1 January 2026

Where to start? I’ve been extra busy with Graceguts in the month of December 2025, with new essays, new postscripts, new commentary, new poems, new poems about haiku, and more, plus an entirely new website. Here’s the complete rundown, this time listed by category.

First, a video. On the Videos page, look for “Textures: 2025 Pulse Haiku,” which I’ve just added to my YouTube channel. It celebrates all 26 poems I featured every two weeks in 2025 on Pulse—Voices from the Heart of Medicine, for which I serve as haiku editor. Also look for “Pulse Haiku 2025” on the Digressions page, which also features all the poems from 2025, with images.

Essays

• A big new addition to the Essays page is “A Correspondence with David Cobb,” a lengthy set of our email messages from 2007 and 2008 (previously unpublished) about the state of haiku in England and the colonies, with an opinion or two, or twenty.

• Check out “A Look Back in Amusement,” which reviews some of my earliest poems published in Modern Haiku (starting in 1988), sometimes with proposed revisions (previously unpublished).

• Should haiku have an agenda? I point out the dangers of such a stance in brief commentary, at “Haiku with an Agenda” (originally written in 2010).

• As a sequel to a previous article, have a look at “Another Late-Night Misadventure with AI Haiku,” which presents ten poems I asked Gemini AI to write in imitation of my own style (previously unpublished). These poems underscore complicated issues. Read why I’m against the use of AI for artistic expression.

• Have a look at “Girl’s Day and Boy’s Day” (with photographs), based on handout text from a Seabeck Haiku Getaway presentation I gave in 2019 (exhibiting my children’s emperor dolls and samurai helmet from Japan; previously unpublished).

• A different kind of essay is “Shared Silence,” my new introduction to Beyond Emptiness, a collection of mystical haiku by Nicholas Klacsanzky, Hifsa Ashraf, and Jacob D. Salzer (available through the Introductions page).

• Meanwhile, on my Deja-ku Diary blog, I’ve added “Show Your Work,” which I also link to from the Essays page. It’s about parody, allusion, and variations of your own haiku, in which I quote many poems by Aaron Barry.

Haiku and Senryu

• New to the Haiku and Senryu page is “My Poems in Modern Haiku.” This is a major new website addition, featuring about 200 poems, including a few sequences and haibun, covering my complete and ongoing poem publication history with the flagship journal of English-language haiku.

• Also from the pages of Modern Haiku is “9066,” ten poems that I’ve just added to the Sequences page. I’ve also developed a PowerPoint presentation to highlight these historically significant and moving poems about the forced relocation of Japanese Americans in World War II.

• I’m pleased to have six poems (and French translations) in a new bilingual anthology, which I’ve added to a new page called “From Double Horizon” (with photos).

• Also check out “From Red Moon Anthologies,” a new page that lists all my poems (and links to essays) that have appeared since 1996 in these annual anthologies that commemorate the best haiku writing in English for each year. I also include cover images for each anthology.

• Individual poem additions include the following two added to “My Poems in The Heron’s Nest” and the third poem added to “My Poems in Tinywords”:

harvest day—

bare branches

puzzle the sky

downsizing . . .

snakes and ladders

from mother’s closet

long workday . . .

I sit in the garage

till the Zeppelin ends

• Two new pages I’ve added to Haiku and Senryu are “From Baseball Haiku” (with a biographical sketch) and “From Haiku: Poetry Ancient & Modern” (the latter with photos from the book’s three editions plus the French and German translations).

• I’ve also added six book images to “From Faces and Places,” and one image to “New Eyes,” my introduction to the same book.

Tanka and Haibun

• On the Tanka page, I’ve started a new page for “My Tanka in Laurels.” This is the Tanka Society of America’s twice-yearly online journal for which I also do all the layout and design.

• New to the Haibun page is “Local Hero,” from Contemporary Haibun Online. This piece is similar to an earlier haibun, “My Favourite Movie.”

Press Here

I’ve been publishing books with my haiku imprint, Press Here, since 1989, and like to enhance its individual book pages when I can. The following are some newly added reviews of books published by Press Here.

• A review by Wally Swist, titled “Three Press Here Books Reviewed,” covers Starship Earth by Adele Kenny, and two of my own early collections, Tremors and The Haijin’s Tweed Coat.

• A review by Tom Clausen, “Finding the Way Reviewed,” assesses paul m.’s Finding the Way.

• A lengthy review by George Knox, “The Measure of Emptiness Reviewed,” digs deeply into Lee Gurga’s The Measure of Emptiness.

• Meanwhile, on the Contents page for Fire in the Treetops, I’ve added links to each of Press Here’s Haiku North America anthologies that comprise this 25th anniversary compendium anthology.

Postscripts

I have a habit of adding postscripts to some of my essays, reviews, or other content, to expand on or sometimes disagree with something I’ve written previously. Here are my recent postscripts.

• A discussion of radical amazement appended to “The Seed of Wonder: An Antidote to Haiku Inflation.”

• Exploring setting and event in response to “The Pull of Her Hand.”

• Responding to thoughts by Kay Ryan that are relevant to my “Finding the Sky” essay (see postscript #4).

• Quoting Czeslaw Milosz on epiphany and the privileged moment in an addendum to my “Defining Moments” essay.

• Quoting Czeslaw Milosz again, this time in my “Haiku as History” essay (see postscript #5), from his Book of Luminous Things chapter on “The Moment.”

Poems About Haiku and Other Poems

I’m always on the lookout for poems to add to my “Poems About Haiku” page, and this month I’ve added three.

• “Buson’s Deer, Issa’s Rain, Chiyo’s Frog” by Paul Rossiter

• “Bashō’s Frog” by PoemToday (editor of the “Brief Poems” blog)

• “For Karai Senryū (1718–1790)” by Marc Isaac Potter

Also, on Poems by Others, I’ve added “Exercise in Timing” by William Carlos Williams, excerpted from “Some Simple Measures in the American Idiom and the Variable Foot.”

Commentary

New to the Commentary page are the following additions.

• Pamela Miller Ness on “Landing Swallow” (from 2006), with a response of mine

• Allan Burns on “Toll Booth Lit for Christmas” (from 2010)

• Ruth Yarrow on “The Light in the Darkness” (from 2010), where I’ve added a response regarding the origin of my “toll booth lit for Christmas” poem

• Kevin and Samantha, editors of 02 Haiku journal, on “listen” (from 2025, in their “Editor Feature”)

Miscellaneous

Enjoy the following additions and updates to miscellaneous Graceguts pages.

• On the Links page, I’ve reviewed and updated all links, sometimes connecting to the Wayback Machine where websites are no longer current.

• On the Blurbs page, I’ve added my blurbs for Beyond Emptiness by Nicholas Klacsanzky, Hifsa Ashraf, and Jacob D. Salzer (from 2025), for Paper Mountains: 2020 Seabeck Haiku Getaway Anthology, edited by Tanya McDonald and Kelly Sauvage (from 2021), and for paul m.’s Finding the Way: Haiku and Field Notes (from 2002).

• On my “Favourite Books” digression, I’ve added a relevant quotation from W. H. Auden, and on the “Dust of Snow” poem by Robert Frost, I’ve added a comment by Kay Ryan. I’ve also added a quotation by Czeslaw Milosz to “Fuji Over the Clouds: The Dangers of Travel Haiku” and quotations by Anna Kamieńska and Rainer Maria Rilke to my “Laughing with Karumi” essay. I love how the universe connects.

• On the “2025 Triveni Haiku Awards” page, available through Contests, I’ve linked to a YouTube video in which I help to announce the 2025 winners, and also give my “Finding the Sky” PowerPoint presentation (covering an essay recently republished by Tuttle).

• On “Haiku Invitational,” available through Digressions, I’ve now added details for the 2025 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival haiku contest, including photos of their 2025 Haiku Exhibition (featuring winners from the 2024 haiku contest).

• New on “The Last Leaf,” available through Sequences, are Italian translations Lucia Fontana.

• I’ve also updated my Appearances page to feature 2026 events, with 2025 now archived for posterity. Here’s to a great year ahead!

New Website

And yes, I have a new website. Or rather, I’ve created and will manage a new website for the Redmond Association of Spokenword, for which I’ve served as president for at least a dozen years. I’m letting go of being president for 2026 but will continue to curate RASP’s monthly readings and have taken over running the website. This site is now secure, heavily redesigned and modernized, optimized for PCs, tablets, and phones, and has new and refined content that greatly improves the previous site. I’ve added a link to the new site from the Links page. I launched this new site, at https://www.redmondspokenword.org/, on 9 December 2025, and look forward to making many new additions regarding the organization’s history, and to adding information about upcoming readings (last Friday of each month) and other events.

Rengay

Meanwhile, over on my Rengay website, I have the following new three-person rengay, all recently published in Frogpond:

• “Sea Crits” with Alan S. Bridges and John S Green

• “About Face” with John S Green and Alan S. Bridges

• “Melting Pond” with Subhashini Jayatilake and Lakshman Bulusu

That’s a lot of updates, eh? Great things to come!