The day this pops up on the blog, I will be flying out to California, having just spent one day at home after having gotten back from the conference on The Alphabet at the University of Windsor in Ontario. After a day with a client in Silicon Valley, I’m giving a reading at Moe’s in Berkeley with Steven Farmer on Wednesday, then spending much of the next two days going through the archives of David Bromige, whose Collected Poems I’m co-editing with Bob Perelman & Jack Krick. Later in April, I will be participating in an event as part of the Grand Piano collective at Poets House in New York, then at month’s end traveling to Bury, Lancashire, for the Text Festival. This is an intensive a period given over to the public side of my writing as I’ve had in years, literally, and I expect to end up quite winded by the process. Not mention thoroughly in awe of the likes of Rae Armantrout or Charles Bernstein, for whom this much travel is pretty much business-as-usual.
What I rather doubt I will have done, tho, is to write more notes for this blog. I’ve been maintaining the blog for more than eight years and as I think about all the changes I want to be making over the rest of this year, most of which are predicated around my desire to have more time to write, it makes me realize that what was once the newest thing on the block has by now become normative, even predictable. Blogs continue to have their uses, but in web time nothing stands still as a form for ten years.
For example, having by now arrived at more than 1,300 followers on Twitter, might it not make just as much sense to forego the massive link dumps here for individual posts there? I have some questions about the efficacy of Twitter, but I have them about this format as well. When I posted my links list last week, it included over 300 links – but my file of potential links had grown to more than 500 that I simply never got to.
Likewise, having reached my maximum number of permitted Facebook Friends – I can only add somebody when somebody else unfriends me or quits Facebook altogether – I have had to set up a rudimentary “fan page.” Unless you are a close personal friend, it makes much more sense for you to “like” that page than to try & link to my clogged-out personal page. As I grow more comfortable with that format, I may figure out how to get tweets to automatically show up on the fan page rather than the personal one, etc.
What all this adds up is that I’m contemplating changes here – as elsewhere – and any ideas you might have as to what might work best, or even just better, would certainly be appreciated. The email address on the left is the best way to communicate.
