1 December 2025

In the wake of this September’s marvelous Haiku North America conference in San Francisco, I’m pleased to add complete coverage of the latest HNA conference anthology to various pages on Graceguts. It was a privilege to edit Nowhere Else with Chuck Brickley, and to publish it with my press, Press Here. You can read about the book as follows:

• Books and Press Here pages (newly listed)

• Nowhere Else page (with links to subpages, ordering details, and more)

• Selected Poems page (dozens of sample poems)

• “Nowhere Else to Go” (our introduction to the book)

• Contributor list (134 poets)

I’ve also added Nowhere Else to my Sortable Book List and the Press Here Book List (sortable catalog). In addition, I’ve added the following poem of mine to the “From HNA Conference Anthologies” page:

rain turned to snow . . .

my hand on the back

of the just-finished novel

I’ve been busy with many other additions to Graceguts in the month of November 2025, including the following.

• On the Digressions page, a detailed new addition is “2025 Traffic Culture Exhibition Winning Haiku,” featuring my translations with Emiko Miyashita of winners from this annual contest in Japan, complete with photos and a video of a digital exhibition of the winning poems. In most years, a physical exhibition has been installed at Ueno Station in Tokyo, but this year (as with 2024, due to renovations), they created a virtual exhibition, which was on display for the month of October 2025.

• Speaking of Contests, check out the “2025 Moon Viewing Haiku Contest” results, with my commentary on the top three poems for each of the two moon-viewing event nights at the Seattle Japanese Garden.

• And speaking more of contests, I’ve added “How to Start a Haiku Contest” to the Essays page, with a link from the Contests page.

• And now focusing on other Essays, a significant new addition is “Finding the Sky.” I’d posted this before, but this new version matches the text that just appeared in Ma: The Japanese Secret to Contemplation and Calm from Kyoto Journal, a hardback book of essays published in November 2025 by Tuttle. You can buy the book through Tuttle or on Amazon.

• I have also created a “First Frost Award” page, available through Essays, with appreciation paragraphs for three First Frost Award winners I selected in 2021, 2023, and 2025. First Frost is a haiku journal I coedit with Eric Burke, Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco, and Dale Wisely. I discuss poems by Cherie Hunter Day, Ron C. Moss, and Eric Sundquist.

• For a bit of fun on the Essays page, I’ve now posted “How to Celebrate National Poetry Month,” which reports an actual conversation with a “Windows Technical Department” tech support scammer. This riveting story dates from 2016.

• On my “Jump into Haiku” essay, I’ve added a link to the Haiku Foundation website where this essay was republished on 9 November 2025. The essay will also be used again, as an afterword to a new book I’m editing, to be published in early 2026 by the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival.

• I continue to make updates to my Deja-ku Diary blog, lately with the addition of a new poem by Julieta Lozano-Ramsay to the “Watching Haiku: Other Creatures” posting, and by Chuck Brickley to “Shared Autumns.”

• I’ve been able to make PowerPoint presentations out of dozens of my essays, poems, and sequences, especially in recent pandemic and post-pandemic years. Look for a small PowerPoint logo on any page that has a PowerPoint presentation to accommodate it, in case you want to ask me to make a virtual or in-person appearance using any of these files. My addition of these symbols on Graceguts is not complete, please note.

• Here are three poem additions, the first in Wales Haiku Journal, the second in Ginkgo Gold, the 2025 Haiku Society of America members’ anthology, and the third from the Haiku Foundation’s “Haiku of the Day” website feature:

snow falling—

the scarecrow’s mouth

doesn’t open

spring cleaning—

a little sand

escapes from the conch

fine rain—

the edge of the welcome mat

beginning to curl

• And here’s another poem addition (with photographs), this time to “My Haiku in the Queue,” available through Digressions, about a poem of mine installed for public viewing near Vashon Island’s north-end ferry dock, where everyone waiting to get on the ferry can see my little confession:

the old barn

where we first kissed

condominiums

• On my “Meteor Shower” page, newly added are five SoundCloud musical interpretations of my most widely published haiku, created by sevenism, project dirigent, ikjoyce, Jesús Lastra, and Night Note, all circa 2016.

• And speaking of poems, a big new addition is “2025 Haiku from Index Cards,” the first annual update to my huge earlier “Haiku from Index Cards” project, available through Haiku and Senryu. This addition sports 28 more recently published haiku and senryu.

• You can find yet more poems through the Sequences page. Look for “Art Prints for the Clothesline,” complete with photos from my visit to the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art that inspired this sequence.

• On “Haiku 21 Reviewed,” available through Reviews, I’ve added a postscript about Haiku 21.2, where I quote my poems from this sequel. And also new to the Haiku and Senryu page is “My poems in Dadakuku.”

• A major new addition to the Photographs page are links to the following, all from 2025, which I’ve also linked to from elsewhere on Graceguts:

  • • Palouse in Spring (this was a bucket-list photography trip)

    • Oregon Coast Weekend

    • Haiku North America (in San Francisco)

    • Seabeck Haiku Getaway

    • Winnipeg Wedding

    • Exploring Winnipeg (+Folklorama)

• On the “Poems by Others” page, look for two new poems by former Washington state poet laureate Rena Priest: “The Establishment Poet” and “Daffodils.” And on the “Poems About Haiku” page, don’t miss “A Run of Desires” and “Modest Distance,” both by Ann Spiers.

• On the Haibun page, a new addition is “Scenic Beach,” from the 2024 Seabeck Haiku Getaway anthology, Uncharted Territory.

• Speaking of haibun, Carolyn Kizer’s “A Month in Summer” page, available through “Poems About Haiku,” now includes an image of the original Kenyon Review publication from 1962. I have a detailed essay about Kizer’s haibun, most likely the first ever written in English, which I hope to publish soon.

• Here’s a bevy of smaller updates:

  • • On the “My Haiku Notebooks” page, I’ve now documented notebook #27 and its trip through the washing machine.

    • The “Short Sentences with Every Letter of the Alphabet” page (on Digressions) now includes “Blowzy night-frumps vex’d Jack Q.”

    • The Links page now lists Laurels and O2 Haiku.

    • The “Our Tanka Dance” page (available through Introductions) now includes my promo video for Dance into the World, the Tanka Society of America’s 20th anniversary anthology I edited in 2020.

    • I’ve rearranged the “Your Thoughts” page to present the most recent comments first rather than last, and also added two new comments, including this one (blush):

“You really are a haiku genius! I can’t believe the volume of fascinating work you’ve done, captured and presented in a most interesting way on Graceguts! I’m blown away.” —Linda Poole, founder of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, Vancouver, British Columbia

• As usual, I’ve updated the Appearances page, fixed a few broken links here and there, and made umpteen miscellaneous tweaks, including layout and alignment refinements. I’m hoping you won’t notice a single one of them.

But wait, there’s more! On my Rengay website, check out “Spinning the Globe” (a six-person collaboration), “Backgammoned” with Neal Whitman, and “A Spring Tale” with Sarah Welch. I also created a new “Seasonal Tales” page, featuring all four seasonal rengay I’ve written with my daughter Sarah.

See you next time!