1 February 2026

After a somewhat frenetic December, postings to Graceguts in January 2026 have been a tad bit more mellow, but still with some superb additions. Here’s the lowdown on all the highlights:

• The Books page now links to a newly added presentation of my 1985 collection titled Family. It consists of 30 concrete poems that had never seen the light of day beyond making the collection for myself. I posted photos of each page to Facebook on 6 January 2026, where I was surprised by the positive reaction. David Lasky offered to do some Photoshop cleanup on all my images, and those now appear on Graceguts, along with a brief explanation of the book.

• The Essays page now includes a large new addition, titled “Moon-Viewing Around the World.” It presents many dozens of haiku, longer poems, and prose pieces all in celebration of the moon. This was originally a script I prepared in 2005 for that year’s moon-viewing festival at the Seattle Japanese Garden, but expanded in 2018, and further expanded and refined in 2026. If you ever need a poem or story to share at a moon-viewing event, there’s plenty here.

• Also new to the Essays page is a 1988 paper from my grad-school days: “Sexuality and Language in Twentieth-Century English ‘Dystopia’ Novels.” This paper discusses Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, and was a stepping-stone to my master’s thesis, which I describe at “Nadsat and Clockwork Oranges.”

• Another large addition, on the Interviews page, is my previously unpublished interview with Seattle poet Paul E. Nelson. Have a look at “Duende and Open Form: An Interview with Paul E. Nelson.”

• The Reports page now includes results, with my commentary, from the “2025 Seven Hills / Penumbra Haiku Contest,” which I judged in November 2025 for the Tallahassee Writers Association.

• A lovely new addition to the Haiku and Senryu page is “My Poems in Kingfisher,” complete with images of many of the journal’s covers over the years.

• Also on Haiku and Senryu, I’ve added the following poem to “My Poems in Dadakuku”:

spring breeze—

the pull of her antenna

as we near the robopet store

This poem is a parody of an earlier poem of mine, which is why I’ve also added it to a postscript on my “The Pull of Her Hand” page.

• Here are three other poem additions, in order from “My Poems in Wales Haiku Journal,” “My Poems in Haikuniverse,” and “From the Zodiac Anthologies” (the first poem was also a Touchstone Award nominee):

still unmade

on the sick child’s lawn

the snowman

halves of a snake—

railroad tracks

gleam in the setting sun

correction

this poem is really

about natto

• Speaking of the preceding poem, I’ve added it to a new page called “A Few Corrections,” on Haiku and Senryu, along with two other “correction” poems.

• Freshly added to the Poems by Others page are these four poems:

  • • “Agon” by Branko Miljković

    • “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America” by Matthew Olzmann

    • “Pure Joy” by Joe Zaratonello

    • “The Three Oddest Words” by Wisława Szymborska

• And on Poems About Haiku, I’ve added this piece by Al Fogel, listed in the Bashō section:

Bashō’s frog . . .

four hundred years

of ripples

• I’ve inserted two new postscripts, available through the Essays page, as follows, plus a third something extra:

  • • “Seeing Into the Heart: Vulnerability in Haiku” (see second postscript)

    • “Haiku with an Agenda” (quotes from Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act)

    • “Haiku and the Art of Forest Bathing” (has a new quotation from none other than Obi-Wan Kenobi)

• As usual, I’m always updating my Appearances page, as my events for 2026 begin to take shape. And here are some other miscellaneous additions:

• • • A new photo-haiga for “my window opens / a hundred frogs / sing to the moon” (my first published haiku) added to three pages: “My Poems in Modern Haiku,” “My Window Opens: A Personal Haiku History” (an interview conducted by William J. Higginson), and the Haiga page.

    • “Moon Viewing” digression updated to include information and links for the “2025 Moon Viewing Haiku Contest” results.

    • A new lagniappe is in town, available through Lagniappes and Photographs: “Self-Portrait with Domestic Grass, 2025, courtesy of the artist.”

    • A photo of Victory Luncheonette added to my “Mysticism of Ordinary Experience” essay.

    • On my “Poems About Nothing: Learning Haiku from Antonio Porchia” essay, I’ve added the following haiku by Paul O. Williams:

a warm fall day

learning from the rock

to do nothing

I hope you might continue to enjoy Graceguts when you have nothing to do, and even when you don’t.