Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

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 April, my uncle and I went to see award-winning poet Martin Figura read from "Whistle", his second full-length collection of poetry.  His performance caused quite a stir at Ledbury Poetry Festival in 2010, where he received a standing ovation, which by all accounts is not an easy thing to do at Ledbury.  Not only was this for the Shropshire poet's extremely poignant and unsentimental verse, but for his understated and - at times - humorous delivery of it.  Without having previously read any of Figura's work, I purchased Whistle before his performance as part of Cheltenham Poetry Festival.  Thumbing through its pages, first impressions of his poetry proved dark.  And relentlessly so.  I prepared myself, and warned my uncle. 'When Martin Figura was  nine years old, his father killed his mother,' as begins the blurb of the Whistle tour.  I could see where Cheltenham Poetry Festival were coming from when they booked the rather severe and low-...

I cannot say exactly when I first discovered Norman MacCaig.  It may have been at the beginning of this year, but could well have been at the end of last.  I found him through a tweet.  Six months or more is a long time on Twitter, and when tweets get to a certain age, they're as stubbornly elusive as a missing person who wants to stay missed. But I know the tweet was left by poet  Jo Bell , the director of National Poetry Day, and whose wonderful blog can be found  here .  The link she left took me to an enthralling 25-minute interview with MacCaig.  I liked the man instantly.  I replied to Jo by saying what how charming MacCaig was.  He had a warm sparkle in his eye that only Scots seem to have access to.  He epitomised charismatic.  Unfortunately, embedding has been disabled on the video, but it can be found  here .  Fast forward to yesterday.  I was sat in Stanman's Kitche...