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A Letter From Richard:

I've just finished reading a wonderful book, How To Ride a Dragon: Women With Breast Cancer Tell Their Stories, by Michelle Tocher (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002), which, ironically, hit my local independent bookstore right around the time of the first Dragon Boat Festival here in Lethbridge, Alberta. My wife had talked me into being steersman for the city team, after a friend, Diane Randall, conceived of the idea in the wake of her own experience with our Breast Cancer survivor team, "Abreast of 'Bridge." At first it was a lark: we were a motley crew of thirty-something to seventy-something city employees and their spouses. We dubbed ourselves "Dragn r Butz," the idea being that we twenty bozos in a boat would give it our all, but would be saved by the name no matter how we placed. If we won any races after only five practice sessions and less than a month together, great; if we made fools of ourselves, well, with a name like ours, we could be considered the entertainment platoon. Well, we twenty bozos cleaned up! We made the A division and came third over all against teams with as much as four years' experience. Certainly this wasn't due to any excess testosterone or steroid-fueled juice apes aboard, though we had a few skookum lads and ladies in pretty good shape among our number. Rather, we like to think, it was on account of the cause -- bringing greater awareness and dollars to the research to cure breast cancer -- and the good training and enthusiasm we garnered for the sport. Dragon boat racing is now the second fastest growing and second most popular sport in the world, after soccer, apparently, and we're now talking about forming a permanent team and going on to other festivals, in addition to repeating ours next year. Long preamble, but I thought you might appreciate a look at some of the linked tanka that have come out of my recent writing on the experience. I am working on a longish haibun and have written some stand-alone haiku too, but let me try you with these seven linked tanka first: ~Richard

Tanka Series

Riding The Dragon   (first annual Dragon Boat Race Festival, Lethbridge, AB, 2002) by Richard Stevenson   for Diane & Gepke     dragon boat races -- breast cancer survivors toss petals on the lake, pray for their fallen sisters while witnesses hold their boats   *   "feathering" its called -- cocking the oar ever so slightly left or right to keep the boat straight, on course. Oh, that treatment were that sure!   *   a rose is a rose -- the team named Chemo Savvy know it in their bones; still, their muscles must ache less when they cross the finish line   *   stand on the gunwhales the coach advises steersmen -- get part of the blade out of the water and you will see better, cut your drag   *   we're all paddlers here -- those in the dragon boats who row furiously against fear's metastases, those on the sidelines who yell   *   Dig!  Dig!  One! Two! Three! the drummer yells to my mates. Power ten on three ...! I draw a bead from ball cap to lamp standard peak and hold   *   Six/sixteen! she yells -- six deep strong strokes followed by sixteen quicker ones. Engine room, power house lift us up until we glide free!

Notes

Most of the poem sequence will be clear from context, but so that the reader can see the literal images more clearly -- and their metaphoric and symbolic import -- it might be useful to gloss a few terms used.    "Hold the boat!" is a command given to paddlers to bury their oars in unison to stop the forward movement of the boat on a dime; in a sense, we're all inspired to do that by the bravery of breast cancer survivors who choose to buck conventional wisdom and challenge themselves physically after rounds of chemo and invasive surgery. Feathering is a way of maintaining a steady straight course with minimal movement on the part of the steersman. S/he rotates the paddle a few degrees left or right without reefing on the oar and that compensates for any unevenness in the paddlers' strokes. Engine Room and Power House are the literal terms -- obviously metaphoric -- for the different sections of paddlers responsible for the steady steam and extra power the rowers provide.    The dragon boat is a long, narrow canoe -- like boat that carries 18 or 20 paddlers in rows of 9 or 10; the drummer calls the rhythm and sits facing the paddlers from the stern, seated behind the dragon's head; the steersman stands -- I call him the vulgar boatman -- in back before the tail with a single long steering oar. The first three rows set the rhythm and the drummer takes her cue from them, calling the moves and hitting the drum accordingly; the next three or four rows are the engine room -- bigger, stronger oarsman in wider seats; the last group are the terminators my power house), and they are the first gear, so to speak, slowly paddling the boats into the starting gate, and performing functions as called upon by the drummer or steersman as are required in docking and setting a course.

Bio Note

Richard Stevenson is a member of the list-servers, WHChaikuforumworkshop and HaikuTalk, and is also a full member of Haiku Canada and The League of Canadian Poets. His most recent book, his thirteenth, is a collection of haiku, senryu, and tanka entitled  Hot Flashes ( Ekstasis Editions, 2001). He teaches Canadian Literature, Creative Writing, and Business Communication for Lethbridge Community College and is the steersman for the local city dragon boat team Dragn r Butz.

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