I'm still struggling with the Johnstown Flood poem, but suddenly I've also found myself juggling a companion piece: a poem about the members of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, which managed the dam that collapsed and destroyed Johnstown. The list of club members is a Gilded Age who's who: manufacturers of mine explosives, members of Congress, art patrons, an attorney general, window-glass millionaires, railroad executives, and so on and so on. And as I pondered this list, I suddenly thought of card tables and old guys in tuxedos drinking brandy, and surreptitious belching. So poem number 2 is slowly taking the form of a whist party: that is, I'm breaking the poem into card-party groups of four names, and interspersing them with commentary that riffs on the Hoyle instructions for whist.

What excites me about this verse project, as much as anything, is the way in which each subject seems to discover its own poetic structure. This is a whole new world for me, one that requires me to slough off many of my preconceptions about form and line and sound. To be honest, I'm kind of scared.

"Make sure of winning at the earliest opportunity, but take any risk if that is the only way of saving the game."