Lately I've had the oddest sensation: I feel as if people are actually reading my poems. I don't mean I'm selling more books or getting more acceptance letters, because I'm not. But the few poems that are out there, the ones eddying downstream, are being fished out, examined, considered, before being dropped back into the brook. Only now and again, of course. I'm not talking about a trove of readers. Still, something is different.

Anyway, I feel different, which I suppose is the point. Not being read has been, for me, a basic fact of the endeavor. I've been published, repeatedly, but I've never had an audience. So even this small shift is surprising. I recognize that it's a social media phenomenon, but that doesn't make it less surprising to me. I've kept this blog since 2008, and only now has the shift happened. Clearly, social media recognition is no more automatic than anything else.