Earlier this year Alfred A. Knopf published Simon Armitage's "Seeing Stars" , a new book of poetry. We were very pleased when asked if one of WW's works could illustrate the cover. Below is the cover, and one of our favorite poems from the book.

My Difference
by Simon Armitage, from "Seeing Stars"
I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my
difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as
much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my
difference doesn’t cut much ice. He wants me to dress my
difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it
on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May
Day Parade. “Tell me one interesting fact about your
difference,” he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my
difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse
and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of
dental floss. He says, “Er, that’s not really what I had in
mind, Henry.” Basically he needs my difference to die in a
crash, or be ritually amputated in a civil war. Then he
shows me a prize-winning poem (one of his own in fact)
about a set of twins whose difference were swapped at
birth by a childless midwife, and who grew up with the
wrong differences, one in the bosom of the Saudi Royal
Family and the other beneath the “jackboot of poverty,” and
who met in later life only to discover that their differences
were exactly the same. He wants me to lock my difference
in a coal cellar until it comes of age then take it outside and
reverse over with a ride-on mower, thus making my
difference very different indeed, or auction my difference in
the global marketplace, or film it getting a “happy slapping”
in a busy street, or scream the details of my difference into
the rabbit hole of the cosmos hoping to bend the ear of
creation itself. I tell him I once swallowed my difference
without water on an empty stomach, but he isn’t listening
any more. He’s quoting some chap who went at his
difference with a pair of pinking shear. He’s talking about
such and such a poet who threw his difference in front of
the royal train, or had it beaten from him by plain-clothed
officers and rendered down into potting compost or
wallpaper paste, or set fire to his different on primetime
national TV. And when I plead with him that no matter
how small and pitiful my difference might seem to him, to
me it makes all the different in the world, he looks at me
with an expression of complete and undisguised and
irreversible indifference.

William Wegman, Twins with Differences, 1970