1 February 2024
The first month of 2024 has produced the following rumblings on the Graceguts front.
Perhaps my biggest addition is a new Donations page, plus Donate buttons added to the home page, Contact Me, and Graceguts News pages. I do have expenses with Graceguts, and maintaining the site takes many hours each month, so I would be grateful for any contributions you might be able to offer through PayPal.
A new addition to the Tanka page is “2023 Fujisan Tanka Contest,” featuring a poem of mine that won a Foreign Language Tanka Excellence Award. An award ceremony took place in Tokyo on 4 February 2024. Here’s my winning poem:
for a moment
from the train window
Mt. Rainier in snow
as if that could solve
all the world’s problems
New to my Essays page is “Haiku Gratitude,” a blog post about National Haiku Writing Month, originally posted on 28 January 2024 on J. I. Kleinberg’s “Poetry Department” blog. February, of course, is the official month for NaHaiWriMo, which I started in 2010—the shortest month for the shortest genre of poetry. Yes, you can do it too! Write at least one haiku every day during February! I’m providing the daily prompts on the Facebook page, which has nearly 4,000 followers.
On my Poems page, check out an untitled visual poem that just appeared in a brand new journal called Password.
And speaking of Password, I’ve added it to my Links page as a new publication where I’ve been published. I’ve also just added Scarlet Dragonfly Journal and Steel Jackdaw (which reprinted my “Why ‘No 5-7-5’” essay).
On the Poems About Haiku page, look for “Yes” by William Stafford. I’ve always thought that most haiku are a way to say “yes” to life—and “yes” to the here and now. Also new to the same page is a limerick about haiku, by Picakezdi, for a bit of amusement.
On the Appearances page, look for various new additions, including workshops, readings, and my being a guest commentator on “The Poetry Space” podcast hosted by Timothy Green and Katie Dozier on 1 February 2024 (coming soon to Spotify).
In addition to making routine additions to the Appearances page, I also regularly fix outdated links and make other small refinements throughout Graceguts. An example is that a Tricycle magazine essay by Robert Aitken about R. H. Blyth, which I thought was no longer online, has resurfaced, so I added the correct links on my page about the origin of Shiki’s “two autumns” poem, and in a review of an Aitken book. Another example is that on the Books page, my listing of Through the Spirea now includes a link to a PDF scan of the book, now available on the Haiku Foundation website. Usually I don’t list small additions like these (and many others), but they do happen regularly.
On the Press Here page, I’ve added an image carousel showing many of the books I’ve published. I’ve also expanded the “New and Featured Titles” section at the top of this page.
And over on my Rengay website, three recently published new additions, all on the Three Person Rengay page, are “Alakazam,” written with Sidney Bending and Margaret Rutley (guess the theme!), “Friday Night Out” with Michelle Schaefer and Dianne Garcia, and “Both Sides Now,” a cloud-themed rengay with Marcyn Del Clements and Subhashini Jayatilake. Enjoy!