Back in the saddle...

Have been posting rather sporadically of late -- readership too has fallen off to about 20 visits a day, from a peak in the good ol' days of 60 -- a common complaint among bloggers these days, what with the brain drain into Facebook, Twitter and all -- but have decided to commit myself to at least once a week, if I can, to see if I can build that readership up a bit.  Comments to David Trinidad's poem, below, are encouraging. The first string in months! Keep 'em coming!

The last month I've been busy with teaching and two grant applications. 
The summer was a good and productive one -- wrote/revised a number of poems I'm quite happy with (including a couple that got accepted by Saranac Review), took trips to Quebec City and Baie St-Paul, to Toronto, and to my partner's mother's cottage north of Napanee, Ont. Reading highlights included Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (it has to be one of the best novels I've ever read -- I've been meaning to read it for quite some time), Camu's L'etranger (reread, this time en Francais), and, among poetry, which was mostly read online and in anthologies, Susan Briscoe's The Crow's Vow, Pris Campbell's Seatrails, and a book of tanka entitled The Ink Dark Moon, Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu translated by Jane Hirshfield (with Marco Aratani).  The latter was a brilliant read -- one I especially recommend.