Literal Idioms: Teacher’s Pet

If I was a teacher, I would want a pet like this.

Literal Idioms: Music To My Ears

I’ve found myself somewhat tangled up in poems recently, but I continue to be facinated by the literal meaning of figurative phrases. This time I got inspired by Alistair Mackenzie who is a wonderful songwriter, dear friend and beloved contributor to the Take It & Run project.

He is music to our ears. Literally. If you want his music in your ears you can download his ep The Mess We’re In for free.

Pintrest!

Everyone’s doing it and I now have a pintrest page (http://pinterest.com/richardwatkins/) where I have built boards for some of the original pen paper pause sketches and the projects they led to.

Pin that.

Literal idioms: under the weather

Literally.

Literal Idioms (16) – I ran a mile

Continuing my stubbornly literal look at figurative phrases:

This guy looks like he’d be handy in a race.

End Of The Road festival: impromptu poetry/music collision

Special things can happen out of the blue. At The End of The Road festival, I was happily watching three of the boys from The Mountaineering Club sharing some of their musical talent on the Living Room Stage. I went on to read some of my poems on the same stage, and before any of us really knew what had hit us, we were creating a live collision of improvised music and poetry. Some of it was caught on camera, so I thought it only polite to share.

By the way – If you havent heard any of their stuff yet then enjoy them at their magical best via http://themountaineeringclub.bandcamp.com/.

THE MOON: This is my most recent poem, written for the Moon festival in China (which is on the 12th september), accompanied by “moon music” from Tom Adams (Piano), Leo Plunkett (Sop Sax.) and Richard Blake (Trumpet).

AGE: This is actually two poems collided together, both about the joy of getting older, accompanied by “growing older music” from the same mighty trio.

Celebrating ‘United Verses 译站’

One of the most exciting things I have been part of in a while is United Verses 译站, an exciting cross-cultural poetry project in Shanghai (all hail mighty conspirators: Andrea Fassolas, Tom Mangione and Laura McCrae).

The basic idea is that, working alongside translators, Chinese and English speaking poets mutually interpret each others’ work to share with the world in both languages. I was paired with 周海明 / Zhou Haiming, a wonderful Shanghainese poet who taught me a lot. Translation came from 黄佩佩/Huang Peipei and 杨希/Yang Xi.

Here is a short celebration of our encounters:

And live footage from the showcase:

Email me if you want copies of any of the poems.