3. Graceguts. Speaking of cyberspace (does anyone use that term anymore?), I‘ve really enjoyed working on my
www.graceguts.com website, which is now just over two years old. The name is derived from an E. E. Cummings poem (for years I‘ve been a contributing editor toSp Juna f the E. E. Cu m s Soiey), and features selections of my published haiku, senryu, tanka,
ring or l o m ing c t
essays, reviews, reports, photographs, collaborations, sequences, haibun, haiga, interviews, and more. The Essays page, for example, currently has more than 100 essays, divided into such categories as ―Learning Haiku‖ and ―Studying Haiku‖ as well sections focusing on tanka, rengay, and book prefaces and introductions. I have many more essays and especially book reviews to add, some of which I will have to type up because I no longer have them in electronic form, or never did. The Rengay section of the site is, I believe, the largest single online repository of information about rengay (essays and worksheets) and sample rengay (for one, two, three, and six writers). My website also has some fun things like Digressions and Lagniappes, plus other content such as Poems by Others, Quotations (relating to haiku and longer poetry), and information about Press Here, my small press that has published at least one or two haiku books every year or two since 1989, including all of the Haiku North America conference anthologies. The entire site is an ongoing labour of love. I‘ve been getting great feedback on it, and site visitors have steadily increased each year, which is gratifying.
4. Essays. My Graceguts website features many published essays, but I have at least as many more that remain unpublished, covering such topics as the relationship between humour and haiku, t
e au(haiku revision), favourite haiku commentaries, the common aesthetics of haiku and tea nsk
ceremony, E. E. Cummings, the varieties and lengths of haiku moments, punctuation in haiku, differences between Japanese and Western haiku culture and communities, teaching haiku, and déjà- ku (my term for haiku that bring to mind other haiku, ranging from parody and allusion to cryptomnesia and plagiarism). The longest of these various projects (mostly finished) is a memoir I‘ve written about Jerry Kilbride, complete with numerous poems and reminiscences from many people who knew him. He was not only a wonderful poet and dear friend, but also amazingly skilled at connecting and inspiring people. In the year ahead, I deeply hope to push some of these projects out the door!
5. Haiku Northwest. I continue to be active with the Seattle-area haiku group. I manage the group‘s website at
http://sites.google.com/site/haikunorthwest/, attend the monthly meetings, and direct the group‘s annual Seabeck Haiku Getaway, which I started in 2008. The Seabeck retreat is a long weekend of haiku sharing, writing, and camaraderie, all very participatory, with a featured guest (before John Stevenson in 2011, we had Charles Trumbull, Penny Harter, and Emiko Miyashita). It takes a lot of work, and I‘m very grateful that Tanya McDonald helps so much with it—it wouldn‘t be possible without her (and she‘s a wonderful haiku poet, too). Washington State has the highest per capita number of members in the Haiku Society of America of all of the society‘s regions, so we‘re fortunate to have so much haiku activity in this area, with six active groups in and around Seattle, plus a Japanese-language haiku group. The area is very haiku friendly, too (among mainstream poets and beyond). Must be something about our close proximity to mountains, forests, the ocean, and Native American influences—or maybe it‘s the rain!
6. American Sentences. In addition to my neon buddha poems, which have given me a real burst of creativity, in recent years I‘ve also found a new outlet in writing ―American Sentences.‖ This is Allen Ginsberg‘s name for a seventeen-syllable ―sentence‖ as an Americanized variation of haiku. He wished to distinguish it from haiku, and ignored the haiku traditions of season word, cutting word, and sensory imagery, but did retain the here-and-now self-revelation that‘s common to the genre—to the point of brutal honesty (some of Ginsberg‘s American Sentences are surprisingly raw). My own use of the form has been more for humour than self-revelation, though. I usually record daft things
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