1 February 2023

I’ve recently added one of the largest new additions to Graceguts in the last ten years—a page celebrating the history of Woodnotes, a haiku journal I edited from 1989 to 1997. I started this page in December 2022 when I was adding 209 of my reviews from the journal’s pages (see the Reviews page), but vastly expanded its content in January with two new essays about the journal, images for each cover, and subpages for each of the journal’s 31 issues. Each one of these subpages includes overview paragraphs, staff lists, statistics, tables of contents, Woodnotes Award winners, selected poems, cover scans (including contributor indexes), and scans of selected interior pages. Here’s a complete summary of newly added content, in addition to the landing pages for each of the 31 issues:

• • A Short History of Woodnotes (essay; includes cover images representing the journal’s three design stages)

  • Selected Essays and Interviews from Woodnotes (with links to all 34 essays and interviews; see the complete list at the end of this announcement)

  • Woodnotes Award Winners (22 poems)

  • Beginner’s Mind (haiku origin stories by 22 different poets)

  • Woodnotes Statistics (2,537 haiku and senryu and 257 tanka over 1,116 pages)

  • Seasonal Trails (four haibun by D. Claire Gallagher)

  • A Journal of Friends (appreciation essay)

I hope this content serves as a useful historical record of the journal, which was one of the most influential and prominent haiku journals of the 1990s. As Cor van den Heuvel said, “Woodnotes set a new standard for the quality of haiku—and related forms such as tanka, linked verse, and haibun—published in haiku journals. The articles were groundbreaking and the quality of the layouts and artwork were outstanding.” Please explore the Woodnotes page and its many subpages, the preparation of which also spawned the addition of certain other content listed below.

• New on the Essays page are “Harold Henderson’s Grammar Haiku,” a major new essay, recently published in Blithe Spirit (includes a link to an event report I’ve also added about a Zoom presentation of this essay), “Japan-Think, Ameri-Think, Haiku, and You,” derived from a 1996 report in Woodnotes, and “The Haiku Life,” which describes a Lady Bird Johnson redwood grove haiku handout. In addition, my “How Graceguts Got Started” essay now includes a new postscript about the arduous conversion of Graceguts to New Google Sites, which took extensive work from September to December 2021, and its relaunch and much refinement after that.

• The “From The Gulf Within” page now includes Jerry Kilbride’s review of the book and a report by Kimberly Cortner, “Gulf War Poetry Reading,” both from Woodnotes, as is Ce Rosenow’s review of A Haiku Path added to the Further Reading page, and linked to from the Haiku Path page.

• Just added to Poems About Haiku are “After Bashō” and an excerpt from “A Month in Summer,” both by Carolyn Kizer. The latter is, I believe, the first known haibun ever published in English, appearing in Kenyon Review in 1962. Also look for “Letters to the Editor” by Elaine Chan, [untitled] by Fredric Hamber, and “The Versifier’s Syllabic Lament” by Bruce Wodhams.

• On the Poems by Others page, in honour of the recently deceased Linda Pastan, please receive her exquisite poem, “Why Are Your Poems So Dark?”

• The Digressions page now includes a lovely new addition called “Inside the Oyster Shells” about a handmade book sent to me by Terry Ann Carter featuring the “maggie and milly and molly and may” poem by E. E. Cummings. Photos show the entire poem and the innovative “book” in which it is celebrated. Also look for a new “Hydrogen Jukebox” digression that describes my “trilogy” of four ebooks presenting these perhaps enigmatic poems, with the four cover images. The “SoulFood Poetry Night” digression sports a new event photo, which you can also find on my SoulFood Poetry Night website. My digression about “My Haiku Notebooks” also has new photos added, showing a few of the index cards I use to track my haiku after they graduate from my notebooks. A look under the hood!

• On the Sequences page, check out “By the Numbers,” recently published in Blithe Spirit. My “Still I Go” sequence now also includes a publication credit for being included in Kaye Linden’s 35 Tips for Writing Your Memoir in Short Stories book, for which I’m grateful.

• New on the Trifolds page is “On the Water,” a small collection of poems by organizers of the 2011 Haiku North America conference. Find it on the Trifold Downloads page (even though it’s actually a duofold, not a trifold).

• I’ve updated my Appearances page with several new workshops, readings, and other events, such as my 6 February 2023 appearance on Tim Greene’s live-streamed “Rattlecast,” an online Valentine’s Day appearance on Rick Lupert’s Cobalt Poetry series, and a 23 April in-person reading at Seattle’s Hugo House, among other events. And don’t forget, February is National Haiku Writing Month, which I’m leading once again, for the 13th year, with daily writing prompts on the very active Facebook page.

• My ever-growing Tinywords page now includes a new poem published on 17 January 2023, and the Memorial Haiku page now includes my “meadowlark’s call” poem for vincent tripi.

• On the Press Here page for Sonō Uchida’s A Simple Universe, I’ve added photos of William J. Higginson’s introduction, prompted by an Italian graduate student who was researching Uchida’s work and was curious about Higginson’s assessment.

• The Blurbs page now features my invitation to M. H. Rubin’s gorgeous new book, The Photograph as Haiku.

• On the Haiku and Senryu page, I’ve added a Sammamish map to my “Sammamish Haiku” collection, so you can more easily see the town where I live.

• New on the Videos page is a link to “2010 Jack Straw Writers Program at the Seattle Central Library” (1:34:36), a 13 November 2010 poetry audio recording (my part starts at around the 9:30 mark).

• My Haiku Workshops page, available through Workshops, now lists “Haiku Lessons from A Book of Tea.” I keep noticing presentations that I haven’t listed here!

• My Not Previously Published page now mentions the descriptions I’ve written for all 31 issues of Woodnotes, and all other new material added to the Woodnotes page, such as “A Short History of Woodnotes” and “A Journal of Friends.”

• And for some fun, I’ve added relevant images to several pieces on the Poems page and background photos to “a bird,” “Anecdote of a Door,” “Corked,” “Depression,” “Enveloped,” “Instinct,” and “you.”

• Meanwhile, on my Rengay website, new additions include “Waiting for the Light,” a six-person rengay just published in California Quarterly, and “Office Supplies,” a three-person rengay that just appeared in Hedgerow. Blithe Spirit also recently published “Forecast” and “Repeated Hum,” and I’ve added those too. And a fun new addition is a scan of the original calligraphy by Carolyn Fitz for my “Christmas in the City” rengay from when Woodnotes #23 first published it in 1994.

• Also, on the Haiku Northwest website, I’ve written memorial pages for Randal Johnson and Wilma Erwin, and have added a “Definitions” page under Francine Porad’s memorial page. Check out the rest of this website, especially the 2023 Events page, to see lots of Seattle-area haiku activity I’m involved in.

I hope all of these many new additions to Graceguts prove useful or interesting to you, especially the large amount of content relating to Woodnotes. Enjoy!