Once again, the 91��ɫ English professor is bridging the arts-sports divide as poet-in-residence. Sponsored by Canada Athletes Now (CAN) and other benefactors, she will make poetry of the games and the Olympians – two poems a day, published online.

You could call Uppal an old hand at this. Since CAN embedded her with the Canadian athletes at the 2010 Vancouver Winter and Paralympic Games (see YFile), she has also versified the Arctic Games and the 2011 Rogers Cup in women’s tennis at 91��ɫ (see ). It was her idea from the start, a novel way for this jogging sports fan and acclaimed poet and novelist to cross-pollinate two usually disparate worlds – arts and sports.

Priscila Uppal reads poetry at CAN Fund Athlete House in Vancouver 2010

She has immortalized speed skaters and lugers, hockey teams and skiers. Now she’s going to do the same for swimmers and divers, rowers and runners. It will be the first time she has ever attended the Summer Olympic Games and, for that matter, the Summer Paralympics, which she is also covering poetically. London will be a different experience for her than Vancouver. In London the venues are far apart, not centralized, so she’s going to travel by tube to take in events, but not hang out as much with competitors.

Every day, she will post one poem on the CAN website and one on the website. She will read her poems to athletes and – for something entirely different – to spectators watching events on giant screens in London’s Hyde Park. “My backpack will be filled with poems I can distribute. It’ll be fun. Most people will be in a good mood, not rushing to work. It’s a perfect situation for flash poetry or mob-style poetry.”

Like the athletes competing, Uppal has been in training. She’s boned up on all the sports and created an enormous binder full of rules and vocabulary associated with each one. It will help stimulate her poetry-writing muscle so that she can perform every day and be ready for the unexpected – like the luger who died on a practice run at Whistler. Some poems will blaze with glory, others will fall flat, she says. “It’s all part of the process.”

As she has done in the past, Uppal will also be writing about books, film and visual art featuring summer sport for the Literary Review of Canada in her Poet's Corner blog. She’s going to start with a piece about a book written by French literary critic Roland Barthes asking what is sport and why do humans participate in it. Look for meditations on The Bone Cage, a novel by Angie Abdou about a swimmer; Will Ferrell’s comedies and why sports are funny; Haruki Murakami’s writing about running; and Murderball, a documentary about paraplegic rugby players.

Next spring, Uppal will publish a collection her poems in Summer Sport: Poems,  the companion volume to her Winter Sport: Poems published by in 2011.

Here are the first lines of a poem Uppal wrote at the request of the British Embassy one year before the Summer Olympic Games were to kick off:

London Calling

Is it just me, or have you noticed
the growing legion of rowers along the Thames,
singles and doubles, fours and eights,
cutting up waves on the way to Trafalgar Square,
where, it is rumored, gymnasts tumble from one embassy
to the next, balancing on beams, vaulting off
to trampoline up to Big Ben to set the clock

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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She also discussed her new poetry book, , which at 8pm at the Monarch Tavern, 12 Clinton St. (at Henderson Avenue) in Toronto.

The entire and runs approximately seven minutes.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer.

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Research at 91��ɫ is broader than books, journal articles, scientific findings or data sets. In the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, research can result in a piece of poetry that moves the soul.

Like the Greek poet Pindar, 91��ɫ English Professor , an internationally acclaimed poet and novelist, is penning poems for Olympians, playing with such sporting terms as “air to fakie”, “revert”, “stalefish air” and “peel”, and transforming them into accessible poetry.

She is the Canadian Athletes Now Fund – a non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds for Canadian athletes – poet-in-residence during the , from Feb. 12 to 28, and Paralympic Games, from March 12 to 21. In between, she plans to head to the , which run from March 6 to 13 in Grande Prairie, Alta.

Left: Priscila Uppal

“So much about poetry is having surprising language and using it in unique ways,” says Uppal (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04). So using snowboarding words like “crail air” and “elgeurial” will prove inspiring, challenging and fun. “The sporting language itself is so athletic, it has so many symbols and metaphors to play with. I’m really looking forward to working with the language.”

She has already written a haiku for every sporting category at the Games. That includes skeleton, luge, curling and speed skating. “I think people find it amusing when they hear them.” Her goal for the haikus is to surprise even the athletes.

“This is poetry that can be popular, can be accessible to more people,” says Uppal, who has penned six collections of poetry, including which was shortlisted for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two novels, (2002) and (2008). Recently, she edited the first-of-its-kind anthology (2009).

Uppal stands at the intersection where sports and poetry interact. “It’s an untapped resource, sports language,” says Uppal. And people respond to it. Sport and art touch the majority of people in some way, but you rarely see the two coming together. Uppal thinks it’s a missed opportunity to communicate.

As poet-in-residence, she sees her position as intersecting with two traditions, public poetry for heroic figures and events, and the celebration of the local and everyday. “Poetry about the ordinary and poetry about the extraordinary,” she says.

Having a poet-in-residence writing about the Olympic Games may seem novel, but it is actually in keeping with a long, almost lost, tradition. That’s where Pindar comes in. He wrote odes to Olympians. And, there was a poet at the 2000 summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. But the other way it reaches into tradition is through the games themselves. During the Olympics, from 1912 to 1948, medals were awarded for five categories of art. Two people won medals in both an art and a sporting event. Uppal would like to see art return to the Games as Olympic events, as she believes it has a place there.

“It’s incredible, the power of sport and art to transform people’s lives, but we have to make the space available. This is a great intersection of sport and poetry…and maybe it will transform more lives,” says Uppal.

Take the Paralympics, for instance. These are people who were told they couldn’t do anything in their lives because of their physical disability, and they’re top athletes in their field. “It is extremely invigorating and exciting to watch them compete,” says Uppal.

Canadian athletes and artists, writers and poets share a commonality in their ability to transform and inspire, and they are all underfunded. Some of our Olympic contenders live with negative incomes, many rely on food banks and some have been known to live in their cars, says Uppal. At the same time, the country is having a health and obesity crisis, as well as a creative crisis. By bringing sport, art and funding together, there is potential to make a difference.

Her poems will be posted on the Web site, as well as 's own Web site, which will also list links to other places where her Olympic poetry can be found. In addition, CBC Radio One will air some of her poems.

The Canadian Athletes Now Fund has helped to fund about 80 per cent of the athletes at the Games. Donations made to the fund go directly to the athletes to help pay for such basic necessities as nutrition, training and equipment costs, and the donor gets a list of which athletes received their donation.

Uppal will read her poems directly to the athletes and their families over the course of the Games. “To me, it’s a wonderful, wonderful Canadian literary moment,” she says.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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