Race Day

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter R:

race day—

one swimmer doesn’t stop

after the false start

Many of my haiku spring from memory, and this memory was in my first year of college, or maybe my senior year of high school. I had trained as a lifeguard and took years of swimming classes for PE, and this moment happened at a school swimming race. In one of the women’s races for front crawl, a false start brought everyone to a stop, except one swimmer named Kathy who didn’t know the race had been halted. She swam as fast as she could and no one was able to stop her until she reached the end of the first lap. She looked understandably befuddled after someone reached their hand down at the wall. The problem was that she had to go back to the start to begin the race again, and was already tired from her first lap, which was most unfortunate for her. I don’t know if she might have won if the first race hadn’t been halted, but I recall that she came in last in the restarted race.

I wrote this poem on 5 September 1997 at the Asilomar Conference Center while attending that year’s Yuki Teikei Haiku Society retreat. In 1996 I had written tan-renga with a dozen attendees (see “Tanned and Healthy: A Dozen Tan-renga from Asilomar”), and in 1997 I handed out copies of “Tanned and Healthy,” my very first haiku trifold. So it was natural to write more tan-renga with attendees in 1997, and that’s what happened here. Laurie W. Stoelting provided a response to my verse:

race day—

one swimmer doesn’t stop

after the false start

the deaf girl watching smoke

from the starter’s gun

I probably offered Laurie my particular verse knowing that she was an avid swimmer. I tried submitting to Modern Haiku in 1997, without success. It was accepted for Frogpond in 1998 but oddly was never published. For some reason I put this aside for a decade, perhaps because of uncertainty over why Frogpond did not publish this. Then I submitted to South by Southeast, but not until 2009, and in June of that year they published the poem (not sure if they published both verses or just mine—I’d have to check).

Something I’ve noticed about my haiku and senryu is that if I write about older memories, I have a stronger recall of the moment that inspired each poem than I do with many poems written from more immediate experience. I think that’s because older memories are sifted, with the ones that we can recall remaining more vivid, whereas writing only from immediate experience risks those moments not surviving as vividly in memory (despite the poems about them). This is not to say that one method is always better than the other, but as I’ve often said in my workshops, it’s not the recency of a memory that matters in inspiring haiku, but the vibrancy. It doesn’t matter if a haiku moment was ten seconds ago or ten years ago, but if the memory is vibrant, then we should feel empowered to write about it (although the vibrancy doesn’t necessarily mean the poem is better). This stance runs counter to the practices of some haiku poets, however, who insist on writing only from direct and immediate personal experience. They can do what they like, of course, but this approach seemingly denies the value (which might well be a greater value) of long-ago memories. Their stance privileges recency, even though all haiku are written about memories, even if the memory was just a few seconds ago. The duty of the haiku poem is to create a now, not merely to report on a “now” that just happened. The duty of the haiku poet is to create experience with each poem, to create the moment in each reader as they encounter the poem. It makes no difference how long ago the inspiration occurred, nor does it matter whether something “really” happened or not (which is often unprovable). What matters is that the poem remains believable and creates authenticity.

—26 May 2025 (previously unpublished)