Profile of: Meghan Kemp-Gee

Award Received: SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral

Awarded for the project: The Lyric and the Athlete

Department: English

Supervisor: Dr. Sue Sinclair

What can competitive sports teach us about poetry? Can we "read" a tennis match like a lyric poem?

I came to UNB to write and study lyric poetry, and I’ve also been a competitive athlete since I was four years old, when my mother (a former professional tennis player) handed me my first racquet. As an adult, I've competed at elite levels today in ultimate frisbee and pickleball, and I’ve been coaching freestyle wrestling and ultimate for almost fifteen years. So I started getting interested in what my athletic and literary interests have in common. My academic research at UNB focuses on sports literature, and last year, I co-created the sports-comedy graphic novel One More Year; this year I'm also co-editing a comics anthology called Come Out and Play, a collection of LGBTQ+ sports stories.

 In The Sounds of Poetry, Robert Pinsky writes that “the medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth.” My dissertation explores my theories about how the human body works as a lyric instrument — both in poetry and in competitive sports.

“Lyric” poetry can be a difficult term to define, because it encompasses a huge range of poetic styles, genres, and categories. But like many difficult terms, I think that difficulty can be productive! In short, “Lyric” is typically understood as a kind of poetic event: a short, musical, first-person expression of feeling, being, or speaking. In lyric poetry, there is typically a speaker, or an “I” who speaks through or for the poet. Sometimes they speak in the poet’s voice, sometimes in a character’s, but this “I” always speaks through the form of the poetry itself—as well as to or for a reader, audience, and rhetorical situation. From antiquity through the twentieth century, the lyric poem has explored the dynamic physical and theoretical interplay between poet, persona, reader, subject, object, and form.

Like competitive sports, poetry — and that is to say all poetry, because all poetry that exists has form — is a way of organizing the expression, performance, and power of the human body. Just as an athlete explores the limits of her body's abilities, or pushes back against her opponent's strength, or keeps her toes inside the sideline, “the lyric,” as I understand it, always requires rules, lines, bodies, voices, and other selves to push up against — or to push through.

"Poetry people" and "sports people" sometimes seem to be a bit suspicious of this connection, but I believe they have more in common than they might think!  My major goal for this project is to make some fertile connections between poetics and athletics. I don't see these activities as simply interesting metaphors for each other. What if we "read" sports as deeply creative and humanistic activities? What if we "played" poetry by staging our bodies in action on a physical field?