By Pruthvi Khilosia

Manchester Metropolitan University presented the latest event in the A Body of Words series, offering critical and creative perspectives on body image. The event featured moving performances from academics and poets including Dr Muzna Rahman, Alan Buckley and Helen Mort.

The evening’s first performance was by Dr Rahman who read an interesting poem about the female body. Dr Rahman is a lecturer at Manchester Met in contemporary postcolonial and world literature with a particular interest in representations of food and hunger in literature and film.

She explained how she was particularly inspired by Roxane Gay, an American writer known for writing about women’s image in society, and she used that inspiration to begin the night with an in-depth poem about women’s body image in society, exploring weight, sexuality and links to her own identity.

Poets Mort and Buckley went on to perform their co-created live literature show exploring how we live through our bodies. They read ‘The Body Beautiful’, performed in a duo, alongside other poems about the prejudices faced by female rock climbers, the male gaze, our complex relationship with physical beauty, and the mystery of fire-eating.

Buckley, a psychotherapist from Oxford, explained how he was drawn to poetry through his personal experiences. “I wrote poetry and short stories when I was very young and I stopped writing as a teenager because and I was discouraged to write at high school as of the focus on exams,” he said.

“I came back to writing in my late 30s. I split up with somebody and the best way to deal with it was by writing and it lead my back to rediscovering that I am a writer. People often come to writing through some personal crisis to put a framework around their experiences,” he added.

Mort is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Manchester Metropolitan University. She has published two collections with Chatto & Windus, Division Street (winner of the Fenton Aldeburgh Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize) and No Map Could Show Them. Her first novel Black Car Burning is forthcoming in 2018.

“Body image has always been a theme in my own poetry, from perceptions of early female mountaineers to ideas about dieting and weight loss. I wanted to set up a series of events that combined creative and critical perspectives on the body, creating a dialogue,” says Mort.

Mort discussed collaborative approach of Manchester Metropolitan’s English department and that its “strength” of having writers and academics working closely with each other. She discussed hopes to start some new collaborations, commenting: “I think poetry is a great way of getting a message across succinctly and powerfully.”

Audience member Ann Heathcoate from Worsley told Humanity Hallows that she was fan of poetry and was particularly drawn to this event. She said, “It was powerful and moving, both the talk by Muzna Rahman about the grossly overweight woman and her experiences, and as an overweight woman myself I found that very powerful.

“The poems by Alan and Helen, they chose very powerful poems to to reflect on the body beautiful. I want to go away and write more poetry now.”

This latest performance of creativity certainly had an impact on the audience and added important commentary to the wider discussions of body image in society.

For details of future Manchester Writing School events visit www.manchesterwritingschool.co.uk/events”