December 28, Palo Alto

Just back from a week in Friday Harbour, St Juan Island, in the state of Washington. Never easy making plane-small island-hopper-plane / ferry. Our plane to Seattle was several hours late taking off, so the 4-hour wait between arrival in Seattle got whittled down to nothing: we missed the island-hopper plane by about half an hour. Second option was a car to the ferry in Anacortes, scheduled for 8 pm, which actually left with us aboard around 9 pm. But we made it - and smoothly-connected flights back to St José yesterday.

Now for Paris on Tuesday! Looking forward. Meanwhile I’m making last-minute corrections to my poetry manuscript, due soon at the publisher, Carcanet, for August publication. I need to forget the poems for a while, then try and see them with fresh (ie, more objective) eyes. My two poetry groups, Berkeley and Stanza France are great for that, too, nothing like showing them to other poets to make you sit up and see them anew. Also good, is reading other peoples’ poems: at the moment David Ferry, another poet-translator, a recent discovery of mine.