This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
keep doing this as much as I can, although it takes a lot of work to select and upload the photos and to write all the captions.


11. Photo Haiga. Another photography-related distraction is that I‘ve recently created a few hundred photo haiga, although I‘ve hardly shared or published any of them so far. I‘d like to do a lot more. I‘m in great awe of folks like Ron Moss and Jim Swift and others who have created such wonderful photo haiga. It‘s one thing for haiku writers to use whatever amateur photos they take, but Ron and Jim begin with exemplary photographs, as does Ray Rasmussen. I‘m not a painter or visual artist, so I don‘t do traditional haiga, with proper calligraphy, but I‘m drawn to the possibilities of photo haiga. Most of mine have focused on blurred lights and neon buddha poems, most often with the photo coming first, but I‘d like to explore less abstract photos and regular haiku in addition to my neon buddhas. I really need to clone myself.


12. Haiku Handouts. Once or twice a year I create a new trifold flyer as a handout to give out at haiku events. I‘ve collected many of them at http://sites.google.com/site/graceguts/trifolds, where anyone can view or download them. They‘re mostly haiku, but I‘ve done a few on tanka, and one neon buddha collection. These are always a pleasure to give out at various poetry events. At my encouragement at early Haiku North America conferences, it has now become a tradition for more and more people to make these or similar handouts at prominent haiku events. It‘s a great way to share your work without the commitment of putting together a book, and it‘s nice to give them as gifts rather than charging anyone for copies.


13. Rengay. Anyone who knows me knows that I‘ll write a rengay at the drop of a hat. They‘re a great way to commemorate get-togethers with haiku friends, encapsulating the time and location of creation, and also a good way to get to know the writing process or aesthetics of another writer. I have many dozens of unpublished rengay that I‘d like to get out into the world. The year 2012 is also the twentieth anniversary of the rengay form that Garry Gay started in 1992 (he and I wrote the very first one together), and I‘m thinking that it would be wonderful to publish a rengay anthology to commemorate this milestone.


14. Local Poetry Readings. As if I weren‘t busy enough, I‘m also the curator for two monthly poetry reading series near where I live (in addition to my being a board member of the Washington Poets Association and editing its journalC


acdsae). One reading series is SoulFood Poetry Night, which


features two prominent Seattle-area or visiting poets, plus an open-mic reading. The second is the Redmond Association of Spokenword (RASP), of which I‘m a board member. There we feature a single poet or fiction writer, occasionally a nonfiction writer, plus an open mic. These readings routinely attract from 25 to 55 people each month, and since I don‘t have time to go to enough poetry readings elsewhere (Seattle is particularly blessed with a hyperactive poetry scene), it‘s nice to have great poets come closer to me. I‘ve written an essay about the local poetry scene at http://sites.google.com/site/graceguts/essays/building-a-suburban-poetry-community. These two reading series focus on longer poetry, but I do have an occasional haiku poet as well. It‘s also a good place for me to read my longer poetry, which I write a lot of as well.


The other day my son came home from his second-grade class with a little paper project where you flip three portions of a page to mix and match different parts of faces he had drawn. I immediately thought you could do the same with the three lines of a haiku, so I amused myself for an hour not only in figuring out the layout for such a creation, but the lines of several poems that would be suitable. After a bit of trial and error on the layout, and a few scissor-snips of the printed paper, I had my little creation. It has nine haiku, and you can flip parts of pages so each poem can have various


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