‘Pain that hides’: poetic envisionment and the impact of COVID-19 on a runner’s final college season

Abstract

ABSTRACT When one college athlete's final track season is canceled due to COVID-19, he returns to his family farm to process a lost season with poetry. The author examined how a senior college athlete from the Midwest communicated the impact of COVID-19 on his final season of competition while quarantined on his family farm through envisionment building [Langer, J. A. (2015). Envisioning knowledge: Building literacy in the academic disciplines. Teachers College Press] during poetic inquiry sessions [Faulkner, S. L. (2019). Poetic inquiry: Craft, method and practice. Routledge; Fitzpatrick, K. (2017). Poetry, poiesis and physical culture. In M. Silk, D. Andrews, & H. Thorpe (Eds.), Routledge handbook of physical cultural studies (pp. 515–527). Routledge; Richardson, L. (1992). The consequences of poetic representation: Writing the other, writing the self. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125–140). Sage; Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). Sage; Sparkes, A., & Smith, B. (2011). Inhabiting different bodies over time: Narrative and pedagogical challenges. Sports, Education and Society, 16(3), 357–370]. The poetry read and written during the final four weeks of the spring 2020 collegiate sports season shows the athlete moving across Judith Langer's envisionment stances with authors of sports-themed poetry as guides in revisiting memories, people, and themes of a college sports career. The findings highlight the potential benefits of reading and writing poetry as athletic identity exploration. The author encourages athletic directors, coaches, and athletes to consider using poetic inquiry as an arts-based method to support student-athletes negotiating critical events, relationships, and identity that include cognitive and affective dimensions of sport.