Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Airport poetry workshop set to take flight
Dr Nasser Hussain, a poet, writer and Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett, will present his new work at the interactive workshop, entitled Skywriteings, which takes place from 5-8pm at the Alavit design store.
Dr Hussain explained: “Skywriteings explores the relationship between language and place in a global context. All major airports are assigned a three-letter International Air Transport Association (IATA) code (YYZ for the Lester B Pearson airport in Toronto, MAN for Manchester International, etc.). Some, like MAN, form discrete three-letter words. My project has been to comb the list of IATA airport codes, extract all the three-letter words contained in that list, and compose poetry from that pool of language alone.”
Dr Hussain has enlisted a collaborator, who will plot the ‘flight path’ described by each poem on a map of the world. The result is a poem coupled with a visual realisation of it, mapped onto the physical space of the globe.
The workshop will be devoted to an exploration of the Skywriteings project, comments on the work in process, and a gesture to some of the theoretical implications of the research. There will also be an opportunity for audience members to collaborate on a piece. It is hoped that the event will open up new and exciting dialogues around place, language, globality, and representation among students and researchers in and across Cultural Studies, Geography, Media, Literature, and Creative Writing.
This event is hosted by the Media and Place Research Cluster at Leeds Beckett University. Dr. Hussain published his first collection of poetry in 2014, now available through Burning Eye Press.