I spent yesterday scrolling through various vintages of Mennonite hymnals, tracking down the major historical events of 1837 (Oliver Twist was serialized, Victoria ascended the throne, Daguerre invented the daguerreotype . . . ), beginning to read slave documents from antebellum western Pennsylvania, and typing up an index of what I've written so far.

The sidetrack possibilities are infinite. I'm not sure how I'll ever manage to get this book under control, but I am beginning to think that one way to do it is to start recognizing repeated themes and to make sure that they appear cyclically throughout the 200 years under study. Descriptions of loss seem to be one of those themes (obituaries, tombstones, letters, word of mouth, etc.); music is another. And the more I read about the Mennonites, the more I learn about the centrality of music to their worship. In the words of one commentator, congregation members think of group singing as "a conversation."

For years, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, was the home of the Mennonite Publishing House, which released edition after edition of Harmonia Sacra, a shape-singing hymnal first compiled in 1832. How one incorporates shape singing into a poem is something I have not yet worked out.