Fugue 19 - Winter 1999 (No. 19)

many poems per month, and I have a pretty good idea of what those poems are actually going to be in the coming months. I can tell you right now what I'm going to be writing the second week in)une, for example, if I had my schedule with me. The point is I like the results or I wouldn't do it. I haven't gotten off my schedule once. The bad side is that maybe if I had not set up that type of schedule I could have wandered more and ended up writing an Eakins poem that isn't part of my schedule, a poem I'd be happy to have. But of course I don't know that would for sure happen, so I choose to do it this way and produce what I know I can and want to produce. But this is a special project because it's such a long, focused kind of book. It requires, and I'm giving it, a lot of rational control. But normally when I sit down to write, all bets are off, and I'm happy to see what comes up. I like the word "scribble" when I talk about writing. I don't think of myself as a poet so much as a writer and scribbler.

Scribble suggests that, in some way, you shouldn't take it too seriously. And the word author is always with a capital A. Scribbling sounds like the right attitude to instill in somebody. You're just half asleep or half paying attention and you start putting stuff down. You don't compose formally. At least the scribbling is probably in tune with the big spender idea. The big spender just scribbles. "What do you do for a living?" "I'm a scribbler." Like the famous quote about Gibbon writing Tbe Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire.

Somebody would see him constantly working on it and fmally said, "Scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon?" And the reason that's important to me is that it shows the attitude of the non-writer, looking at the writer and devaluing and diminishing what he or she does, and to the outsider it looks like just a kind of scribbling, and they ask, "What's the point of this?" and "Why would anybody want to do that? What a waste of time!" And here's this man, Gibbon, who had a fabulous experience in life writing his great work, and he had to do it in the face of people sneering and looking down their noses at him, and he kept doing it. It's a kind of heroism.

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