Dr Nasser Hussain

Puns have a long history in human writing. Most of us recognise them as those little gems of comedy genius that make you laugh, or groan, but they're useful for being more than just funny, they're also fundamental to what makes poetry work and they provide the engine of change in language by allowing ideas to slip from one meaning to another. Artist and composer Hannah Catherine Jones, comedy writer Jack Bernhardt, poet Nasser Hussain and Sam Leith - Literary editor of The Spectator - join Ian Macmillan to reveal the linguistic power of the pun.

Nasser Hussain and Jo Hamill are proposing a joint presentation on ‘The Space of Language and the Language of Space’, in which Hussain and Hamill will present their current and new work(s), SKY WRI TEI NGS and Gutter Words, and open them up for general discussion. Gutter Words (2016) was a sitespecific work, installed as part of the ‘Reading as Art’ exhibition, curated by Professor Simon Morris, at Bury Art Museum in 2016. Words were obliterated from an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, leaving only those positioned closest to the ‘gutter’ (the central margin of a bound page). The salvaged fragments formed extended columns, which were then sited in the architectural gutter of the gallery space – the corner. What appeared was a visual stutter, a concrete poem. Unconnected words were forced to connect across the previously unthinkable physical gap of the gutter. The viewer/reader was invited to make sense of a disparate set of words, formed out of the appropriated, redacted, transcribed, translated and constrained words of Joyce. Currently the work has returned to the page and the space of the book, where, the architecture of the page continues to govern the positioning of Joyce’s words, albeit in a subverted typographic space. SKY WRI TEI NGS (Coach House Books, 2018). From the publisher: ‘Poems written only from three-letter airport codes demand a new kind of passport. Every major airport has a three-letter code from the International Air Transport Association. In perhaps history's greatest-ever feat of armchair travel, Nasser Hussain has written a collection of poetry entirely from those codes. In a dazzling aeronautic feat of constraint-based writing, SKY WRI TEI NGS explores the relationship between language and place in a global context. Watch as words jet-set across the map, leaving a poetic flight path.'

In a dazzling aeronautic feat of constraint-based writing, SKY WRI TEI NGS explores the relationship between language and place in a global context. Watch as words jet-set across the map, leaving a poetic flight path.

A post for the South Yorkshire Poetry Festival blog.

Culture. at. the. 49th. Parallel. Nationalism,. Indigeneity,. and. the. Hemispheric. Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup he crossed. the border line in a northern corner four cardinal points for a better over there. created a here. one foot in A one foot ...

This essay takes as its focus Ron Silliman's 1978 marathon street-side reading of his long poem Ketjak in San Francisco, and examines the "special effects" of a poet's theatre when it is extended beyond the physical and ideological boundaries of the traditional, contemporary poetry reading. Copyright © 2010 PMC and Nasser S. Hussain.

Poetry Collection.

Invited performer, appearing alongside Next Generation poets Jane Yeh and Sean Borodale, York, UK, 2014

Keynote talk at the English Literature and Creative Writing Postgraduate Conference of Ideas, June 15, 2014

There are two ways to fell a tree. One is, perhaps, instinctive, if not simply logical: measure and plan carefully, apply your saw, stand back, and watch it come down. If everything goes to plan, no one will remark on your work and the job will be quietly finished. The only trace of your presence in the process will be a stump and some useful lumber. The other (far less efficient) method is to strike it with lightning. In that case, you will need a species of luck borne from the mysteries of physics, as the negative and positive ions between the atmosphere and the tree engage in a complex negotiation until conditions are just right, and then, your tree will explode in a burst of sizzling light. If you are fortunate enough to catch it in the moment, there will be an incandescent blaze, too fast to register, but the result will be a charred and jagged remnant, and very little else of value. But you won’t forget the way that tree came down.

An act of appropriative Conceptual writing, Nasser Hussain the poet remixes the autobiography of the cricketer (of the same name), into his own.

Collection of spoken word and Conceptual poetry

Book launch and showcase of seven international writers, held at the Tetley art gallery in autumn of 2018.

Bookended with “Propositions” on why tumbling is a skill that everyone should learn and “Extracts from Letters of Support,” each verso poem in this collection pairs with a recto illustration based on drawings from the source text.

POP rummages through the stale Cheetos after the love poem: what remains? What never existed to begin with? The book invites the reader to journey both forward and backward in time, to retrace steps, solve word searches, hold pages to the light. POP delineates the intensities of a volatile relationship through a variety of lenses. As the speaker tries to anchor her experience, she is met with a clamour of perspectives: it is a junk food fight of poetic styles, each line fried and seasoned using recipes passed down for generations; it is a sad clown’s skincare routine; it is a singalong, a cartoonish cacophony of pots and puns. The speaker shakes the love poem for all it’s worth, leaving behind a trail of lint, wrappers, fibs, and soap foam, but opening up enough space to move in herself.

Surface Tension updates visual poetry for our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and melts them into Dali-esque collages.

"Ink earl takes the popular subgenre of erasure poetry to its illogical conclusion. Starting with ad copy that extols the iconic Pink Pearl eraser, Holbrook erases and erases, revealing more and more.