Poetry in motion

Writing poetry is painting pictures with words. We can all do it. Instead of dipping a brush into coloured paint and painting a picture of what we see or feel, we can take words and put them together, shape them and mix them to express ourselves. Each of us has a massive box of words to dig into. The possibilities are endless.

So what else do we need to write poetry apart from our box of words and our imagination? Centrifugalforces, a ground-breaking UK media organisation, has recently come up with an accessible and fun idea to get the Brits public writing poetry.

Every day, more than 50 million mobile phone text messages are sent in Britain. Text messages are used to tell jokes, to organise things, to gossip, to flirt and to inform. In a short time they have become an essential communication tool.

Text messages are instantaneous and short lived, they appear and then they vanish. But thanks to a new arts initiative from Centrifugalforces, a city in the north of England is looking at text messaging in a completely new light.

Last February, Leeds saw the launch of CityPoems, a public poetry project that gives her people a chance to create a living portrait of their city through text message poetry. It all began with a series of creative workshops led by writers and the people of Leeds were invited to write short poems of a maximum length of 160 characters about any aspect of the city that appealed to them.

Deaf pupils at a city high school were also involved in the initial stages of the project and staff at a local call centre were invited to spend some of their work time creating text message poems about Leeds.