The first drafts of "Scribe" were written in April of 1997. The original title of the poem was "Hymn." Apparently, I was dissatisfied with the work and set it aside for a full year. Returning to the material in April of 1998, I found it much more to my liking, reworked a few lines, and gave it its current title. In my notebook, I observed that I may have found the poem "too chastising to own at the time" I first wrote it; only a year later did its "combined rigor and luxury, severity and voluptuousness" strike me as true.

The poem is related to my thinking about ethnopoetics and the self- consciousness that, I believe, must accompany the fundamentally romantic attempt to connect with the archaic. This self-consciousness must be embodied in the poem; on one level it will always be what the poem is about. For better or worse, "Scribe" is yet another proof of the way my poetry and my criticism are intertwined.

"Scribe" is one of a group of poems I have been writing for the last few years which are in some respects a return to the elaborate, romantic rhetoric of Restless Messengers. They serve as counter-texts to my main poetic project, the serial poem Track, with its restrained, elliptical mode of discourse and its stringently determined numerological structure. For a long time now, I have swung between these two poles: rhapsodic versus analytic, symbolist versus objectivist, organicist versus constructivist, and so on. But this ineluctable dialectic is, in the end, merely a descriptive tool, and not even one that gives me a good sense of where I am when Iím in that "place of first permission" (Duncan), writing the poem. As for my readers, let them describe whatever pleasures they get from my work in whatever terms they may choose. They have my sincere thanks.

N.B. Two poems related to "Scribe" are "Like Dates and Almonds, Purple Cloth and Pearls" (Salmagundi 114-115, Spring/Summer 1997) and "Drones and Chants" (appearing next spring in Hambone). The first volume of Track will appear this fall from Spuyten Duyvil Press.