1 January 2025

Loads of additions to Graceguts in December 2024! Many of them focus on updates to my Reports page, especially regarding contests, but also include a healthy crop of other site additions. I’ve been busy. Please check out the following website updates.

• A significant update to the Reports page is the addition of the 2024 Haiku Invitational results, which I cojudged with Antoinette Cheung and Garry Gay. This includes all the winning poems and our commentary, plus a video celebrating the poems.

• I’ve also added Haiku Invitational results and commentary for 2006, 2007, and 2008, where I’ve also included photos of the haiku stone installed at VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, British Columbia (see also my “Vancouver Haiku Stone” digression, where I’ve also uploaded higher-resolution versions of all the photos). I’ve also expanded my “Haiku Invitational” digression to point to these additions and also added the 2024 Haiku Invitational video.

• Also new to the Reports page are results and commentary for the 2024 Moon Viewing Haiku Contest, which I judged for two nights at the Seattle Japanese Garden in September.

• The Reports page now also features results and commentary from the 2024 Japan Fair Haiku Contest and (in English and Japanese) from the 2024 Morioka International Haiku Contest.

• On the Reports page, I’ve rearranged the contests with subheadings for related contests, such as Haiku Invitational, Moon Viewing, Morioka, and Ukiah. I also updated the 2007 Tofu Haiku Contest page with Internet Archive links and the names of poets that were previously unlisted.

• I wasn’t the judge but was again a cotranslator for the haiku section of Japan’s annual Traffic Culture Exhibition. I’ve added my translations with Emiko Miyashita to the Translations page for the 2023 Traffic Culture Exhibition Winning Haiku (displayed at Ueno Station in Tokyo) and for the 2024 Traffic Culture Exhibition Winning Haiku (exhibited with a “virtual” gallery while Ueno Station was undergoing renovations). These are particularly challenging pages to create, in two languages and with information gleaned from multiple sources.

• I’m excited about a new essay just added to my Deja-ku Diary blog and linked to from my Essays page. It’s “Shared Autumns,” about Shiki’s famous “two autumns” poem and numerous poems in English that allude to or parody Shiki’s original poem. Please have a look and share your comments on the blog!

• And speaking of essays, I’ve added a second postscript to the “Haiku Stances” essay on the notion of community. Another new postscript appears after my “Haiku . . . Under the Bedsheets: Juxtaposition and Seasonal Reference” essay—this postscript about John Cleese, creativity, and juxtaposition.

• My “Animated by Hope” essay now includes J. I. Kleinberg’s lovely “Hope & Love” artwork. Hope is my favourite word—read all about it!

• I’ve made several new additions to my Videos page, most of which I’ve also uploaded to my YouTube channel (if I created the videos). Here are my new additions:

  • • “Wide Open Sky: 2024 Pulse Haiku,” featuring all 26 haiku I selected in 2024 for Pulse—voices from the heart of medicine, for which I serve as haiku editor.

    • A video promoting Dance into the World, the 20th anniversary anthology I edited for the Tanka Society of America. The book was published in 2020, but I’ve only just now uploaded the 2020 video to YouTube (it was previously only on Amazon). I’ve also added this video to the TSA Anthologies page on the Tanka Society of America website.

    • “Another Country” features a rengay about trains that I wrote with Jacquie Pearce (the rengay also appears in her Last Train Home anthology). I’ve also added the video to the “Another Country” page on my Rengay website.

    • “First Frost #1” is my 2021 video featuring selections from the inaugural issue of First Frost, a haiku journal I coedit with Eric Burke, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, and Dale Wisely.

    • And, as already mentioned regarding contest reports, the Videos page now includes the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s 2024 “Haiku Invitational” video. I didn’t create this video, but I did serve as a cojudge in selecting all the poems that it features.

• Some newly added poems to the site include the following tanka (with Chinese translations and brief commentary by Chen-ou Liu) on my “NeverEnding Story” page, available through Haiku and Senryu:

Christmas season—

a year later

in the glove compartment

a tissue packet

from the funeral home

• The Memorial Haiku page now includes the following poems written (both in March of 1990) for Nick Virgilio and Jerry Kilbride:

hermit crab—

out of its shell

out of itself

mime

jumping

frog

• Three of my tanka were recently published in Fanzine with Portuguese translations by Francisco Carvalho. You can read them in “Ten Tanka Translations,” available through the Tanka and Translations pages. I’ve also added Fanzine to my Links page, where I list journals that have published my work.

• And speaking of translations, look for “Mountain Morning,” available through the Translations page. I show a handout I created with the following poem and three others translated into Japanese with a short bio:

mountain morning

all over the red berry bush

snow in tiny heaps

• A new Digression that truly delights me is “Diamond Head Then and Now.” It features a few family photos from 1983 taken at the top of Diamond Head on Oahu, together with a re-creation I took with my son in August of 2024 at the same location. My son was about the same age in 2024 that I was when the 1983 photo was taken.

• Another fun new Digression is “Haiku Poet Word Search,” which shows a word-search grid featuring words associated with me, along with a short comment and three of my haiku. Thanks to Kelly Sauvage Moyer for featuring me on her new website that helps to make the haiku community smaller and more personable.

• Another Digression update, on “Moon Viewing,” is that I’ve added links to the 2007 and 2024 Seattle Japanese Garden haiku contests I judged. And on the “Cherry Blossom Postage Stamp” digression, look for a new image of the United States Postal Service unveiling their cherry blossom postage stamp (it’s all the way at the bottom), plus a link to a Japanese press release. I cotranslated a waka poem printed on the back of 150 million of these postage stamps in 2012.

• On the Blurbs page, look for a blurb that quotes me on the back of Parent/Child, Teacher/Student, Doctor/Patient: New and Selected Poems by Robert H Deluty. Not a blurb I wrote, but I still thought it fun to add.

• Every year I direct the Seabeck Haiku Getaway for Haiku Northwest. In celebration of that, I’m pleased to have uploaded a blog post by J. I. Kleinberg: Look for “After Seabeck: 2024 Report” on the Haiku Northwest website.

• It’s just cosmetic, but throughout the Stories, Tanka, Translations, Woodnotes, and Workshops sections, I have added a grey background to all the publication or meta information at the top of each page, to match how I treat this information on the Essays pages and elsewhere.

• Oh, and I’ve updated the copyright year for all my websites to 2025. Happy New Year!