How to notice the glaringly obvious | Dr Nasser Hussain | TEDxLeedsBeckettUniversity

Noticing things is hard. Noticing things is political. Noticing things is natural. What do we do when we notice things?

Dr Nasser Hussain will explore the connection of ‘noticing’ to the importance of acting. From his 2018 book ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’, Nasser will discuss where his inspiration came from and how this developed into the concept of airport code poetry. He argues that observation is key, but that it’s a process of building knowledge and there is an impact when we don’t notice the obvious. He believes that within the special condition of being completely bored and utterly exhausted, the obvious raises its head. Nasser will also explore the dangers of not acting on what we see and the economic, social and political factors that surround this. He challenges that we need to act on the things that intrude themselves into our consciousness and the connection of ‘noticing’ will progress our changing world. Dr Nasser Hussain has a variety of writing and research interests, revolving around contemporary poetry and poetics, embodiment and performance, and creative writing. In 2018, he published ‘SKY WRI TEI NGS’, a book of conceptual writing that composes poetry from IATA airport codes, combining the semantic, the poetic and the geographical. He is currently experimenting with constraint-based writing in various forms, including ‘Playing with Playing with Fire’ and ‘The Life of Form’, a project that consists of autobiographical poems about poets that have created specific form (the sestina, the pantoum etc), in the form that they created. He also researches the poetic appropriation and has a number of writing projects that seek to find and recuperate ‘lost’ fragments of language. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at

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