1 June 2023

Another quiet month on the Graceguts front. This site has the following new additions, posted in May 2023.

• New to the Trifolds page is “The Sandpiper’s Song,” a haiku trifold I originally put together in 2000, free to view or download, along with dozens of other trifolds. I’ve also reordered all the trifolds to reverse the order, listing the most recent ones first. I’ll have a couple of new ones coming soon, too.

• I’ve made several updates to my Appearances page, if you want to see what I’ll be up to soon with readings, workshops, and other appearances, such as giving my “Haiku on Steroids” workshop for the Haiku Social Club on 4 June 2023.

• A new addition to the Digressions page is “Animated by Hope,” a short meditation on my favourite word, “hope,” and the concept’s exploration in the movie The Shawshank Redemption, Klaatu’s Hope album, and elsewhere.

• I recently finished my latest haiku notebook, so I’ve updated “My Haiku Notebooks” (available through the Digressions page) with a description of notebook #25, complete with that notebook’s first haiku, and I’ve also added a photo and description of notebook #26. It took me a few days shy of two years to fill #25 (about 500 haiku and senryu).

• Also new to the Digressions page is one on Cascade, the journal of the Washington Poets Association, which I edited in 2011 for one of its two issues. And the Two Autumns Press page now includes several new poems of mine selected from most of its books that I’m in. I have a few more books to add poems from still.

• I’ve reorganized my Haiku Workshops page (under Workshops) to list options under headings for introductory and advanced (mostly generative) workshops, and other workshops (nongenerative), and have added listings for the following workshops:

  • • “Count the Syllables” (exploring why haiku need not be 5-7-5 in English)

    • “Doing it Right: Two Season Words in Haiku” (about this more advanced haiku technique that need not be avoided)

    • “On the Art of Writing Haiku” (pairing twenty of my haiku from a Norton anthology with inspirational quotations on the art of writing designed to generate discussion)   +

• Alas, on my Poems page, I’ve added a new mass shooting to “Countin’ Up the Hits.” I wish I could stop writing this piece.

• New to the Blurbs page is one I’d forgotten I’d written in 2013 for Journeys Far and Near: Tanka Roads by Sanford Goldstein, who died in May at age 97. Also new is an uncredited back-cover blurb I wrote for Castles in the Sand, the 2002 Tanka Society of America members’ anthology I edited. And at the start and end of the Blurbs page, I’ve added a quotation and two images by Gelett Burgess who coined the term “blurb” more than a hundred years ago.

• And finally, to give the almost last word to haiku, new to the My Poems in The Heron’s Nest page are three recently published poems from its pages:

walking drunk

off the merry-go-round

my summer-sunned daughter 

distant taiko—

the cherry blossoms

trembling

winter solstice . . .

I learn the word

palliative

• Meanwhile, on my Rengay website, look for three recent rengay: “Going for Gold,” written with Alan S. Bridges, recently published in Mariposa, “Out of Sync” with Sidney Bending and Margaret Rutley, and “The Tour Boat’s Wake” with Billie Dee (on the City Rengay page), the latter two winning honourable mentions in the 2022 rengay contest sponsored by the Haiku Poets of Northern California, and soon to be published in Mariposa.