Six Degrees of Connection

At the end of last year I was commissioned by Tyneside Cinema to write and perform a poem as part of a conference about young people and engagement in specialised cinema. You can read about the event here. It was a pleasing mixture of fun and terror writing a poem based on the conference as the conference happened. 

Since then we have developed a publication which combines a revised version of the poem, alongside prose which summarises some of the learning from Tyneside Cinema's Young Tyneside programme and the evaluation of it by Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, which can also be downloaded from the Tyneside's website here. The publication, Six Degrees of Connection: Towards the Absolute Alrightness of the Kids, can be downloaded from the Tyneside's website or in the Publications section of the Thinking Practice site. 

The poem got shorter after the actual event because it takes longer to write something short than something long, as anyone who's tried to write something good knows. Video evidence of the reading of the original version exists, but I'm not telling you where. 

It probably goes without saying, but I am very up for being asked by others to do this sort of thing in interesting places and interesting situations.