I’ll also be reading from my own poems with Allan Peterson, who is terrific, at Blacksmith House in Cambridge on Monday Feb. 7.

Do consider attending either event, if you’ve got no other plans.

The night before that I’ll be trying not to think about the election results that come in as I listen to Sarah Fox and John Colburn read and discuss the death of poetry (so the hed sez) at Bryant Lake Bowl. Sounds like fun to me.

I’ve got something new on the Poetry Foundation site about Agha Shahid Ali and what’s likely his best poem. Thanks to the patient editors and Urdu-speakers who gave me needed advice.

And thanks, too, to Jessie, who built this site– which I don’t use nearly enough– as I head farther away from the books already discussed here, towards the books of the future, by way of the baby of the moment, who can do more, and it seems eats more, every day.

If you are stuck somewhere with no book, but with your iPhone, do check out the Poetry Foundation iPhone app: shake it and you get a random poem; shake it again if you don’t like the poem you get the first time. It’s like a Magic Eight Ball that is also a rather good poetry anthology; if I’m not careful it’s going to cause me (and not only me) to hold up all sorts of long queues checkout lines.

Right now I have just written something (it’s yet to appear) about Agha Shahid Ali and the ghazal in English. Ali, as you might already know, did quite a lot to popularize the “real” ghazal, with its array of formal requirements– monorhyme, refrain, a name in the last line, a constant length. Did you know, however, that the ghazal he prescribed was a form invented in Persia (and subsequently spread throughout the Islamic world, and beyond it), so that the older Arabic poems called ghazals do not have refrains? Did you know that the English-language go-to guy on the Urdu ghazal, and on Urdu poetry generally, for the second half of the twentieth century was also a committed British leftist who worked hard on the practical teaching of Urdu in the UK? Did you know that said go-to guy, Ralph Russell, died recently? I had had no idea.

When I’m feeling unusually busy at home I think of a saying communicated to me by someone else I trust absolutely, but atttributed (by that someone else) to the scholar Marjorie Nicolson: “You can always read a sonnet.” That is, you’ve always got time, somewhere in any day, for 14 lines.

David and I will have time for a few sonnets this Friday at Harvard Book Store on Mass. Ave. at 7pm. Drop in!