Graceguts News
Read about recent site additions or other news or featured pages here. The most recent posting appears in its entirety here, with earlier items listed under “2023 News” and “2022 News” by date, most recent first, linking to subpages for each posting. To see an archive of past updates, from October of 2011 until August of 2021, please visit Blogistics.
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1 February 2025
The Digressions page is one of my favourite on Graceguts, and I’ve recently given it extra attention. It has lots of fun and sometimes random stuff, in poetry, family, and other categories, and I encourage you to explore it. The following are all my updates to Graceguts in January 2025, with a lot of emphasis on digressions. Because who doesn’t love a good digression? But I digress.
Our family emigrated from England to Canada by ship when I was a child (how many people can say that?). New to Digressions is “Empress of England,” about the ship we took, with reminiscences and numerous photos. This was fun to research.
On my digression for the Haiku North America conference, which I cofounded in 1991, I’ve added group photos from the 2005 and 2013 conferences, as well as other images and logos (much more still to come).
Around 2010 I created several T-shirt designs, which you can now see on my new “Haiku T-Shirts” digression. I also include a bunch of photos showing me wearing many of these shirts.
Check out the new “Thanks, Mum / Reader’s Digest” digression, my letter to the editor written shortly after my mother died in 2023, even though they never published it.
A longer digression is “Shamisen Recordings,” documenting extensive translations from Japanese that I did with Emiko Miyashita for a series of informational videos on the traditional Japanese instrument of the shamisen. Also included are liner notes we translated for a compact disc recording for the Miyako Itchu Institute of Music and Culture in Japan. These translations date from 2022 and 2023. As a bonus, I include three additional shamisen performance videos by Miyako Itchu.
Another extensive new digression is “Pulse Haiku 2024,” presenting all 26 haiku I curated in 2024 for Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, for which I serve as haiku editor. I also include “Wide Open Sky,” a video I made celebrating all 26 poems, and selected contributor quotations about the Pulse haiku series.
An annual ritual is to update my Appearances page, which I’ve now done to focus on 2025, and have archived 2024 Appearances. Several new events added too!
A major new addition, to the Reviews page, is actually three additions. They are previously unpublished reviews that I don’t think I’ll be able to publish in any print journal (their time has passed), but didn’t want them to remain unseen. Here are the three reviews:
I Wish, a 2020 members’ anthology published by the Hailstone Haiku Circle in Kyoto.
A Sonic Boom of Stars, a 2020 members’ anthology published by the Southern California Haiku Study Group.
Across the Ravi, an ebook of rengay written by Arvinder Kaur and Hifsa Ashraf in 2022 (an uncommon collection of rengay).
New to the “Memorial Haiku” page, available through Haiku and Senryu, are these two poems, for Deborah P Kolodji and Bill Kenney, respectively:
long winter—
the phone calls
that no longer come
hotel reception—
we lean in to hear
his signature haiku
And speaking of the “Memorial Haiku” page, a rewarding undertaking has been to add photos for all (but one) of the many poets I’ve honoured with tribute poems.
I’ve added photos to my “children’s book sh elves” poem (showing how the poem was featured at the Redmond Library in Redmond, Washington), and to the “night falling snow” page (showing the poem drawn in sand), both available through the Poems page.
Through the Books page, look for three photos added to the Bound by the Beauty holograph anthology I compiled in 2011.
I’ve added three photos of J. W. Marshall and Christine Deavel to my “Open Books: Seattle’s Thriving Bookstore for Poets” interview, first published in Poet’s Market in 2008.
In the spring of 2008, the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, for which I serve as a haiku judge and consultant, unveiled a haiku stone at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia, featuring winners from the 2006, 2007, and 2008 Haiku Invitational contests that I cojudged. I’ve added seven unveiling photos to my “Vancouver Haiku Stone” digression.
Another fun new addition is “My Poems in Solitary Plover,” listing ten years of my contributions, available through Poems and Haiku and Senryu. This has mostly been poetry, but also one essay, “Lorine Niedecker’s Haiku Library.” Solitary Plover is published by the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, based in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.
New to the Haiku and Senryu page is “From The Jade Pond,” featuring four poems I contributed to this Vancouver Haiku Group anthology, along with a few event photos and the event poster. I’ve also added two poems to “My Poems in Wales Haiku Journal.”
On the Poems by Others page, look for “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain,” a Li Po poem translated by Sam Hamill. Also look for Linda Pastan’s “Ars Poetica” (for Billy Collins) and “Ars Poetica” (a separate poem with the same title), and for Mary Oliver’s marvelous “Wild Geese” poem.
The Poems About Haiku page now includes a short poem (not a haiku) by Bob Zaslow and “Espaliered Pear Trees” by Linda Pastan (which mentions haiku).
I’ve also added new postscripts to two existing essays. They are “A Survey of Haibun Definitions: Introduction to Wedge of Light” (with a definition of haibun by Andrew Fitzsimons) and “Arriving Geese: Learning from Shugyō Takaha” (plus a photo showing me meeting Takaha in 2004 in Tokyo).
On “We Are All God’s Poems,” a sequence of tanka available through the Sequences and Tanka pages, I’ve added credit to a new anthology in which this sequence appears, titled We Are All God’s Poems (I also added the book’s cover image).
The Venues page now mentions the Tether Design Gallery in Seattle, Washington, and the Links page now includes Unsolicited Press. I’ve also moved my “Wintering” sequence from Haiku and Senryu to the Sequences page.
It’s just cosmetic, but throughout the Collaborations, Haiku Journey, Poems, and Quotations sections, I have added a grey background to all the publication or meta information at the top of each page, to match how I treat this information on the Essays pages and elsewhere.
Thank you for reading this far. Now check out all the links—there’s a lot to explore. Maybe start with Digressions!