Colin Watts

Biography

I was born in Staines to the sound of doodlebugs overshooting London. I trained as a civil engineer and town planner, but was only allowed to practice abroad, so turned to community development and adult education, which I've done ever since in a 30 year Liverpool career of regular sideways moves. I've been published in numerous magazines and won prizes. My first collection, Human Geography, was published by Driftwood in 2005. My second, Taking Down the Tree House is due out from Headland in the autumn of 2010. I'm always up for readings (have senior rail card, will travel). I also teach creative writing and am open to offers I am a founder member of the Dead Good Poets Society, which has thrived, despite the vagaries of arts funding (and lack of it) since 1991, and which I currently chair.

Samples

GETTING THE HANG OF IT Maybe, one day, I shall get the hang of it, the mild and bitter, sweet and sour tang of it. The Cupid's bow-and-arrow boomerang of it, the why you never wrote and never rang of it. The chalk and cheese, the hard/soft yin and yang of it, the ego, id, the Sigmund Freud and RD Laing of it. The Adam, Eve-olution and orang-outang of it, the lock, stock, barrel and big bang of it. I hope to say, before I die, despite the pang of it, I've held it in my arms and not just sang of it. From Getting the Hang of It, Driftwood 2002. ZEN AND THE ART OF PEELING AN ORANGE For the first two years of your apprenticeship you will study and practice eighteen hours a day, steeping yourself in shade, texture and scent. Weigh the fruit in your hand. Acknowledge its excellence, forgive it its blemishes. Meditate upon its prior manifestations: cockroach, emperor, grain of sand. Enter its spirit. Pray for its soul. With your front teeth make an incision either side of the five-pointed disc where it was torn from its mother-tree. Relish the zest. Insert your thumbnail, trimmed to a chisel point. Execute a spiral peeling. At first, your crude mudras may either puncture a protective membrane, spilling the lifeblood of its segment of flesh, or detach a sliver of peel the size of a small coin, leaving the rest in place. Possibly, they will do both. After a further five years of endeavour you will be able to remove the skin intact with a single sweep of either thumb, creating a crude replica of the Bodhnath stupa at Bhadgaon, festooned in streamers of pith. Finally, as a Maharapurusa, you will, in the space of the beat of a humming bird's wing, create a living orange Buddha, complete with urna, toenails and genitalia, umbilical cord pulsing. You will place the shorn globe in your palm. As you tug on a single strand of pith the remainder will unravel like an old sweater. One tap and the segments will topple, naked as babies, to form the Dharmachakra. "After reading Zen and the Art of Peeling an Orange I will never dismiss citrus fruit as just one of my 'five-a-day' again." Christina McAlpine, Citizen 32. TAKING DOWN THE TREE HOUSE Lodged on a pallet wedged in the V of the big maple, open to any who could scale the ladder of battens nailed to the bark. Framed with two-by-twos dragged from skips; walls a demolished wardrobe. Floorboards from derelict houses. Roof, a panelled door, powder-blue, with a tarnished brass handle. Now the young ones have flown the nest, he climbs up there to throw great pots in the Japanese tradition; play a meaner, cleaner sax; celebrate his status as the greatest poet ever to hail from Staines. His neighbour tells him gently that it’s no longer safe. He’s right: it never really was. Several years and much love in the making: half an hour with a lump hammer and it’s down to earth and kindling.

All poems are copyright of the originating author. Permission must be obtained before using or performing others' poems.