Companion Guide for An Axe for the Frozen Sea

by Camille Floyd

This companion guide is intended for readers of An Axe for the Frozen Sea, as well as writers and artists of all ages who want exposure to modern poets and exercises to improve their craft. The guide is adaptable for both individual use and group settings. Rabbit Room Press recently released An Axe for the Frozen Sea, which features a collection of interviews Ben Palpant conducted with 17 modern poets. This guide follows the interview with American poet and essayist, Scott Cairns.

The following is an excerpt from the interview. Read the full interview here. Purchase the entire book of interviews here.

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"You don't seem to take yourself too seriously,” I suggest.

"Well, I guess going to a lot of poetry readings over the years, listening to other poets, I find myself thinking, ‘You don't have to be that severe, dude.’" He grins. "So, yes, I usually open my poems with a joke and then, at some point, you know, I get a little more serious, and the irony falls away. If you were raised in this home as I was, irony was a requirement. And puns were also required. How did Naomi Shihab Nye put it? 'Answer, if you hear the words under the words...' That is very similar to what I have said endlessly to my students, which is, pay attention to the words within the words."

"Maybe you could help me understand what you mean by that."

"I've noticed,” he says, “that the poems I love most are poems that I can keep reading and opening because, during a given reading, I will have seen a primary sense of the word, but then see how the secondary and tertiary senses also figure into it. This is mostly why I started learning Greek and why I'm trying to learn a little Latin. It's because, as you must know, the English language is the best language for poetry. It's a museum for almost all the other languages. And so the etymological hauntings within an English word—of its Greek or Latin roots—may not be so overt, but they're present. If you're attentive to those ghosts, the poem keeps opening for you. It's never the same poem with each reading. I want to make poems like that, poems that keep opening. We should be cognizant that writing poems isn't about saying what you think you know; it's really about constructing a scene of meaning-making—a field into which a reader can enter and make meaning with the poet. There really ought to be some ambiguity implicated in every line, I think."

"Does the ambiguity play into line breaks for you?" I ask. "How do you make decisions on line endings?"

"I am almost always counting something; that's one technical element of lineation. I also want my lines to register as a provisional, syntactical unit which is then modified by subsequent lines. Often, for instance, the word out here at the end of the line appears to be a noun, but then it turns out that it's an adjective modifying an actual noun waiting in the next line. That provides a wonderful, dizzying experience for the reader who then is obliged to take another look at what he just read, and his re-reading proves essential to the agency of what I like to call the poetic operation of language.”

“Which is one of the things we like about our favorite poems.”

He nods and takes a drink from his mug. “Poetry,” he says, “when it's really poetry, occasions this sort of spinning, vertiginous—I like the word vertiginous—operation of language. You can also witness this in a rich prose text. Poetry, of course, can happen in verse or prose. Even fiction, nonfiction, and drama can obtain some degree of this poetic operation of language—this delicious, puzzling, opening activity. A great novel like Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov—a book I read every summer—does this. It keeps opening me onto something new."

He pauses and gazes out the window. "I really do feel that when I'm making a poem, it's not about having a glimpse of something true and then trying to transcribe it. It's more like trying to figure it out, glimpsing it as I go, wrestling with the language, listening to the music of the words, letting the music lead me to the next words. And in that way, my compositional practice is also my meditation.” He thinks for a moment. “I guess for the first half of my life I resisted the equation between poetry and prayer. Over the past twenty years, however, I have approached my poems as a kind of prayer—perhaps my most efficacious prayer."

"It sounds to me like your favorite poets force you to calibrate to mystery," I say, "but that's also partly why you write. You're calibrating to the divine mystery."

"Well, yes, because I'm my first audience. I want to get something out of it, too." He laughs. "You should know that I really only have five ideas. I think they're pretty good ideas, but to the extent that ideation occurs in any of my poems ever, they're pretty much the same five ideas retooled, if opening a little more onto a fuller glimpse each time I work it over. One of the hardest things for young readers to figure out is that there really is no hidden code in the poem. The reader’s purpose is not to crack the code and replace the poem with a paraphrase of the poem. No, a genuine poem is actually a place you enter and experience, a place in which you collaborate in meaning-making."

While he takes another drink from his mug, I consider the room around me quietly before beginning my thought. "When I drove up to your house today,” I say, “I thought of your house as just a house."

"A very modest house,” he replies.

"But when you told me that your dad built this house, my perspective shifted. In a way, I walked through this house differently. It seems as though poems, if we think of them as a place, should be entered with a different kind of respect. I'm not just entering an apartment that is produced en masse, I'm entering a place that had a great deal of meaning long before I entered it."

"Ah, a dwelling place,” he suggests.

"Yes. How do you enter a poem with that kind of respect?"

"Well,” he says, “I suppose, when I start reading, I'm not looking for any inspiration, anything to take. I'm just ingesting the page, you know. If it draws me back later, if I keep going back to the poem again and again, then something grows out of that thorough reading. It's the poets like W. H. Auden, C. P. Cavafy, that I come back to. Do you know Cavafy? He was a Greek poet living in Alexandria, Egypt in the early twentieth century. He's a fantastic poet. I have certain other favorites—Mark Strand, Anthony Hecht. Anyway, I spend a lot of time with them, you see. They become sort of my primary audience. They write to me, I write to them. Richard Howard was one of my beloved mentors, one of the best-read guys I’ve met. I pore over the works of these people and hope that some of it rubs off. I end up writing to satisfy them more than to satisfy, I don't know, the living."

He continues, "I want students to be less concerned with what the author is saying and more concerned with what they can literally make with the poem on the page. The entire literary history is really all about a conversation that has been going on for centuries. To be part of that conversation, first you have to read to find out what that conversation is, and let the utterances of other writers provoke your responses. The more you're equipped by the prior discourse, the more likely you are to make something interesting with it, something that might contribute to the ongoing conversation."

Imperative
by Scott Cairns

The thing to remember 
is how tentative all of this 
really is. You could wake up dead.

Or the woman you love 
could decide you’re ugly.
Maybe she’ll finally give up
trying to ignore the way you
floss your teeth when
you watch television.
All I’m saying is that
there are no sure things here.

I mean, you’ll probably wake up alive,
and she’ll probably keep putting off
any actual decision about your looks.
Could be she’ll be glad your teeth 
are so clean. The morning could be
full of all the love and kindness
you need. Just don’t go thinking
you deserve any of it.

Discussion or Journaling Questions:

1. Cairns admits he wants his poems to be layered and ambiguous enough to keep opening up for readers after each reread. He advises his students and us to “pay attention to the words within the words”. Instead of asking, “what does this poem mean?” What are better questions for approaching a poem? What are other inquiries that could dissect the individual words and images, or the speaker’s mood and tone?

2. Cairns says that poetry can be found in prose, “fiction, non-fiction, and drama can obtain some degree of this poetic operation of language”. Cairns references The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky as a “poetic” novel. What do you think Cairns means by “poetic” prose? What are other books, short stories, plays, or movies you think are poetic or play heavily with poetic imagination and language? And why?

3. Cairns claims all of literary history is really a conversation between authors, responding and recreating the meaning of others. What authors or poets do you see playing off of each other, or entering the conversation with another author or literary movement? How is their work enhanced by that context? What new insights can you find in this comparison?

Exercises:

1. Cairns describes how he plays with lineation, the way poetic lines are formatted and divided on the page:

“I am almost always counting something; that’s one technical element of lineation. I also want my lines to register as a provisional, syntactical unit, which is then modified by subsequent lines. Often, for instance, the word out here at the end of the line appears to be a noun, but then it turns out that it’s an adjective modifying an actual noun waiting in the next line. That provides a wonderful, dizzying experience for the reader who then is obliged to take another look at what he just read, and his re-reading proves essential to the agency of what I like to call the poetic operation of language”.

For this exercise, find a poet you enjoy reading and pick an ending line from one of their poems. (This exercise will work best if you are unfamiliar with the poem itself). Use that line as the first line in your poem. Set a timer for 10 minutes, and write as much as you can without stopping to edit.

Now edit your poem only by changing the line’s length, where it begins, and manipulating the sound patterns using punctuation. Set a timer for 7 minutes.

2. Cairns explains that his poems are not transcriptions of epiphanic moments. Rather, he works at figuring meaning out within the language, “glimpsing it as I go, wrestling with the language, listening to the music of the words, letting the music lead me to the next words”.

Find an instrumental song or album and listen to it intently once or twice through. Then, set a timer for 10 minutes and play the music while you write. Instead of trying to set words to the music, try to translate or embody the music through language.

Exercise Reflection Questions:

What surprised you?

What was most difficult?

What do you like about your poem?

Exercise for the Young Artist:

Read this excerpt from Scott Cairns:

“I remember being a boy—maybe three or four years old—and we were getting ready to visit my grandmother’s house. I was ready early because I didn’t have much to do, and so I walked out into a very crisp winter night, and closed the door behind me. I stood on the threshold, my little feet on the doorstep, and as I looked up into the starry sky I had this exhilarating sense of joy, of beauty. I said out loud, ‘I love life!’’

Think about a memory where you had a similar experience, where you had so much joy and happiness, and you felt warm and happy over a new discovery. Journal, write a poem, or draw/paint about this experience, detailing where you were and who you were with, trying to imagine yourself in that moment again!

For more Scott Cairns’ poetry, see his most recent poetry collection entitled, Lacunae, published by Paraclete Press.

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Camille Floyd is a writer, teacher, and poet based in Nashville, where she works as a publishing assistant at Rabbit Room Press.