Thanks Chris! -- my thoughts are similar; I recall seeing you around the infobahn watercooler in gone years as well as in that happy gathering of our early ghazal efforts marshalled & encouraged by the redoubtable & incomparable Agha Shahid Ali. Happy to see your studious work continues.

I'll catch you up on my tale by thumbnail-sketch. Circa 2006 I generated a midlife crisis & headed to India for belated study of Indian classical music, a long interest. Lived in Dhrupad Sansthan in Bhopal a couple years along w/ India travel & jaunts to China (where I helped a friend open an art gallery). I was offered a job in Kolkata & thought I'd settle in; but India declined my work visa request. This pulled me to Los Angeles in 2009 -- in nick of time to spend last days with my mother, then (3 years later) my father. Amid these travels & travails I kept a journal in form of incessant poetry-writing in diverse modes. That continued through a decade back in California -- till last July when I lost my fulltime job. This opened up space to put together a MS (completed a month ago) which I'm starting to shop around [currently via the American poetry prize lottery]. My MS includes (per my tally) "33 ghazals, 16 sonnets, 9 villanelles, 8 ballades, 4 pantoums, 3 quatrozians, 3 dohas, 3 poems in rispetti, 3 poems in English sestets . . . [etc., w/ even 1 sestina, plus] more than 60 poems loosely based on Chinese formal models." Several of the ghazals plus 1 haibun (the latter from Bhopal days) are slated for R.W. Watkins' Eastern Structures soon. I'd not focused on publication in recent years, but the pandemic gave me a kick in the proverbial.

I'm now subscribed to you in Medium. Will also have to track down your work more generally.

Ah, now time for my morning dhrupad lesson via Skype. Hat-tips --

cheers,

d.i.