Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

If a young woman put a poem of mine to song over 70 years after my death, I'd be chuffed to bits.   W.B. Yeats must be fist-pumping in his grave.   'Tread Softly' by Tiny Ruins

The year is 1994.  I am eight years old and I watch as Dad removes a videotape from its red and white rental case.  “Right then, Sonny Jim,” he says, wagging the cassette at me for emphasis.  “The first swear word I hear and you’re up to bed."  We had rented 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' from Movie Mart, our local video shop, and I was triumphant of my place on the settee.  The film was a 15 certificate and I knew I was pushing my luck by at least seven years by being there.  As a fan of the action and war genre, Dad was surprisingly tolerant of my watching scenes of violence.  Even obscenity within these types of films was largely overlooked.  At the time, my three favourites were ‘Labyrinth’, 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' and - thanks to Dad - 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day'.  So the rules were suspended for films containing guns, explosions and cybernetic organisms, but there was something about swear...

As I said in my last post, YouTube is an amazing place to discover poetry.  I feel very privileged to live in an age in which these online resources exist.  Playing a poetry reading on YouTube will never replace going to a live reading, but it does allow you to watch both historic readings and readings in other countries.  Plus, it does allow you to skip any boring bits or move onto another reading completely.  I've watched many readings by the former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, whose popularity prior and subsequent to that post speaks for itself.  In one of many engaging talks uploaded to YouTube, he says that when he's flicking through a book of poetry, he always reads the short poems first, just so he can get a flavour of what the book is like as a whole.  It seems right to do this, because trying to getting into the zone in a bookshop is hard thing to do.  To my mind, poetry is an ascension, then a descension -  or is it the other way ...

Now that my stonemasonry apprenticeship is over, I have time to focus on the element of the craft I can see myself making a career out of.  The two weeks I spent at a letter carving workshop in Oxfordshire was the very first of my placements.  All the other placements were all excellent in their own way, but there was something about letter carving - something about the huge expanse of creative possibilities that exists within it - that pulls me into that world.    For one, there's the meditative aspect of letter carving.  Before any letters are carved in stone, the traditional letter carver will first set out the letters onto paper.  Two horizontal ruled lines will be drawn according to the height of the letters, then these letters are drawn by hand.  And by hand I mean freehand.  No stencils, no rulers - no other tools apart from a pencil.  Just the hand and the eye.  It takes a lot of practice to accurately copy something as...

In an interview Jack Underwood did with Maurice Riordan and The Poetry Society, he said that there were probably only about ten really good poems.   He went on to say that there are a hundred or a thousand good ones, but the really good ones are hard to find. I admit that I have much more confidence in recognising a great song than I do in recognising a great poem, but that’s only because my musical journey has been much longer and more immersive than my relatively short poetry journey.   I’ve listened to thousands of good songs and thousands of bad songs over the years and in doing so, the difference between good and bad becomes plain as day, and the difference between good and great becomes just as obvious.   Similarly, in recognising the difference between good and bad poetry, the reader becomes more confident not just in his or her taste, but also in not having to justify that taste. A good ear for poetry leads to a state of what can only be described as a blis...

After Matthew Sweeney's 'The Volcano' A few days after I met you off the ship we walked to a quiet spot in the park and you told me all about your life in Europe.  I cannot say for sure how long we sat there but as the sun set I remember watching your hands work in rotation as you described how limestone is formed.  I laughed away some tension because you must have said layers a dozen times before you said that those layers were layers of sediment that compressed into stone.  Then you cupped your hands into what I saw as a heart but what you saw as stone and you tipped that stone onto its edge and onto its face to represent its three bedding planes for building: natural-bedded, edge-bedded, face-bedded.  You had earned enough money to get us off the island and the rest would go towards the stone we would use to build a house.  The moment you said that, you clapped your hands together in prayer and promised that it would be the softest, cre...

Worst Haiku Ever Rubbish, Rubbish, Rub- a-dub-dub, three men in a  Jerome K. Jerome.  Tuesday Haiku  Behind at college. How will I fly to the moon  before the term ends? {Film Spoiler Alert} Creed Haiku  #1 Time to get fast-tracked to a fight with the scouser with my dead dad's name.  Creed Haiku  #2 Yo Rocky, train me! Everyone you knew is dead and you might die soon.  Creed Haiku  #3 My name IS NOT Creed.   Well, okay - maybe it is.  Where's my title shot?  Creed Haiku  #4 My route to success:   bypass the amateur ranks  and fight the world champ. Creed Haiku  #5 Oh, did I tell you -  leave the mansion out of this! - I've been to juvey.   

In the 6am warm up,  shrug off the injustice of failing to recall the first of the dreams you'll have about her,  and meet the road. Make it want to feel the tapestry that exists in the kingdom within your chest, and run it in,  until the earth itself amends the terms of its inheritance. 

When you frown, your face screws into a knot not dissimilar to that of a clove hitch, though to compare you to a knot as useful as this one would be to labour it with a comparison it doesn’t deserve.  There is beauty in seeing a well-groomed, happy, obedient horse tied neatly to a hitching post outside of a saloon. There is no beauty in your frown. In fact, I do not know a horse, rope or post in history that has been afflicted with the separate or collective ugliness  of your scowl. I am reasonably confident of this supposition and I will stand by it. However, I must distance myself from objectifying matters, because it is an overly simplistic device used to derive an element of humour from a place where there absolutely is none. And therein lies my problem.  Or rather, your problem. So for fear of comparing you to something marginally favourable, it is only fair that I compare you to yourself, because the only thing that comes close...

I'm currently reading Matthew Sweeney's 'Black Moon'.  Sweeney has been one of my favourite poets ever since I discovered his prize-winning poem, ' The History of Glassblowing ' a few years ago.  For me, it's his sense of humour that gives his poetry lasting appeal.  It's inventive and often fantastical, and his poems are a real joy to read.  Humour in poetry requires a very light touch for it to work on more than one level, but Sweeney does this with incredible skill.  As a result, his humorous poems are understated enough to avoid becoming distracting or intrusive.  'How to Win the Lottery' is taken from his 2007 collection, Black Moon, and is absolutely an example of one such poem. 

I must join Matt Merritt at Polyolbion in drawing attention to Michelle McGrane's blog, Peony Moon .  In her latest entry, Michelle interviews Helen Ivory in which she talks about the inspiration behind her latest collection, 'Waiting for Bluebeard' (published by Bloodaxe Books, 2013).  That interview can be found here .  I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Helen Ivory as she was kind enough to publish one of my poems on her extremely well-regarded poetry webzine, Ink, Sweat and Tears .  I urge everyone to take a look.   The interview concludes with a picture of a mouse reading one of Helen's poems.  What more could you want?          

Why is the sky blue Why is it called boxing day Why is the sea salty Why is loft insulation needed Who is the secret footballer Who is banksy Who is the stig Who is gossip girl Where is chuck norris Where is death in paradise filmed Where is bora bora Where is downton abbey What is my IP What is the harlem shake What is love What is my IP address

Distracted, I open a new tab, go to Google, type in your name,  click Search just to see it there as a title  at the top, and go back  to whatever it was I was doing.  

My brother was told today that he's secured an interview to study Postgraduate Medicine at Newcastle University.  Out of a thousand entrants, only two hundred were accepted for interviews.  I don't want to jinx it, but it's some very good news after he worked so hard on his personal statement.  Here's how I congratulated him over text:      A response poem or a silly game of word association?  The half rhyme of Grove/Cole was a  happy coincidence.

Untroubled, unhurried,  loyal to the knock,  silent - they waited.   Time took leave of itself.   James rolled on his heels,  stopping at intervals.  Will watched a plane  and he did so open-mouthed  and that’s all he did.   A bush rustled somewhere.   Should we go? I asked.  James turned his head, looked at me.   What for? We haven’t spoken to them yet.  We’ve knocked, I said.  Yes.   And they’re not in.  He looked at Will.  Will looked down, looked at me.   I looked back at Will.   Will turned to James.   I thought you said they go to City.   You said the thing said they went to City   They do go to City, James said.   The thing did say it. Will smiled, relaxed.   Don’t worry, he smirked.   They go to City.   The thing said so.  Another knock.   They’re in, James said.   They go to City....

(Based on Sam Willetts' ‘Coupe De Foudre’, taken from New Light for the Old Dark ) A drunk bird falls at a rate that’s reckoned  as thirty-two feet per second, per second.  In Wetherspoons, her distance like a  collision beckoned: thirty-two feet per second  per second.

The bags on the ground a pound! The bags a pound on the ground! The bags on the ground a pound! The bags a pound on the ground! Wow , I thought.  I pointed. Those bags                        Those bags              Those bags Each a quid? Yes, mate. Good lord. You can’t fault the fee of the fruit on the floor! You can’t fault the fruit of the fee on the floor! You can’t fault the flaws of the fruit on the floor! Your fruit is free as I flee from your stall!