1 March 2025

I’ve been productive in making new additions and changes on Graceguts this last month, not to mention a huge new addition to the Haiku Northwest website (listed at the end here). Here’s what’s new on Graceguts in February 2025:

• I have a new micro-chapbook! Please have a look at “Year of Rain,” just added to the Sequences page, published in February of 2025 by the Origami Poems Project, listed on my Books page.

• I’ve been particularly busy on my Essays page. A significant addition is “‘l(a’: A Haiku by E. E. Cummings.” This was originally published in Modern Haiku in 1998 but never added to Graceguts until now.

• Another new essay, previously unpublished, is “The Obligation of Democracy,” newly written about William J. Higginson.

• Also new to the Essays page is “Lines from Linda Pastan,” reviewing favourite or interesting passages from two books of Pastan poetry I read recently.

• The Essays page also includes a link to “The Brussels Sprout Legacy,” recently added to the Haiku Northwest website (more about Brussels Sprout below).

• And on my Deja-ku Diary blog, please check out “Mountains Are Mountains, Gardens Are Gardens,” which I’ve also listed in the “Deja-ku Diary” section of the Essays page.

• I’ve also been busy with several new Digressions. The first is called “Buick Estate Wagon,” remembering a car our family had in 1973, complete with numerous photographs.

• Another digression is “Miniature Poems,” which presents 564 of my haiku and senryu on a single sheet of paper (and yes, you’ll need a magnifying glass, but I provide one).

• For fun, try distracting yourself with the “Text Chat with a Scammer” digression, which presents screenshots from an actual conversation I had by text in June of 2019.

• Graceguts has surprise pages that I call Lagniappes. I’ve lately moved several of them into the Digressions page (or elsewhere, as indicated), as follows:

  • • “My First Poetry Readings”

    • “How 28 and 42 Became My Favourite Numbers”

    • “First Haiku Slam at the National Poetry Slam” (I got third place!)

    • “On Essays and Physics” (includes a Keats parody)

    • “Monsieur Joliat” (moved to Poems By Others)

In place of these lagniappes, I’ve created five new ones, showing Captain Haiku drawings by my daughter, a graphic showing haiku poets agreeing on the supremacy of haiku, a National Geographic “genius” cover, Microsoft Word’s suggested spelling of “haikus,” and (drum roll, please) a “Round Tuit” (because we all need to get around to it).

• In Poems by Others, look for two new poems by Robert Sund (“New brushes in a jar” and “I woke up with,”) on the “Ink Bottle Poems” page, plus the addition of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (including a couple of fun graphics).

• I’ve added new postscripts to the following two essays and one haibun:

  • • “Points of Growth: Learning Haiku Truth from Louise Glück”

    • “Down the Distant Mountain”

    • “Hearing the Owl” haibun (a seventh postscript, plus photos and two videos, about the “Spirit Lodge” movie)

• It could have been a postscript, but instead, a new subpage to “The Weather-Beaten Jizō: Shikoku Pilgrimage Haiku by Shūji Niwano” is “Virtual Shikoku Pilgrimage,” about a visit to Shikoku’s 88 temples at Seattle’s Koyasan Temple in June of 2019, consisting mostly of a photo gallery.

• Three new additions to the Poems About Haiku include the following:

  • • A video addition to “John Cage’s Mushroom Haiku . . . Mesosticized” poem by Stefano Pocci

    • “Ryōkan Reimagined” by Timothy Daly

    • “Ultimate Haiku” by Louis Phillips

• I’ve also created four new pages on the Haiku and Senryu page:

  • • “My Poems in Brussels Sprout” (38 poems, plus links to additional content)

    • “My Poems in Haikuniverse” (five poems, ongoing)

    • “From No Longer Strangers” (three poems, plus book images)

    • “From Glimmering Hour” (three poems, plus book images)

• On the Photographs page, check out three new album additions:

  • • 2017 Haiku North America conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico

    • Blurred Lights at Lusio Arts Festival (from 2018) (I’ve also added one of these photos at the end of the gallery on the Photographs page)

    • 2019 Poets in the Park festival (also linked to from the Poets in the Park page)

• New to my Haibun page is “He’s Got My Number,” written for Marco Fraticelli.

• My Haiga page now features “Four Etegami” from the 2017 Seabeck Haiku Getaway retreat.

• New to the Translations page is the following haiku of mine translated into Russian by Nikolay Grankin:

a firetruck parked пожарная машина

at the coffeeshop— у кофейни—

spring snow весенний снег

• I’ve made many smaller additions and changes throughout Graceguts, including the following:

  • • Updates to my Appearances page

    • A quotation by Vaclav Havel on my “Animated by Hope” essay

    • A Japanese translation by Shinko Fushimi of my poem, “the year’s first sleet,” on the “Fuji Over the Clouds: The Dangers of Travel Haiku” essay

    • Journal/text photos of The Journal of the North American Japanese Garden Association, which published my “Haiku and the Japanese Garden” essay in 2021

    • Instagram logos and profile links on my Bio and Contact Me pages (yes, I’m on Insta, though not very much)

    • A new graphic of my “elbow to elbow” poem on “From Off the Beaten Track: A Year in Haiku”

    • An appreciation for Graceguts by Ken Mullen at the end of the Your Thoughts page

    • A “Book of the Week” quotation and image on the “Haijin’s Tweed Coat” page

    • A photo of my “River Walk” trifold on the Trifolds page

    • A fun tip-jar photo on the Poetry Readings page

    • Delightful “Nothing” artwork by John Burgess on the page that’s good for Nothing

    • “Ottawa Citizen Article” moved from Appearances to come under Interviews instead

    • Blurb for Joshua Williams’ book, Silent After, added to the Blurbs page (on the Japanese term “yoin,” about the silence we experience after being moved by beauty)

Meanwhile, on my Rengay website, look for “Haloed in Red,” written with Alan S. Bridges, newly published in Frogpond.

And here’s the project I mentioned earlier regarding the Haiku Northwest website. A huge new addition that took about two years of (sporadic) work is Brussels Sprout, presenting digital PDF scans of 23 issues of this journal that Haiku Northwest founder Francine Porad edited from 1988 to 1995. This historical project includes subpages for each individual issue, complete with statistical data and a table of contents, favourite poems selected by 23 different Haiku Northwest members from each of the issues, Editors’ Choice poems, lists of contributors, and selected pieces of artwork. Connie Hutchison also provides a short essay, “The Blooming of Brussels Sprout,” and my essay contribution is “The Brussels Sprout Legacy.” Separate pages are also included for compiled Editors’ Choice Awards from all 23 issues, a page to directly access all 23 PDFs, and an analysis of statistics from all issues (in a total of 1,036 pages, the journal published 3,686 individual haiku and senryu, not counting 738 linked-verse poems, 80 tanka, 157 poems in sequences, and numerous other poems and prose contributions). An additional page presents and invites comments from site visitors. Please explore this extensive site addition and try viewing the PDFs of any of the journal’s 23 issues to explore its historic poems, essays, and artwork.

See you next month!