A Form of Uncertainty
Scott Cairns’s most recent collection embraces the unknown and unknowable while demonstrating the poet’s wide-ranging knowledge and formal mastery.
Review by Mischa Willett
I encountered in a literary journal recently some hand-wringing—not to say bloviation quite, but close—on the mournful and oft-trod topic of where have all the poets gone? Not that the stuff isn’t being churned out still, of course it is, but for the author of the piece, none of it was quite up to scratch. Kids these days, he went on, don’t know the first thing about form (I’m paraphrasing) and if they’re going to just, you know, talk and add lineation, they might as well just skip it and write novels.
The funny thing was, since along with being a poet, I don an alter-ego as a scholar of Victorian literature, I had just been reading a strikingly similar appraisal in The Westminster Review 1830 edition. Who does this Wordsworth think he is? And Keats! laughable, that lad. Where have all the formalists gone?
I say it was funny, but actually, I find it kind of sad. The kind of people who can’t appreciate jazz due to its “formlessness” or Picasso for his, or improv comedy are just so obviously… poorer for the lack. And anyway, that a serious literary publication in the Year of our Lord 2026 gave space for this sort of assessment struck me as so much doomsdaying, with nary a tick closer on the actual clock.
Now, to be fair, I love formal poetry, when it is good (Kenney, Merrill, Hecht, Rich, Mehigan), and I dislike it when it is not. And I love free verse when it is good, and I dislike it when it is not. I write a little of both and I read a lot of each and I don’t make categorical judgements any more readily than I would that all [insert genre] music is terrible.
I don’t mean to use this space to mount a full-throated defense of a practice that comprises some 80 percent of our art, but I would like to think about some things that free verse, in negotiation with its own formal heritage, makes possible and which Scott Cairns so capably demonstrates (remonstrates?) in his new collection Against Certainty (Slant 2026).
These are intelligent poems, almost miraculously articulate and informed, and stuffed with references to Cairns’ lifetime of reading.
But first, this is something like Cairns’ 12th poetry collection, quite aside from the prose works, so it’s a little funny that they sound so, well, uncertain. The poet’s gesture is the provisional assay, the supposal, which gives them an endearing patina of the ingenue, despite their evident gravitas. These are poems of deep wisdom and hard-won spiritual heft masquerading as the rumblings of a fool (in the highest Shakespearean sense). For instance, this bit from “My Cave”:
Despite appearances, my dwelling place
has long remained interred within the dim
hollow of my head, wherein my wits have
proven also dim, reduced unto this
steadfast state of idiocy…
Longtime readers of Cairns’ poems will recognize the move—a former collection of his is titled Idiot Psalms after all—but one also suspects it is a ruse.
Read the full essay at Fare Forward →
Originally published in Fare Forward, 2026-09-29.
Image credit: Book cover image, Slant Books (via Fare Forward)
