Hello, blog

I'm leaving Facebook this week, shifting my social media activity to Twitter (@Shanna_Compton and/or @BloofBooks) and Bloof's Instagram (@bloofbooks). (Yes, I know Insta is owned by Facebook.)

Remember how we used to title our blogs? I was Brand New Insects when some of you first knew me. I remember your titles too. I remember your distinctive color palettes and fonts. How your spaces seemed individual, like studios strewn with the fits & starts of your making. I remember your acrobatic appendages, the comment boxes dangling below. (Yes, I remember when those rotted off the body too.)

I took this photo in Stonington, ME, last year. On the last morning before we go, we take our refuse to the dump, which they euphemistically call the Transfer Station. I have a thing for colorful remnants and the poignant beauty of garbage, but I sure wish we made less of it.

Which is to say: I'll be returning to this space too for longer semipublic thinking—the stuff that is more urgent to share than journaling, less pulled together than essays or reviews. Often lately I've realized how much I miss the blogs. Don't you? (Are you blogging somewhere, again or still? Do you have a Tiny Letter? I'll blogroll you or subscribe, if you let me know where you are.)

But this site badly needs an update. I'm going to switch over to WordPress and redesign everything. So that may take me several weeks, between other projects. At that point the URL may change, but the domain will stay the same.

For the month of April though, I'll be posting daily drafts (along with several other poet comrades) at the Bloof Books blog for NaPoWriMo/GloPoWriMo. I'm pretty sure this is my fourteenth year to write poems in public with Maureen. I'm not sure what I'll be working on yet. Thinking about it.

I'll be in New Orleans in April too, for the New Orleans Poetry Festival, doing a reading and working the book fair.

Here's a new poem from the March 19th issue of the Nation. (The online version collapses the spacing in the final line, and sometimes there's an ad for Quaker Oats in the middle.)