1 February 2022:
An Overhaul of Graceguts
On the last day of December 2021, I relaunched Graceguts after a hiatus of four months. The site had undergone a forced migration to a new system, requiring every single page (of more than 2,700) to be reformatted and redesigned, sometimes relinked, and in some cases restructured and rewritten. In addition, the site is now secure and optimized for phones, tablets, and personal computers. If you spot any dead links or have any other comments or suggestions, please contact me. The following are primary changes to the site when it was relaunched on 31 December 2021 plus other additions made in the month of January 2022.
Extensive redesign of the home page, with images for each of the main menu options, and a redesign of all subpages.
Creation of a new www.rengay.com website, with all the content from the Rengay and Rengay Essays pages moved to the new site, featuring this six-verse thematic collaborative poetry. The addition of much new content includes the following recent rengay: “The Corner Kick’s Curve,” “Even in Kyoto,” “A Moveable Feast,” “Oceans Away,” “Shaughnessy,” “Timberline Lodge,” and “Yesterday’s News.” I am also particularly pleased with the new “City Rengay” page featuring rengay about different cities of the world.
Broad revisions to the Press Here page, now with subpages for each of the dozens of books I’ve published since 1989 with my press, devoted mostly to haiku and related poetry. This page has sections for new and featured titles and for all titles.
An overhaul of the Photographs page, with categorized and updated links for many dozens of online photo albums—with more to come. These changes have been long overdue, dating back to the migration of all my photo albums from Picasa to Google Photos when Google acquired Picasa in 2004 and discontinued the service entirely in 2016. I’m still looking for links to old Picasa sites, but I believe I’ve updated most of them.
One feature no longer being updated, because the new system no longer supports it, is the old site’s blog, called “Blogistics.” However, you can still visit that page where you can read hundreds of archived blog posts. In place of this blog, you can now read “Graceguts News.”
Updated the FAQ page with new links.
Hundreds of miscellaneous link additions, link updates, typo corrections, and rewordings throughout the site.
In addition, here are recent additions for specific subpages of Graceguts (I’d like to draw special attention to a few major additions marked in red below):
Appearances
Created a new Appearances page for 2022 and archived my 2021 events. Many new updates to both pages, including new photos.
Books
Published a new ebook, Ocular Oracle, the fourth in my “hydrogen jukebox” trilogy of surreal poems, listed on the Books page. You can view the free PDF on the “My Word” page newly added to the Introductions page.
Assembled details about Noh, a book I cotranslated with Emiko Miyashita, published by PIE Books in 2010. Includes a sample Noh play summary, “Motomezuka,” a sample poem, and photographs.
Under the Seabeck Reunion listing, I added a review of the book by Maeve O’Sullivan.
Commentary
Added “Clatter of China” to the “Geppo Commentaries” section of the Commentary page.
Digressions
A fun new Digression added about “Haiku, Maui,” with numerous photos and videos.
“Noel” image added to my “Haiku Christmas Cards” digression.
“The Startled Moose” and “Naked Lovers” stories added to the “Typos Happen!” digression.
“Remembering Darryl Ford” section added to the “For the Love of Skiing” digression.
2020 and 2021 judges’ names, video addition, and other updates to the “Haiku Invitational” digression. See also my interviews with the 2021 winning poets.
Essays
Links on the Essays page added to three essays on my Déjà-ku Diary blog: “Bird Music,” “Buson’s Butterfly and Shiki’s Firefly,” and “The Unbroken Circle: Spontaneous Similarity.”
Added “Anxieties of Influence: Learning Haiku From Harold Bloom,” a major new essay published in 2021 in Blithe Spirit.
Added “Three Haiku Sequences,” a Bacopa Literary Review blog post of mine from January 2020, discussing my “Shēngxiào,” “Haiku Lessons,” and “Still I Go” sequences.
Added “Judge’s Comments on the 2015 Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational.”
Added the text to “Haiku Seeds,” my script for a video also added to the Videos page. This essay (and video) is aimed at school children to inspire haiku writing.
Further Reading
Added the essay “A Pre-Electronic View of the World” by Paul O. Williams to Further Reading.
Haibun
Added my very first haibun, “The Cat’s Bell,” to the Haibun page from my 1989 haiku book, Egret. Photos of the book also added to the new Egret book page.
Added “Rebirth,” published in Modern Haiku in 2020.
Added relevant photos to all twelve of the haibun in my “Historical Haibun” feature.
Haiku and Senryu
In the Anthologies section of the Haiku and Senryu page, I’ve assembled all my poems published in Global Haiku, the Midwest Haiku Anthology, and the San Francisco Haiku Anthology.
Added recently published poems to my Tinywords and Heron’s Nest collections.
Added my poem included in the most recent Haiku Society of America anthology, Visiting the Wind.
Added 28 of my neon buddha poems in a new 3Lights feature, with images.
Added five haiku, with Japanese translations by Toru Kiuchi, on “Haiku Forum Haiku.”
Links
Links added for Alba, Books on Asia, Guest, Haiku Forum, International Tanka, The Journal of the North American Japanese Garden Association, Kontinuum, Take 5ive, and Vines, where my writing has recently been published. Other links also added to the Links page.
Nothing
Added YouTube links for all the songs mentioned on “Songs About Nothing” on the Nothing page.
Poems
Added my one-word “pwoermds” dalliances, published in Pocket Lint in November 2021, to the Poems page.
Added “Better Apples” (prose poem) and “Unseasoned” (translation “experiment”), both published in Noon in November 2021.
Poems About Haiku
Added my own poem, “late-<season> wind” and Elizabeth Searle Lamb’s “On Reading Haiku” to the Poems About Haiku page.
Postscripts
On the Essays page, and listed on the Postscripts page, new postscripts have been added to the following essays: “Haiku as History: The Ultimate Short Story,” “Metaphor in Haiku,” “A Sampling of Cultural Haiku,” and “This Perfect Rose: The Lasting Legacy of William J. Higginson.”
Reports
Added winners and commentary for the “2019 Moon Viewing Haiku Contest” and “2021 Moon Viewing Haiku Contest” contests I judged for the Seattle Japanese Garden (no contest was held in 2020). A few photos also included.
Winners added for the “2021 Morioka International Haiku Contest,” which I judged with Toru Kiuchi, in English with Japanese translations.
Reviews
Added “Travel Haiku Along the Way,” a review from Blithe Spirit of a well-travelled haiku collection by Gilles Fabre.
Sequences
Added three sets of poems to the Sequences page: “Twilight” (from my 1989 haiku collection, Egret), “The Night Watchman” (published in Heron Quarterly in 1998), and “Tokyo to Kamakura” (published in Frogpond in 2021).
Stories
On the Stories page, I’ve added “One Christmas Eve,” a previously unpublished short story originally written for my nephews in 2001.
Tanka
“We Are All God’s Poems” sequence added to the Tanka page, also linked to from the Sequences page. This sequence was published in International Tanka in late 2021.
Translations
“A Year of Bashō” added to the Translations page, featuring twelve poems I cotranslated with Emiko Miyashita from our book on Bonsai.
Added my translations with Emiko Miyashita of all 100 waka poems from 100 Poets: Passions of the Imperial Court, our rendition of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, from an artbook published by PIE Books in 2008. Each poem is presented with the image of a card from the karuta card game traditionally played at New Year in Japan.
Added “2021 Traffic Culture Exhibition Winning Haiku,” complete with numerous photos, from contest-winning haiku I translated with Emiko Miyashita. This exhibit was displayed at Ueno Station in Tokyo in October and November of 2021.
Trifolds and Trifold Downloads
Added PDFs of three recent trifolds to the Trifolds page: “Carousel,” “Shadow of My Pen,” and “City Rengay.”
Created a new visual presentation on the Trifold Downloads page of all trifolds I’ve created, available for viewing or downloading.
Videos
Added several videos from YouTube to the Videos page, including “Moving Mountains” (a short video of haiku by me and Ron C. Moss, with photos by Ron), “The Well-Worn Path” (my video of a collection of haiku by Haiku Northwest poets, which I edited with David Berger), and “Haiku Seeds” (includes my segment on haiku, produced by the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia; the text for this video script has also been added to the Essays page).
In addition, I also launched or relaunched the following websites (plus a few other smaller sites), each one with extensive design changes and new content additions:
Hilltop Haiku (new, for a public haiku installation slated for Sammamish, Washington)
Rengay (new)
Thank you for visiting and supporting Graceguts. I hope you enjoy exploring all this site’s new developments, and my other new and relaunched websites. Check back regularly for new additions listed in the “Graceguts News” section of the home page.