1 September 2023
August seemed to have been a quieter month for Graceguts. Nevertheless, I’ve added the following content.
I’ve just won a Trailblazer Award for the following haiku, which is a pleasing honour:
winter funeral—
lots of s’s
in our whispers
You can now read about my “2023 Trailblazer Award” on the Commentary page, where the judges share their thoughts on the poem. And on the Interviews page, please read my “2023 Trailblazer Interview,” which responds to questions about the poem and offers my thoughts on innovation in haiku poetry.
Another task I’ve been working on is the schedule for Haiku Northwest’s 2023 Seabeck Haiku Getaway, slated for 26–29 October 2023. You can now have a look at the information page, schedule, and registration page.
The Translations page now includes selections and translations (done with Emiko Miyashita) for the 2022 Traffic Culture Exhibition. I’ve also linked to them from my Tokyo Traffic Culture Exhibition page available through Digressions. Translations for 2023 will be coming soon too!
On the Poems About Haiku page, I’m pleased to have added “And Yet” and “After Bashō” by Ron Wallace.
On the Haibun page, check out “Lost Summer.”
New to the Videos page is my “Haiku Poets of Northern California Featured Reading,” a Zoom recording of my reading for the summer quarterly meeting of the Haiku Poets of Northern California on 16 July 2023. I read my “Bluing Twilight” sequence of wildlife-encounter haiku, plus poems from my “Mandolin Summer” trifold.
It’s brief, but hopefully still of interest to some folks. On the Essays page is “On Rejection,” an excerpt from a Haiku Foundation blog post on how to deal with rejection when submitting poems for publication.
On my “Notes on Gendai Haiku” page, look for five relevant quotations by Donald Revell from The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye.
It was sad to lose tanka pioneer Sanford Goldstein this past May. New to the Memorial Haiku page (even though it’s a tanka), available through Haiku and Senryu, is the following tribute poem:
summer sunlight
brightens the playground
next to the graveyard . . .
can I ever do as much
with my five lines down?
for Sanford Goldstein (died 5 May 2023)
On the “Moving Day” and “Luggage Poems” pages, available through Haiku and Senryu, I’ve added photos of each of these trifolds, and these photos now also appear on my Trifolds page. Lots of haiku and tanka trifolds to view or download!
As I often do, I’ve updated my Appearances page, this time with two new haiku events (October 10 and November 8, 2023) for the Iowa Poetry Association, among other additions.
And on my Rengay website, please check out the following:
I’m delighted to say that, with Ion Codrescu, I just won first place (and $200) in the 2023 Haiku Society of America rengay contest. Winners were announced 5 July 2023, and our winning rengay, “Yellowing Maple,” is newly added to the Two-Person Rengay page. This “Yellowing Maple” page also includes commentary by the judges, plus translations of the rengay into Romanian and French, both by Ion Codrescu. This rengay and the commentary appear on the HSA website and will also appear in the next issue of Frogpond.
Available through the Essays on Rengay by Others page is the text from “The Moment of Awe” (now on my site instead of just a link to it), plus “About the Poems” by John Thompson, which is his introduction to his Four Trails Four Seasons rengay book with Paul Watsky.
As always, thank you for reading Graceguts.