Embedded Files
It’s still winter where I live, near Seattle, but we haven’t had any snow (yet?), and I suspect we won’t this season, for the first time in many winters. As we shuffle towards spring, I’ve made the following additions to Graceguts in the month of February 2026:
On the Essays page, look for “On Nick Virgilio,” which presents my previously unpublished speaking notes from the 2009 Haiku North America conference in Ottawa, Ontario, from a panel I was on discussing the life and poetry of Nick Virgilio.
Also on the Essays page, look for “Luminous Things: On Czeslaw Milosz.” I originally shared these thoughts to my Facebook page on 7 December 2025, generating an interesting discussion.
And speaking of essays, new to my Deja-ku Diary blog (and linked to from that section of my Essays page) is “Haiku Withdrawal,” about the honourable necessity of withdrawing your poem if you learn that it might be excessively similar to someone else’s poem, even if accidentally. These things happen!
On the Digressions page, look for “Jack Straw Writers,” a description of my tenure as a Jack Straw fellow in 2010. This page includes photos, a link to an audio interview with me, and other pertinent links.
New to the Poems page is “H,” an “eyechart” poem recently published in Password—and crosslinked to my “In the Eye of the Beholder: Haiku Interpretation” essay.
New to Haiku and Senryu is “From Seabeck Anthologies,” collecting all my haiku, senryu, haibun, and rengay, plus essay links, from anthologies published in conjunction with the annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway retreats I’ve directed since 2008. These additions are only partial so far, as I still need to track down a few Seabeck anthologies to verify the poems they feature. Photos also included, with more to come!
On the Poems About Haiku page, look for Mark Young’s “Haiku Zydeco” (in the Bashō section), and Stephen J. DeGuire’s “My Method” (in the Santōka section).
Two other additions to Poems About Haiku are “Closing Word” and “What Haiku Is—And Isn’t” by Ryan Stone.
And on the Poems by Others page, please find three marvelous Robert Sund poems: “Friends,” “Let These Poems,” and “Sharp Lines.” Sund is an underappreciated Pacific Northwest poet whose poems frequently shine for me.
I’ve added new postscripts to various essays and prose pieces, as follows:
“Skywriting: Learning Haiku from Annie Dillard” (third new postscript, quoting Robert Sund’s “Sharp Lines”)
“Hand in Hand” haibun about September 11 (first new postscript, quoting two stanzas from Robert Sund’s “Autumn Equinox”)
“Hearing the Owl” haibun (addition to the fifth postscript, quoting Robert Sund’s “Here’s Home” poem)
“The Heft of Haiku” (fifth new postscript, quoting from “On the Difficulties of Translating Haiku into English” by Alison Kirby Record and Adnan K. Abdulla).
“Quiet Souls” essay/haibun (third new postscript about the permanent closure of Cid Corman’s “CC’s” cake and ice cream shop, one of Kyoto’s literary landmarks)
New to “My Poems in Modern Haiku,” available through Haiku and Senryu, is the following recently published haiku:
a fresh cartridge
for her inkjet printer . . .
lengthening days
And on “My Poems in Dadakuku,” also available through Haiku and Senryu, look for the following piece, which may well be my first emoji-ku:
W A R
A 💥 A
R A W
To conclude, here’s a miscellany of other site updates:
As usual, a few more additions to my Appearances page—some interesting workshops and presentations coming up!
On “Gary Snyder’s Earring” (on the Poems page), I’ve added three photos from Seattle’s Elliot Bay Book Company of a Snyder photograph that inspired this poem, taken in February of 2026, 14½ years after writing the poem
On “Meteor Shower” (available through “Haiku from Index Cards”), I’ve mentioned the inclusion of this poem as part of the 2019 installation of the Seabeck Haiku Walk
I’ve added Outlaw Poetry to the Links page
On the “Animated by Hope” digression, I’ve added the following quotation by Gerhard Richter—because it’s true: “Art is the highest form of hope.”
See you next month, when spring will have sprung!
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