery O’Connor’s phrase, is “Christ-haunted.” Instead I’ve decided to begin with the Catholic poet William Baer. I may get back to Majmudar (and other writers whose faith commitments are a bit nebulous) in a twenty-first post.

Born in 1948, William Baer studied at Rutgers and New York University before completing a Ph.D. at the University of South Carolina under the poet James Dickey. He was the inaugural editor of The Formalist (1990-2004) and is the author of five volumes of poems, a number of works of film criticism, various collections of interviews with other poets and several plays. He lives in Evansville with his wife and two children and is currently the Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair at the University of Evansville.

His first book of poems, The Unfortunates (1997), won the T.S Eliot Prize in Poetry. In this volume, Baer eschews the fragmented lyric, which was coming into its own at the time (and is still too popular, as Marjorie Perloff rightly complains). Instead he offers tragic portraits in straightforward narrative of the broken lives of “everyday” individuals, from a local prosecutor who no longer believes in justice and a young man tempted by cults to a woman dying in a hospital and an unhappy librarian.

In “Breaking and Entering,” for example, a common criminal reflects on the idea of home in the middle of a burglary:

When he was done, he sat in their living room:
as always, he’d made certain they’d be away,
and checked for dogs, alarms, and nosy neighbors,
then glass-cut through a window in the back—
ready with the knife he’d never used
(but would)—and quickly packed her gold and stones,
their small antiques, and the “knock-out” Tiffany lamp—
which these dull bastards certainly didn’t deserve.

But he liked their quiet house, just as he’d liked
his parents’ best when they were sound asleep,
no nagging, fighting, or banging him about.
Some “sneaks” enjoy the breaking in—“like sex”
they say—while others crave the risks, or just the goods,
but he liked sitting in their living rooms,
until, at last, he’d slit their couches open, and leave.
Too bad. He liked it here; it felt like home.

Baer offers no hope of redemption in these poems as if to force us to come to terms with the deeply-rooted problem of human brokenness–something we Americans, with our self-help books and day-time talk shows, want solved before the next chapter or commercial. At the same time, small paradoxes, like the criminal breaking into a home in order to “steal” a sense of home–a sense, ironically enough, that is marked by the absence (or silence) of others–show us that to make peace with our brokenness is to be a divided or irrational self.

In other volumes, Baer addresses redemption head on. Psalter (2011), for example, is a wonderful book of devotional poems on selected books and characters from the Old and New Testaments. In “Genesis,” the opening poem of the volume, Baer retells God’s miraculous creation of “a corporeal universe”:

with stars, and with a whirling spot of blue,
with countless creatures of the day and the night,
in which there was, beneath the skies above,
a creature, in God’s image, yet not alone,
a male, a female, with understanding and love,
with a deathless soul, with free will of its own.

Man-made creation, on the other hand, which attempts to replace rather than imitate God’s original creative act and divine order ends in chaos. “What becomes of a scheming innovator,” Baer writes,

who falsely sacrifices before our feasts,
who countermands the will of his creator
and claims that all are holy, and all are priests?

The answer: “The earth will open, and those who still rebel / will tumble into the flaming pits of hell.”

Yet, there are those who do not “still rebel.” In “Adam,” for example, after the father recognizes the full force of his rebellion against God, he does not despair, but rather turns to God in faith:

He’d seen this thing before, of course, but never like this.
After Eden, he’d found a swan lying motionless and silent,
forever rotting, irretrievable, and gone.
But now, it’s his boy, the brother of Cain, the shepherd son,
the kind and faithful friend of He-Who-Is,
lying quiet and slain: finished, futureless, at the end of his end.
Once, Adam had named the names, and named his own two sons,
and named this curse, which mullifies and terminates, as: “death.”
But he who’d known the awesome power of God looked to the skies,
knowing, without a doubt, though nothing was said,
his God both could and would undo the dead.

This poem’s simple diction can hide a nuanced contrast. Adam had indeed “named the names” and “his own two sons.” In this, he imitated God. Naming is a creative act–one that in human usage identifies being (whereas with God it creates being). Adam’s silence in the creation story at the Tree of Good and Evil, however, and his subsequent transgressive act, resulted in death. The word, which he is forced to coin because of his one original act, fills his mouth and cuts his wind–it “mullifies and terminates.” In this silence (“nothing was said”), however, Adam turns to God, resubmitting himself and his language to Him. The poem, in turn, fittingly ends in metaphor: God, Adam knows, will “undo the dead.”

One criticism of Baer’s work is that it lacks formal depth or metaphorical richness. While Baer’s focus narrative can sometimes divert his attention from formal possibilities, like Frost, Baer’s seeming simplicity can be deceptive. His work is both accessible and complex, immediately pleasurable and a great tool for private and public devotion.

Resources:

Books of Poetry by William Baer:

The Unfortunates (1997)

Borges and Other Sonnets (2003)

“Bocage” and Other Sonnets (2008)

Psalter (2011)

A common complaint of Christians is that there are no great living Christian writers. To some, it seems, the Christian imagination died with C.S. Lewis and Walker Percy.

Yet, while there is no one of the stature of Percy at the moment, there’s a lot of great work being done by novelists and poets alike that take faith seriously. As I have noted elsewhere, the category of Christian fiction or poetry is problematic. Nevertheless, over the next few months, I’ll be introducing readers to twenty writers whose work shows an understanding of orthodox Christianity and excellence in craft.

I’ll begin next week with a poet few have heard of: Amit Majmudar.

Over at First Thoughts, I point readers to recent discussions of the commercialization of art and the general decline in artistic judgment. I end with the question of how to regain this judgment:

The temptation here–and it’s an easy one–is to blame capitalism for this decline. Panero points out, however, that the problem is not the market, it’s us: “If we are here to put capitalism on trial, and capitalism loses, I wouldn’t question capitalism. I would question our judgment.”

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is playing on Broadway again. It has been revived a number of times since it was first produced in 1949, and by all accounts, this particular revival has been a success. It’s even expected to turn a neat little profit.

Over at the graying lady, however, Lee Siegel wonders “why the play was revived at all.” Willy believes, Siegel writes, that he can “attain dignity through his work,” but no one believes this anymore:

In our time of banker hustlers, real-estate hustlers and Internet hustlers, of suckers and “muppets,” it is unlikely that anyone associates happiness and dignity with working hard for a comfortable existence purchased with a modest income. Even what’s left of the middle class disdains a middle-class life. Everyone, rich, poor and in between, wants infinite pleasure and fabulous riches.

Siegel needs to read the play again. It’s not quite right that Willy believes he can attain dignity through hard work. Rather he believes he can attain it through success by force of personality alone. He has very little interest in hard work, as his refrain “He’s liked, but not well-liked,” his memories of Ben striking it rich in the jungle, and the foils of the hard-working (and successful) Charles and Bernard all show.

I’m no fan of Arthur Miller, but Death of a Salesman, despite its other excesses, calls into question the very yearning for “infinite pleasure and fabulous riches” that Siegel (also wrongly) sees everywhere.

Over at First Thoughts, I have a short post on Mark Bauerlein’s piece on liberalism and literature at Public Discourse. His conclusion that “resonance” or personal fulfillment has replaced truth as the arbiter of value today is worth pondering.

Bauerlein discusses only the novel, but I wonder to what extent the importance of fulfillment–however short-lived–has perverted our view of service in the church or our view of vocation. No doubt we long to be involved in a community or to pursue a vocation that is fulfilling, but this shouldn’t be the only thing, and certainly not the most important thing, that determines which community we join or which vocation we pursue. And often the most fulfilling things turn out to be those we do out of a sense of duty to the one true God.

This, I take it, is part of what it means to lose one’s life to save it.

Matthew J. Franck has a strong critique of Wendell Berry’s Jefferson Lecture at First Things today. The lecture, Franck says, was “chiefly a catalogue of Berry’s hatreds”:

He hates “agribusiness” and large-scale farming, though it is a great success story in the battle against hunger. He hates “corporations” and derides the notion that they are “persons” in the law, sounding as much like a wise man as the average backbench Democratic hack in the U.S. Congress. He hates “industrialism,” “plutocracy,” and “capitalism,” explaining why his thought is popular among a certain breed of college professors. He hates “materialism” but seems unable to transcend it at any point in this lecture.

* * *

He loves the “stickers” and he hates the “boomers,” terms he borrows from his teacher Wallace Stegner. Boomers are mobile creatures, moving from place to place and seizing opportunities—presumably like the first Berry who came to America centuries ago. Stickers are the ones who stay in place and sink roots in the land. Is there room in Wendell Berry’s moral imagination (he loves that word, “imagination”) for a good word to be said about each of them?

The answer to that question, Franck writes, is emphatically “No.” I’ve read the lecture, which is ironically titled “It All Turns on Affection,” and I think Franck is right in his critique, though perhaps a bit too fervent.  Nathan Schleuter offers a helpful response, pointing out that Berry is equally critical of governmental agencies elsewhere, but this is besides the point and does nothing to justify Berry’s unfair derision of “all agribusiness executives,” who, in Berry’s words, “don’t imagine farms or farmers. They imagine perhaps nothing at all, their minds being filled to capacity by numbers leading to the bottom line.”

Berry is not the only literary figure recently to show a lack of imagination in complaining about the lack of imagination. In her new collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson argues that American public discourse is distinctly lacking in empathy and generosity, and like Berry in his lecture, she fails to show either. My full review is forthcoming in The Weekly Standard, but in a nutshell, she derides the lack of governmental spending on education and welfare programs, and claims that it is unchristian to oppose such spending. She demonizes corporations and suggests that those in favor of austerity measures are suffering from “paranoia.” Yet, while she claims to have had “a broader experience of the American population than is usual,” she shows no real understanding of why serious Christians who care deeply about the poor and the defenseless (particularly unborn children) might actually oppose government welfare and an increase in centralized power.

Too often conservative Christians give greedy corporations or the unjustly rich a free pass. Greed is a sin, and we should speak boldly against it. But so is willful ignorance, which, of course, conservatives can be guilty of as well. Boldness and fairness are not mutually exclusive. Our times require both.