Against Certainty

What makes words arranged on a page serve as a poem? Over the centuries, poets and critics have spoken of poetry as prospective (as opposed to retrospective), as generating openness, suggestiveness, connotative implication, ambiguity, and—as poet Scott Cairns has said—recognizing the poem as a scene of meaning-making, rather than merely a document of meaning made. In each of these attempts to name the poetic operation of language, one common disposition obtains: a genuine poem is never finished in its effort to lead a reader into further meaning-making. One might say that the poem is a place—a semantic field—where a recombination of old things can give rise to a new thing. The poems offered in Against Certainty have been crafted to open up possibilities not only for the reader, but also for the poet himself. As Cairns notes, both the form and the substance of these poems are “the results of my writing to see what I didn’t know to see, to say what I didn’t know to say.” A poem invites the reader to come to terms in order to appreciate them as the approachable terminus of new departure. Against Certainty is the culmination of forty years of literary pilgrimage, resounding evidence that Scott Cairns has produced not only a richly layered body of work but also a poetics that restores the craft to its ancient, enduring purpose.