1 October 2022
The last month (September) has been busier with Graceguts site additions, and I’m especially proud of the first couple of additions here.
On the Reviews page, check out my extensive review from Modern Haiku of Natalie Goldberg’s haiku memoir, Three Simple Lines, including a new postscript.
New to my Essays page (linked to from the Haibun page) is “Quiet Souls,” a haibun-like personal reminiscence of influential poet Cid Corman and my 2002 visit to his home in Kyoto, complete with photos and two postscripts. This piece appeared in Modern Haiku in 2021. A related addition is “Tsunamis, Santōka, and Cid,” a letter of mine from 2011 to Scott Watson about Corman, including a video of Watson reading an essay about Corman that I refer to in my letter.
Also on the Essays page, my “Notes on Gendai Haiku” now includes an informative quotation by Ryan C. K. Choi. I especially like the idea he offers that contemporary haiku in Japan is more evolutionary than revolutionary. The Essays page also includes my short contribution to Christal Ann Rice Cooper’s blog focusing on “Sacred Spaces, Sacred Places” in “Celebrating 20 Years of National Poetry Month” in 2016.
A major new addition to the Haiku and Senryu page is “Godawful Early Haiku, Part Deux,” with more of my early haiku from around 1985, but also later ones as late as 1993, all written in a notebook I apparently kept in my car. I radically changed my understanding of haiku in 1987, and you can see this improvement in the poems I present. The selection of poems here includes some of my very earliest published haiku (though not all are indicated as such), from the late 1980s and early 1990s. See also “Godawful Early Haiku” and “My Haiku Notebooks.”
And speaking of the “My Haiku Notebooks” page, it now includes photos of all my notebooks, from 1985 to 2022, photos of a few interior pages, and a sample poem from each notebook. I arbitrarily present the first poem from each notebook. Most are haiku, but you’ll also find a tanka and one longer poem. Again, you can see the evolution of my understanding of haiku here, especially after 1985.
A set of “Poems for G. H.” (four poems) by David Jaffin are new to the Poems About Haiku page (the G. H. in question being renowned haiku poet Gary Hotham).
On the Haiku Workshops page, check out the new listing for “The Song of Haibun: Prose with a Haiku Twist” and, on the Other Poetry Workshops page, look for “Running a Small Press or Poetry Journal.”
On the Haiku Invitational page, available through Digressions, I’ve added the names of all the winning poets for each year, going back to 2006.
A new addition to the Links page is the Mexican journal Taller Igitur, which recently published “Bandelier,” a rengay I wrote with Cristina Rascón, which she also translated into Spanish. The rengay itself is one of many new collaborations I’ve added to my Rengay website, including “Clicking Cameras” with Ion Codrescu and “Silent Totem” with Sidney Bending on the City Rengay page, plus “Clipper” with Deborah P Kolodji. Many of the rengay pages now also include a “Recent Additions” section, including the Rengay home page.
On at least five of the “Learning From” essays, I’ve added relevant photos, such as pictures of the authors whose books I quote.
On the Quotations Visualized page, available through Quotations, the last eight images are all new quotations.
On the Poems page, look for two recent poems of mine that recently appeared in Solitary Plover: “windswept snow” and “Undone.”
A useful addition at the top of the home page is a new button inviting site visitors to read a featured link. For September I featured “Common Wisdom: Learning Haiku from Heraclitus,” and October features my review of Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines. I’ll continue to use this feature to highlight a favourite essay or other content each month.