TYNESIDE POETS!

TYNESIDE POETS!

Wednesday 23 December 2009

TRY TO UNDERSTAND ME



Try to understand me,
where I come from, where I’m going;
I’m drifting and I need you
to save my hopes from ruin.


You’ll need to know what splits me,
my need for roots and dreams;
it’s not the earth that hurts me,
it’s the tyrants and their schemes.


My father sailed the world before me,
to Rio and to Spain;
his father taught him shells and ships
and how to smile in pain.


Mother stayed at home and nursed,
came from a quiet place;
she ran the river and the green,
grew strong, with a gentle face.


I split my tongue in the early days,
shook off asthma as I grew,
fell into school and struggled out,
just clutching what I knew.


I was bred for something ‘better’,
for an office on fifth floor,
away from sea-spray and stray sheep,
with my name upon the door.


My mother and my father
scraped and saved for me,
bruised each other in the process,
gave up smoking and the sea.


Try to understand me,
why I’ve come back to earth;
it’s because I need to know myself
and the landscape of my birth.






KEITH ARMSTRONG

Monday 14 December 2009

Two Poems by Dave Alton

Reading

Often, while the house is quiet, I’m reading
One of the slightly foxed anthologies
Prised from its tightly packed bookshelf, its spine
So faded selection is mere guesswork,

Except for me knowing this modest library
And its order beyond cataloguing.
Sometimes, when physicists publicly
Contemplate a possible multiverse

I wonder why science has been so slow
To recognise what seems quite obvious
To avid readers. Pages of poetry
Are the absolute proof of prodigious

Fecundity inherent in creation.
Not only is the past and present
Pressed like rare blooms between heavy pages,
But the future also is cast in words

Already written. Possibilities
Are realised and explored, every page turned
Opens yet another world, which is why
Tyrants burn books. For the threat to them comes

Not from the poets who can be silenced,
But the poems that cannot be contained
By razor wire and watch towers. Even when
Committed to the pyre poems become sparks

Fanned by the wind and igniting tinder
In unexpected places. This is how
New worlds come into being, when people act
According to such illumination.

Reading, at its best, requires silence,
Although it’s in the silence that voices
Are raised in anger, in exultation,
Until even the full stops are screaming.

                     
Old Joe

Everyone down the club had known Old Joe,
They would have missed him, only the club closed
Two years gone, windows blinded with plywood.
Not for the first time police broke down his door,
Once they’d got their breath back having climbed
All nineteen flights, the lift being knackered again.
Who’d thought it a good idea to upend
A terraced street and stand it vertical?
Who’d thought it a good idea to stick
Some old gadgie in the very top flat,
Up on a level with the seagulls?
“Bloody good view over the Tyne.” someone said,
“Nowt worth seeing,” Old Joe had grumbled,
“Since the yards went, and my vision with them.”
Death leaves chaos and a dreadful stench,
Leaves the younger copper stifling a retch,
Leaves the older one bothered for a moment
By his own mortality. A clutter
Of sock and grey underpants, toppling stacks
Of the local free paper, chipped mugs
Stained with tannin like fingers jaundiced
By years of rollies. Anarchy of old age
Had not possessed Joe entirely it seemed,
For against one wall, in a bookcase,
Meticulously dusted and in order,
Stood proud volumes and selected works.
And by his decomposing armchair
An anthology lay open, face-down
On the thin carpet, making a small tent
Accommodating rebellious ideas,
Refugee thoughts from the world surrounding,
And a well polished magnifying glass.
However much his vision faded
It appeared Old Joe never went blind.

Thursday 3 December 2009

Two Poems by G.F. Philips

The following poem was published in the anthology Living Rights: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Stories and Poems (volume one (articles 1-10) by Flames Books, Birmingham, England, edited by Marisa Antonaya. The poem grew out of a couple of interviews and a series of photographs that the Burmese woman kindly discussed and showed the poet.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. There are in total 30 articles. In 2009 the United Nations celebrates its sixtieth year.
The quotation that heads the poem is from the photographer, Dean Chapman, who secretly took shots of daily life under the Burmese military dictatorship in the 1990s. The photographs formed an exhibition at The Side Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2000.

From The Testimony Of An Otherwise Citizen
for Colette Anderson

‘I find it impossible to be ‘objective’ in my approach to the joys, desperation and terrifying fear that the peoples of Burma experience. It is the indomitable spirit, their kindness, determination and humanity that motivates me to persevere with my documentation of these people’s endless suffering.’
Dean Chapman,1962

Rescheduled line closing in on Bristol,
Its cargo weighing considerably more
Than its usual crates where shades of English
Mixed with Burmese. The little ones their voices
Weak from expectation or the strangeness
Of a cooler landscape, pale complexion.
Hidden on board all the way from Rangoon
Like fraudsters living under pretence;
Playing up to the moods of sea,
Three siblings with enough noise to match,
Already toughened by father’s orders,
Their lives shored-up and stirring
From the dangers that always lurked within.
First it was the Yanks then the Aussies kicked out.
The army with their zeal saw fit to govern,
Beating unrest through more unrest, shouldered
The blame on those in retreat, and so were guilty
By their actions. The same when students torched
Your university. The soldiers raided,
But days before you had already fled.
Your father had his only weapon:
A billiard cue – with more hope than threat.

All roads straight, all led from the capital.
You clutching hand-held beads and blown-up views
Of Windsor Road where, flimsy like new shoots,
You had hauled yourself free of the good earth.

Another day the coast would have been
Your Shangri-La, as it was for grandfather.
Earlier that century he had roamed in
From Ireland, into the interior;
Though spoon-fed on occupation and famine
It gave him the chance to own a pharmacy,
What the army took out of private hands,
(As was discovered later) a return,
It was said – a going back to basics.

Another Sunday it would have been
Something sacred. Fussed over by servants,
Beyond serrated palms in the games room
Your father soon ahead in billiards.
He hadn’t played so well in weeks. Standing proud –
Talking compounds was more his thing. His rush
In the way he’d follow-through was lethal,
For each ball he had to slug he’d see as
his enemy to smash.

In the depression of the 1930s unemployed men from the North East were drafted into ‘instruction centres’, i.e. work camps. One such work camp was in Thetford Forest in East Anglia. There was a national timber shortage, and thanks mainly to them the forest is entirely man-made.

Floaters

As time went by they had to work for their dole money
In one of Whitehall’s appointed zones: the bleak railhead
Near Brandon where men from terrace were dragooned
Upon the heath – it was new to them.
In tented beginnings their eyes caught blown sand
Off Thetford Chase, its choking bracken,
Caught as the strange accents were between one people
That summer of 1936;
At first it was why they were greeted with suspicion -
If that was not punishment enough -
To make them want to turn back.

But then some men at the sniff of hay, local girls,
They forgot home and pride; themselves. They were a fillip,
An attention other than an ex-soldier’s orders,
What one must do and here’s the plan of action:
It stretched their limbs and patience to the maximum,
Putting up corrugated iron huts
That became for them their living quarters,
Complete with bunk beds and copper boiler.
Those huts in a row grew as the work grew
While the long exercise exhausted them;
Any thoughts of protest lost to men
Like cracked branches tossed aside in a gale.
Yet they lived in hope their spirit would not crack
Under the strain, be left voiceless, deferred; dry
As had this glacial plain.

On a long exercise more action
In the cutting of track in allotted space,
With ditches dug that some men were told to refill
Much later just to keep the backsliders busy,
A humiliation born out of superiority,
You know, the pointed finger, that kind of stuff.
But they still worked on a settler’s life,
Hardened to it, as ever, conditioned.

The bracken was gradually cut down, out of its tangle,
So all could see further down the nose of land.
As the settlers headed back to camp
The cleared ground opened up like a wound.

Next day the labourers were herded out,
Their bit done as behind them
The planters (the bees-knees) moved in en masse,
Yet their energy was soon stripped as loose bark.

Then in three years the forest looked primeval
From Gallows Hill the leafy way to timber.
But soon green trucks rolled over shaky ground
To carve out tracks through mud and spoils
While others with time off waiting for thumbs up
Took to local girls thrilled by their crisp uniforms,
Men living for today, close to the edge,
Seeing it as an interlude, dotage.

Thursday 26 November 2009

in blood





In blood I am
an apprentice boy of Newcastle.
Falling foul
of hacks and parkies,
I tipple and prance
and strum my poems at night.
I sing in the Blackie Boy
and tap-dance on tables.
I wear my shoes on my head
like some medieval surrealist,
a Geordie Bosch.
I go fleeing about 
down Pudding Chare
with the company of fools.
Pissing music in the dark,
like a ruffian
I wear curls around my ears.
The City Fathers will rail
at all my gay ribbons and lace,
my gold and silver threads
and shoes of Spanish leather
but give me the pudding-basin treatment if you will,
see if I fucking care you bastard Puritans,
you killjoys.
I’m a Jingling Geordie
and freedom flies nightly
in my flowing hair.










KEITH ARMSTRONG






Note:


The apprentice boys of Newcastle kept falling foul of the Puritan tendency. An Act of the Merchant Adventurers of 1554 thunders against their gay dress and 'tippling and dancing... what use of gitternes [guitars] by night!' In 1603, the youths are again enjoined 'not to dance or use music in the streets at night': nor are they to deck themselves in velvet and lace - or to wear their 'locks at their ears like ruffians'. All to no avail: in 1649, Newcastle's Puritan elders were still railing against ribbon and lace, gold and silver thread, and coloured shoes of Spanish leather. Nine recalcitrant youths received the pudding-basin treatment for their hair.
Despite this killjoy attitude it is nevertheless the case that the Newcastle corporation was unique among towns in maintaining a 'company of fools' from 1561-1635. Fools were otherwise confined to courts or noble families. 

Monday 23 November 2009

Competition

Word processing your creative work is great for only keeping the end result unlike the days of old-fashioned pen and paper, even the tap-tap of the clanking typewriter or smooth electric machine – nothing quite as physical now or needing to use all your fingers. So I thought it would be a good idea to show how a song written about a year ago developed into a song cycle with a narrative about the banking crisis/credit crunch. There is no crossing out (just a spell check), but the reader will be able to see how parts fitted into a new whole, what became a collaboration and subsequent work in progress with American composer, Adam Bruce.


DEALER:

Competition, competition,
Bulls or bears will grow;
Competition, competition,
Bids will come and go.

Everyday the bids flash up,
They’re flashing up on my screen:
Will you buy me? Will you sell?
They’re hanging there in between.

It’s game on a really gripping game on
And it’s always a thrill and chase for me;
And the hope is I can always stick it out
Or I’m back on the shelf, you see,

With competition, competition,
It keeps you on your toes;
Competition, competition,
Bids will come and go.

I mustn’t burn myself out,
But make a fast buck
Then the quicker I’m out…

Competition, competition –
I must live the dream;
Competition, competition,
Bids come fat or lean.

Everyday the bids flash up,
They’re flashing up on my screen:
Will you buy me? Will you sell?
They’re hanging there in between.

It’s game on a really gripping game on
And it’s always a thrill and chase for me…

If competition, competition,
It could flash my dream,
Competition, competition,
Bids come fat or lean.

Competition makes you…
Makes you want to dream…

*
Song One (from The Bull and Bear Song Cycle)
In and out of the Dealers’ Room

CHORUS OF DEALERS:

Everyday the bids flash up,
They’re flashing up on our screens:
Will you buy me? Will you sell?
They’re hanging there in between.

And with competition, competition,
It keeps you on your toes;
With competition, competition
Bids will come and go.

KARL:

It was Jasper, he struck this deal,
No way could I forget
For when you owe someone money
You’re always in their debt.

He said some tycoon wanted this shipping firm,
It will go down; its shares were low.
We can snap them up and sell them high
And it’s all because he’s in the know.

CHORUS OF DEALERS:

And everyday the bids flash up,
They’re flashing up on our screens:
Will you buy me? Will you sell?
They’re hanging there in between.

And with competition, competition,
It makes you live the dream;
With competition, competition
Bids come fat or lean.

KARL:

At first I didn’t know what to say
For he made great play of it;
But when we hit the jackpot we’ll be away
Because as he said if I stay on here
By the age of thirty five I would be burnt out.
And then the money I owe could be paid back,
And there would be plenty of money over
And I could start my own little business.

G. F. Phillips

G. F. Phillips is the printed version in the manner of my signature or otherwise known as Gordon Frank Phillips on my birth certificate, a printer’s son from St Albans. I now live on Tyneside as a tutor in Literature and Creative Writing for the WEA and Newcastle City Learning.

Tuesday 17 November 2009

When the Time Comes

Galaxies are fermenting in soup tins
Where one shuttle ends another begins
While wyrd systers start weaving red banners
Removal of hearts requires cold spanners
And a surgical spoon woven from grass
Owners of property contrive to pass
Through helium smiles as if the broad moon
Is only significant as a rune
Explaining how rocks may be defeated
How oceans might have to be deleted
How mountains shall be humbled, how a gorge
Might well be remembered as the last forge
Whereat Vulcan clattered and Wayland Smith
Hammered intricate lattice-work of myth
Speaking nothing of history rather
Telling the future is always farther
Away than is usually suggested
As it’s there hypotheses are tested
And one magnificent monument raised
On a plinth of ice, on a weak day praised
For the observation of lassitude
Which is sad, of course, and joyful, of course
When the book is written and yet the source
Is not even mentioned despite the sound
Of weeping becoming ever profound
Amongst atheists who learn to insist
The nothing they are sure of does not exist
So bring sandwich bags for the parapets
To keep certain revolutionaries
Unsure of what the latest wind carries
Now doctors are consulting flights of birds
Letting ministers explain why huge herds
Of pint glasses dashed against cobblestones
Is final confirmation no one owns
A single garden statue worth coaching
And that stars are just headlamps approaching,

                                                   Dave Alton

Monday 16 November 2009

DURHAM




Cobbled webs of my thoughts
hang around your lanes.
A brass band nestles in my head,
cosy as a bedbug.
I’m reading from a balcony
poems of Revolution.
It’s Gala Day and the words are lost
in the coal dust of your lungs.


Your dark satanic brooding Gaol
throws a blanket over blankness:
a grim era of second-hand visions
aches like a scab in a cell.
And rowing a punt up your Bishop’s arse
a shaft of sunlight on the river
strikes me only as true,
shining into the eyes of all the prisoners
swinging from Cathedral bells.

Old Durham Town, you imprison me
like a scream in a Salvation Army song,
release me soon:

someone 
get ready to hug me.






KEITH ARMSTRONG

Sunday 15 November 2009

STRONG WORDS FROM THE STREETS

Doctor Keith Armstrong on Newcastle writer Jack Common (1903-68) and the poetry of community in the North East


I have known Jack Common since the sixth form of Heaton Grammar School in
Newcastle upon Tyne when I was introduced to his novel of working class life
on the streets of my own Heaton, 'Kiddar's Luck' and its sequel on growing
up in Newcastle, 'The Ampersand'.
He struck me as a man after my own heart. Someone who knew his roots, who
had come from the same streets as mine. His father was a railway worker,
mine from the shipyards.
We had a shared sense of the industrial heritage of Newcastle, and a sense
of community.
When I walked along the Fourth Avenue where he was born, and down its back
lane, the colour of his words and the characters that haunt him sprang to
life. A gritty realism tinged with the remembrance of things past, the
shouts of the street-hawkers and the cries of kids playing in the gutters of
the early twentieth century.
He stayed with me as I went to college and began work in the library world
in the 1960s, which I later left for community work and the life of the
political activist in the seventies, and he is still with me now as a
guardian soul looking over my slim shoulders as I try to make sense of his
life and work. Sometimes I wish he'd go away.
With a name like Jack Common he had to be on the side of the common folk -
and he was.

'A commitment to the virtues of the common man formed the basis
of Jack Common's political beliefs. For a better - socialist - society would
never be produced through political programmes designed by intellectuals,
planners and professional politicians - no matter how well intentioned. The
roots of a better society had to be established within the daily practices,
the hope and aspirations of the ordinary men and women who made up the
working class.' (Strong Words, 1977).

It was through this kind of inspiration that myself and others established
the Strong Words community publishing project in the North East of England
back in 1977.
Its aim was to publish booklets based on the lives and experiences of
working people in the area, expressed throught the words of the people
themselves.

'It is this belief in the importance of strengthening cultural
traditions within the working class which forms the strongest link between
Jack Common and the Strong Words project.' (Strong Words, 1977).

Through its publications and events, the project attempted to express
working class people's living experience in the North East of England
through the words of the people themselves; their own stories told in prose,
in verse, in conversation. Working people were given the opportunity to
publish and communicate their own feelings and ideas - about the past and
future; about work and the lack of it; about family life, having children
and being a child; about problems and happiness, victories and defeats. And
in a booklet that was cheap enough for people to afford.
Strong Words was based upon the belief that it is important to retain and
strengthen cultural heritage in a way that allows working people to benefit
from each other's experiences.

'So much is written about  working class people (in the press, on TV, in
academic books and journals) but very little is written by them. The purpose of
Strong Words was to 'alter this a little by encouraging people to write of their
own experiences or to document them through recorded conversations. In this respect,
we hope that these booklets will come as a breath of fresh air. Above all, we hope
that they will be read and discussed in pubs and clubs, workplaces and
communities throughout the area.' (Strong Words, 1977).


Strong Words and subsequent projects could be said to be influenced by the
likes of Tommy Armstrong and his fellow pitman-poet Joseph Skipsey, who
describes his own background vividly:

'I had no means of education to speak of. I was born on St Patrick's Day,
1832, in the village of Percy Main, near North Shields. That was the time of
the great colliery strike. My father was one of the leading men among the
miners of our village and whilst trying to keep between his workmates and
police was shot dead outside the "Pineapple Inn" near Chirton. My mother
Bella was left with eight children of whom I was the youngest, only four
months old.
When I was seven years of age I went to work down the pit but even the mere
pittance that I earned was of importance to a family such as ours, for those
were times of desperate poverty. I became a trapper boy. I worked from
twelve to sixteen hours a day in the bowels of the earth, seeing daylight
only on Sundays for this was a life of work and sleep. That was when I
taught myself to write. Mostly I sat in complete darkness, but occasionally
a kindly miner would give me the end of his tallow candle which I struck
against the wall with a bit of clay. At such happy seasons I amused myself
by drawing figures upon the trapdoor and trying to write words by copying
from hand-bills and notices I found from time to time ... I had begun to
write down some of the verses that I had made, and here I ought to explain
that I never wrote anything with a view to publication. I made verses
because it seemed a natural and delightful thing to do. Most of my smaller
pieces were composed as I was walking to and from the pit and some of these
have been praised as among the best I have written.'

'Oh sleep,
Oh sleep my little baby,
Thou wilt wake thy father with thy cries
And he unto the pit must go before the sun begins to rise.
He'll toll for thee the whole day long
And, when the weary work is o'er,
He'll whistle thee a merry song
And drive the bogies from the door'.

(Skipsey, J., 1991)

Indeed, it was only when Skipsey attempted to ape the stylistic manner of
the 'literati' of the day that his writing ran hollow. In this he was like
the Scots border poet James Hogg who, as:

'the self-educated shepherd established his reputation as a writer and came
into contact with the sophisticated literary world of Edinburgh, the
predictable consequence was that he accepted too uncritically the validity
of Edinburgh's opinions and fashions. As a result, many of his works are
simply attempts to produce the kind of writing that he thought Edinburgh
would admire - and this is one of the main reasons for the existence of the
large body of unsuccessful verse which has done so much to harm his
reputation ... Most of Hogg's best poetry was written when his object was to
please himself rather than Edinburgh. Thus his many excellent songs make no
concessions to the taste of genteel society, but are rather written in the
spirit of the traditional folk songs he knew as a child in Ettrick Forest.'
(Mack, D.S., 1970).

Such tensions are as valid today as they were in the days of both Skipsey
and Hogg; indeed, I feel them in my own writing and in my concern to speak
with a regional non-metropolitan voice.

It is this concern which is at the heart of Strong Words, Durham
Voices and Northern Voices. Listen, for example, to retired miner Fred
Scott of Newburn (1983):


'There's a lot who have authority but it's only power that's got a hold of
them. It's not that the man is any different to me. The pollis is only a man
the same as me. I don't think the vicar will be any better than me as
regards living, to live a life. To help everybody - that's been my mainstay
in all my life, right from a kid. We were fetched up that way - to care for
people, and I've just continued on. We're all born the same and we all go
back the same, and I say they shouldn't be allowed to hold as much land,
none of them, because they're strangling the people with what they're doing.
It's still going on. The whole lot of them are living off your back. These
people are born into it, they've got it, and they're going to make sure you
don't get it - but you're the man who's working, you're the man that's using
the shovel. Freedom's a fascination. That's the main thing. Nobody to tell
you to do this or do that. Free as the dicky birds'.

And to farmer Joe Yeats of Gilsland in the booklet 'Missile Village'
(1978), reflecting on the impact of the Blue Streak rocker launcher development programme at nearby Spadeadam:

'Spadeadam was a good thing in a sense. We had no dole then in this part of
the country. It was a big miss when it finished. But to me it was a useless
asset. I suppose they would know what they were doing probably, but to me it
was still a waste of money. When I was up in them fields out there, I would
see this big puff of smoke over Spadeadam and I'd think "Hey up, there's a
few more thousand pound gone up in the sky there". That's all it was, a puff
of smoke, you know'.

A feature of many of the Strong Words/Northern Voices publications has
been the attempt to link past and present by including material from young
and old alike to reflect changing times in their communities. This from
youngsters Jonathan Scott and Pamela Staley (1991):

HANDS

A miner's hands are cold and cracked;
A miner's hands are cold and damp;
A miner's hands are never young;
A miner's hands are worn and dirty;
A miner's hands are sore and aching;
A miner's hands are always painful;
A miner's hands are his life-long tools:
Hands for playing when he is young,
Hands for working when he is strong,
Hands for begging when his life is almost done.

These poems by young people were in the tradition of the Teesdale lead-miner
poet Richard Watson, described here by Claude Watson (Northern Voices, 1991):

'Dick Watson was a good poet. He worked at Wire Gill but it was well known
that he was fairly useless - and his wife was worse. At Wire Gill, there was
a man who worked the horses; he drew the level. This chap used to get up
early in the morning to get his horse ready for the start of work. He had a
young lad that helped him. One morning he said to the young lad, 'Now, lad,
thou just lie on this morning and watch the pantomime when 'Poetry Dick'
gets up, what with bits of string and newspaper, 'tis a bonny pantomime!'
Everything was fastened up with bits of string and newspaper to keep him
warm!'

'Poetry Dick':

'Mary, what is there here
But toil and poverty?
As for the friends you're speaking of,
What have they done for me?
Here I may sweat and dig for lead,
'Mid smoke and dust to earn my bread,
And I go half clothed and half fed,
Till I can work no more.'

In the publication 'Where Explosions Are No More' (1988), miner John Egan of Trimdon
told his own story, the basis of a touring show which portrayed his life in narrative,
poetry and folk-song:

'The first pony I got was a grand little fella. They called him 'Spring'. I
always remember Spring. I can see him now, Spring, he was grey. All the
ponies had names before they came down the pit: Boxer, Whiskey, Mottram,
Martin, all sorts of names, but my pony was Spring.'

The booklet also featured poems and stories by local children like Dianne
Duddin:

PIT PONIES

Pit ponies are blinded in the sunlight but, down in the pit, the ponies can
see in the dark.
And the ponies pull the coal around like slaves, and for their night they
rest in peace.

Whilst the pits are obviously gone, the tradition is not entirely lost and
the culture is preserved by bands like 'The Whisky Priests' (1996), a young group
from Sherburn village, though they are admittedly an exception to the general rule:

'This village draws me,
I hear it calling me back through the years.
Its people are its life-blood,
I am its joy, I am its tears ...

This village haunts me,
Its whispering hurt tears at my soul.
Oh why did I forsake you?
Welcome me back, welcome me home.

A sacred bond exists here
Between the land and the people it owns.
It grants no escape from the realms of its fate,
It reaps the crops we have sown.

This village has made me all that I am
This village is calling me home.'

A sense of place, of Northumbrian roots, is also crucial to an understanding
of the life and work of Tyneside's famous son, wood-engraver Thomas Bewick
(1753-1828). It is particularly evident in Bewick's Memoir (1979):

'Well do I remember to this day, my father's well known Whistle which called
me home - he went to a little distance from the House, where nothing
obstructed the sound, and whistled so loud through his finger and thumb -
that in the still hours of the Evening, it might be heard echoing up the
vale of the Tyne to a very great distance...
From the little window at my bed-stead, I noticed all the varying seasons
of the year, and when the spring put in, I felt charmed with the music of
the birds, which strained their little throats to proclaim it'.

All of these impressions greatly influenced the art of Bewick. This is also
true of the people he grew up with, who gave him a sense of tradition and
common learning:

'The Winter evenings were often spent in listening to the traditionary Tales
and Songs, relating to Men who had been eminent for their prowess and
bravery in the Border Wars, and of others who had been esteemed for better
and milder qualities, such as having been good Landlords, kind Neighbours,
and otherwise in every respect being bold, independent and honest Men. I
used to be particularly struck or affected with the Warlike music and the
Songs. These Songs and laments were commemorative of many worthies, but the
most particular ones that I now remember were those respecting the Earl of
Derwent-Water, who was beheaded in the year 1715...
These cottagers were of an honest and independent character ... most of
these poor Men, from their having little intercourse with the World, were in
all their actions and behaviour truly original - except reading the Bible,
local Histories and old Ballads, their knowledge was generally limited - and
yet one of these, "Will Bewick", from being much struck with my performance
which he called Pictures, became exceedingly kind to me, and was the first
person from whom I gathered a kind of general knowledge of Astronomy and of
the Magnitude of the universe. He had, the Year through, noticed the
appearance of the stars and the Planets and would discourse largely on the
subject. I think I see him yet, sitting on a mound or seat, by the Hedge of
his Garden, regardless of the cold, and intent upon the heavenly bodies,
pointing to them with his large hands and eagerly imparting his knowledge to
me, with a strong voice.'

Bewick is a key figure in the 'Geordie' heritage. Indeed, given that he died
in Gateshead, an image of him and his work might have been more appropriate
on the 'Gateway' site now occupied by 'The Angel of the North'. He worked in
Newcastle when it was the most important printing centre in England outside
London, Oxford and Cambridge, with twenty printers in the town, publishing
more books than any other provincial city, including 'songs and schoolbooks,
histories and sermons, works in all shapes and sizes, as well as Bewick's
'Quadrupeds' and 'Birds'. (Brewer, J., 1997).
This active publishing trade was backed up by a thriving cultural and social life
represented by 'nearly fifty clubs and societies, ranging from masonic
lodges to floral societies, from debating clubs to political associations,
[which] met in coffee houses, club rooms and taverns ... In 1778 Bewick was
elected to Swarley's Club, which met at the Black Boy Inn ... [and] he also
spent time with members of a literary club 'who kept a library of Books and
held their meetings in a Room at Sam Allcocks, at the Sign of the Cannon, at
the foot of the old Flesh Market'. The society, which included some woollen
drapers and the cashier of a local bank, may have served as the model for
the Philosophical Society that Bewick, together with a bookseller, land
surveyor, coach painter, engineers and dissenting minister, founded in the
1770s to debate literature, philosophy and politics ... The bookplate of
Richard Swarley proudly declaimed 'Libertas Auro Pretiosior' (Liberty is
more precious than gold); government spies broke up the club because of its
radical, oppositional views during the Napoleonic Wars. The first occasion
on which the radical bookseller and numismatist Thomas Spence set forth his
views on the collective right to rural property was at a meeting of the
Philosophical Society [from which he was later expelled - K.A.]. His
agrarian socialism was controversial and Bewick, who was a firm believer in
the virtues of private property, disliked it. On one occasion their
differences led to a fight with cudgels in which the strongly built engraver
gave the slender radical a terrible drubbing. But they remained friends
throughout their lives. Bewick visited Spence after he had left Newcastle,
and the Bewick-Beilby workshop gave Spence the tools and type he needed to
publish his new and simplified alphabet.' (Brewer, J., 1997).

Bewick and his associates were asserting a collectivist vision from a
regionalist perspective and were not interested in merely aping London
fashions. They 'directly challenged any presumption that only gentlemen
could be cultured and refined'. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical
Society was established in the belief that, 'Knowledge, like fire, is
brought forth by collision; and in the free conversations of associated
friends many lights have been struck out, and served as tin for the most
important discoveries, which would not, probably, have occurred to their
authors, in the refinements of private meditation'. (Brewer, J., 1997).

Aware of the kind of tradition which inspired Bewick, Alan Plater has this
to say:

'On the whole, born as we are from generations of disenfranchised voices,
Geordie writers live easily enough with their ragbag of realities. The mere
fact that we are able to write and see our work performed without being in
hock to the Bloomsbury/Oxbridge axis, is awesome enough. On the whole, we
are not cursed with Art in the Head. We see ourselves as makers,
conscientious craftsmen who happen to be writers, just as our fathers
happened to be railwaymen, shipbuilders or pitmen ... What we share, to
borrow an idea from Sid Chaplin, is love of place and love of work. The
shipyards and the coalfield, hideous as the conditions were, nevertheless
created a lasting respect for the craft tradition, linked to the notion of
community interdepdendence. Both of these traditions have suffered
grievously during the 1980s, kicked almost to death by the bovver boots of
Thatcherism. What survives is the possibility of love, and that survival
depends in large measure on the writers ... Memory becomes history becomes
legend ... In the North East, we have long memories and a massive burden of
history ... an oral tradition, starting in childhood, hardended by inherited
rage and love ... our stories should be dream-driven, not market-driven and
they should be stories that in one form or another were first heard in a
back yard, once upon a time.' (Plater, A., 1992).

The American broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel, whose books based
on the recollections of 'so-called ordinary people' have chronicled American
history since the Depression, recently attacked what he referred to as a
'national Alzheimer's disease'. 'One of the things failing us today', he
said, 'is the elimination of the past, of history. Some of the kids don't
know about the sixties, let alone world war two, let alone the depression'.
In speech, 'he described lambasting a couple for failing to appreciate their
forebears' sacrifices, and insisted people could change once they were
educated'. (Terkel, S., 11/6/98).

It is the belief which underpins the Strong Words and Northern Voices
projects, the kind of belief which motivated North East writers like Jack
Common and Sid Chaplin; a belief which is not quite dead, for, in Chaplin's
words:

'There are a few people in my life who represent more than father-figures.
They are rocks you can strike any time and get living water, trees under
whose mighty branches you can shelter - and the fruit and blossom are
constantly there, elemental beings whose voice you can hear at any time.
This is not an explanation but a statement - how it happens is a mystery -
but once met they become part of your psyche. There is no need to call up
their ghosts. They live on in you.' (Chaplin, S., 1989).
This attempt to keep some kind of cultural heritage alive, led Strong
Words to stage exhibitions and events in honour of Jack Common, and to
publish 'Revolt Against an Age of Plenty' (1980), a selection of his
essays, and, subsequently, to establish the enterprise 'The Common Trust'
with the aim of keeping Common's spirit alive and to ensure that his writing
was published and still available ('Freedom of the  Streets', People's
Publications and The Common Trust, London, 1988). For the values he stood
for still carry some weight: the exploration of ideas of community in an
increasingly individualistic society, the regard for a sense of history and
place in our lives (in some ways, encapsulated in the city of Newcastle upon
Tyne), the love of fallible humanity, the bringing together of kindred
spirits to talk, celebrate and sing, the need to analyse and articulate our
thoughts and feelings, all of these things and more.
An exhibition in 1977 at Newcastle's Central Library as part of that year's
City Festival, set the ball rolling and stimulated a large degree of
interest, further developed by an evening at the Tyneside Cinema where
Common's wartime film 'Tyneside  Story' was shown and supplemented by a talk
by renowned Durham novelist Sid Chaplin on his association with Common.
Common's old friend Tommy McCulloch attended as did his son, Peter Common.
The aim was to bring people together across generations to celebrate Common
and his links with his home city.

Times have, of course, moved on. The ideas of Common and of the Strong
Words Collective need to be viewed in this light. 'There is no
counter-culture now.' (Newcastle artist George French, 2001). Just what can
be retained of value in the present context and into the future it is, in
part, the role of this thesis to explore.
The use of the word 'community' now has a hollow ring. The traditional
organised industrial trade union movement has been splintered. The
international 'communist' movement has been dealt a body blow. The ''global
market' seems triumphant. And do the terms 'socialism' and 'working class'
have any meaning any more? Recently, Jonathan Rose asked at the end of his
'Intellectual Life of the Working Classes' (2001) why 200 years of cultural
self-improvement through libraries, lectures, schools and newspapers
organised by and for the working class died in the 1960s. He concluded that
the alleged egalitarian attack on the 'dead white men' of the classics
actually enhanced the privilege of the middle-classes. If there was common
agreement on what the canon was, be it Shakespeare or its ilk, it was easy
enough for the self-taught to make up the ground. But, since the 1960s,
cultural trends have had 'as brief a shelf-life as stock-exchange trends,
and they depreciate rapidly if one fails to catch the latest wave in
architecture of literary theory'. 'The new waves (be it 'new
wave', 'modernist' or 'postmodernist')', argues Rose, 'reflect the Anxiety of
Cool, the relentless struggle to get out in front and control the new
production of new cultural information'.

And as Nick Cohen (2005) concludes, 'each new wave carries
high culture further away from the working class. Once, the middle class
left saw the workers as the very vanguard of history; now they are dismissed
as sexist, racist and conservative'.

Rose searched a database of academic texts published betweem 1991 and 2000.
There were 13,820 references for 'women', 4,539 for 'gender', 1,826 for
'race', 710 for 'post-colonial' and only 136 for 'working class'. As Cohen
comments:

'It shouldn't be too great a surprise that the humble do not care
about education and that they regard intellectual life as alien when the
educated care so little for them.'

Jack Common might well be turning in his grave.
What once seemed a class that through its liberation and self-education
would rise up and change the world now seems locked into the
trap of the sink estate and the intellectually starved world of a bemused
underclass. So is there any hope? I say there has to be.

Researching the life of Edinburgh's Robert Louis Stevenson recently, I was
made aware of, if I wasn't before, the dualities of the man and of his
beloved home city. One of the greatest inspirations of 'RLS' was the
eighteenth century Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson, a man 'who lived without
restraint and who wrote about the real life of the city, about ordinary
people, servant girls gossiping on the tenement stairs, dandies getting
splashed in the filthy streets, drunks staggering home at night' (Calder,
1980). Not so far removed from Common's own Kiddar's Luck, you might say,
and Fergusson lived from 1750 to 1774, parallelling the lives of Newcastle's
own radicals Thomas Bewick and Thomas Spence.
RLS himself as a young man mixed with those beyond the reach of the law and
the establishment as an alternative to the manners and morals of the middle
classes.
'Edinburgh certainly fed his imagination ... a city where still the
past is never allowed to lie down and die, where in his everyday comings and
goings he could not avoid the continual stimulus of the sombre outline on
the ridge, castle, cathedral, kirks and uneven lands, or the sound of bugles
and drums drifting down in the evening, and the mingling with lines from
those authors who had already captured something of the city.' (Calder, J., 1980).

This duality of dark and light in Edinburgh is reflected in all cities. In
Edinburgh's case it is visible in
the culture of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, in Stevenson's own Jekyll
and Hyde, in the thief and magistrate Deacon Brodie and, above all, in the old
and new towns of the city, which did not get its name 'auld Reekie' for nothing.
That Fergusson and RLS, along with the likes of Robbie Burns and  James
Hogg, give a city like Edinburgh historical depth cannot be denied. So much
so that the city is now a UNESCO World City of Literature and a novelist
like Ian Rankin carries on this tradition by setting his Inspector Rebus
stories in the city.
Without a sense of such heritage, a grasp of the light and shade which
reveals the truth, our cities would be breathing corpses. This is why it is
important to remember Jack Common and his evocative writing rooted in the
streets and lanes of Newcastle where, like Edinburgh, the past refuses to
'lie down and die' and which must reveal its dark side, alongside the glitz
of the cultural admen, to any writer worth his bottle of brown.


New Publication from University of Sunderland Press: 
Common Words and the Wandering Star 
by Keith Armstrong 
Introductory Offer £5.95 
In this unique book, Keith Armstrong assesses the life and work of
Newcastle born writer Jack Common, in the light of the massive social,
economic and cultural changes which have affected the North East of
England and wider society, through the period of Common’s life and
afterwards.
He seeks to point out the relevance of Common to the present day in
terms of his ideas about class, community and the individual and in the
light of Common’s sense of rebelliousness influenced by a process of
grassroots education and self improvement.


“Keith Armstrong's study of Jack Common is a major contribution to
contemporary studies in English literature. 
This is a well-informed book with many innovative characteristics, 
including the author's use of poetry as a way of exploring Common's creativity.”
Professor Bill Williamson 
____________________________

Friday 13 November 2009

doctor keith armstrong archive at university of durham

the archive contains copies of over 300 items relating to armstrong's publishing activities over a period of almost 40 years, including 'poetry north east', the magazine of the tyneside poets.


http://library.dur.ac.uk/search/c?SEARCH=Armstrong&SUBMIT=Search

Thursday 12 November 2009

Arresting Orator

Only walking sticks,
Nothing that might be construed offensive
Other than words, and then only because
Being stridently reasonable renders deaf
All with a stake in not being able to hear.
Such interest in profound silence of tongues
Wraps reason in barbed wire, crucifies words
Along rough cross members of watch towers,
Ends sentences with bullets as full stops.
Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear
Before there’s cold steel, keen enough to slice
Ears clean off. Or make precise incisions
To surgically remove the aggressive
Malignancy, diagnosed as likely
To devour the body politic. So,
The yeomanry, sabres drawn, intent on
Riding down veterans and civilians
While the magisterial from high up
In their vantage point, consider themselves
Justified in issuing the order,
Arresting orator, crowd being armed
Only with sticks.
                                            Dave Alton

Sunday 8 November 2009

MAN OF MUSIC IN PAXTON




(For Gary)


There’s a man in Paxton
who is researching stars
and that musical telescope of his
stares out of the village window
to pierce a broader darkness.

There is a universal symphony in his breath,
picked up from the folk whistling
in the rain-kissed street.
There’s a child singing across the borders
and the sky is a chorus
of screaming clouds.

Our man of music in Paxton
scratches notes as he opens his mind.
He calls out
under the leaping rainbow
for a song to enter 
his soul.

He wants to name a star after his wife.
He wants to write Jane a song.
There is nothing more beautiful than the sight of Space:
‘Nothing more terrible than the beauty of music’, he says.

And, while his songs are soaring to the stars,
in the name of his radiant life,
he knows his Dad’s bones are cracking with age
and he knows there are days
when his guitar will sob
in the village darkness.

But, tonight, he has named a star ‘Jane’
and, while life is forever such struggle,
he has written a lovely song in Paxton
and taught his son Archie to dance in the sky.




Keith Armstrong

Thursday 5 November 2009

For Remembrance Day

          YPRES QUARTET

                    (1)
By Menin Gate I hear the bugle blow
And wonder, should the call come would I go,
Knowing what none of these chiselled here could know
Before they were cheered as they volunteered,
Charging through No Man’s Land, and disappeared?
For I’m of a generation that’s crass
Enough to claim, in youth, “Life is a gas!”
And think myself ill served if fickle fate
Means my coffee’s cold or my bus runs late.
How, for those boys of puttees and dubbing,
Different the invitation to go clubbing,
And come the weekend they’d all get slaughtered:
Careless of the future, bellies bloated!
No troop train for me though, it’s Euro Star,
Seat reserved in an air-conditioned car,
Speeding with a whisper, travelling at ease:
No smoking and a seat near the front please.

                    (2)
I hear the bugle blow by Menin Gate,
And stand silently beneath the dread weight
Of all those huge, right-dressed blocks of limestone.
Could each be a cube of compounded bone
Engraved with names of all who surrendered
Life so comprehensively they ended
Their brief span with nothing else to show?
Except all who assemble here, they know
The value of a life is not bound
Up in a mess of flesh, a body found.
Nine decades later and what would we do?
Build a solemn memorial? Or sue
Someone for starting a shooting match
Without risk assessment? The safety catch!

                    (3)
At Langemarck the final bugle has blown,
Such sombre notes set into field-grey stone
Tablets laid in serried regular ranks.
So many students released from their pranks
And classrooms to lie after final games
Beneath these bleak plaques gilded with their names.
At least those who, having been overthrown,
Still had enough about them to be known.
Yet many more being so shell tossed
They were simply expunged, forever lost.
Their names etched on blocks around a pit
Of body parts collected bit by bit
And beyond recognition. Some bone there
For everyone, and with a few to spare
That maybe enfeebled history forgot,
Or perhaps belong in some enemy plot.
Far too many salting this Flanders’ earth
Where I stand never having proven my worth.

                    (4)
As I await the Last Post’s plaintive wail
It seems there are Germans in Passchendaele,
Visiting the cheese museum. In truth,
How might they do justice to their fallen youth
Who no doubt volunteered, fought, fell and died,
With no lack of fervour, courage or pride.
And, perhaps, they too for their mothers cried
Just one brief final time. 64A,
Ieper to Passendale, making its steady way,
Hourly service from the Cloth Market square,
And takes three and a half months to get there.
What a bloody journey, but those who stick it
Arrive back on a two-day return ticket.
Such a bloody journey! As I’ve wandered
Around Salient points, was life squandered,
I’ve thought, extinguished in vain? To believe so
Is to lose them all again, let them go
From History. Why recall fools who dared fight
And die? Simpletons believing in right
And wrong, prepared to make a difference.
I stand by the Menin Gate: such immense
Sacrifice I’ve never been asked to make
And could not bear it to be a mistake
If it had to be me before the guns,
Or so finely hewn a name was my son’s.
Too many names for one to count and yet
Together they amount to such a great debt.
As the buglers parade my conscience says,
“Commit to remembrance!” The Last Post plays.
                                                      Dave Alton

Tuesday 3 November 2009

Art

Naming the colours;
It’s a question of tall men
And attitudes they strike,
Or deep valleys
With an absence of greed.
There is a wine glass
Half full of cochineal
Atop a basalt boulder,
There is a bicycle
With one pedal
And a flat tyre.
Moorland is interminable,
Grass countless.
Who can know why some folk
Speak secretly to bridges,
More openly
To supermarket trolleys?
Branch reaching out,
Road to infinity
Merging
In the second third,
Pixels
Making suggestions
Like shards
Of shattering photons,
Like
A scatter of jelly beans.
There are shades
Expectantly beneath easels,
Pencils
Not drawing attention to themselves,
Wax crayons
Relieved not to be tallow
And oils
Too refined for workshops.
Last night,
In bed, on the floor,
An inspired solitude,
A celibate
Exploration of flesh,
Of contours,
Of endless waves on endless oceans.
Canvas is not blank,
A palimpsest
Of dreams and patronage
Only 3D specs
Might reveal.
Sauvignon blanc
In a schooner
Set
On a Victorian schoolmaster’s desk
With an umbrella,
With a urinal
And
A sewing machine.

Cryo

There is an iceberg in the oven,
The hob has frozen hard,
Wine bottles filled with decanted sighs,
Tears buried in the yard.

Trees shedding all their leaves in springtime,
A statue on the lawn
Is weeping sand precisely because
The moon will rise at dawn.

A moon that shines on separate sheets,
A moon to bind the dead,
A moon estimating absences,
The anger and the dread.

Strum the old guitar with a scalpel,
Incise lyrics on glass,
A choir of lawyers sing the anthem,
The tune is from a mass.

Once nakedness becomes meaningless
And eye to eye being blind,
There is only silence and shadows,
Only the loss to find.

The saxophone has laryngitis,
Even the devil sleeps,
So, when no one meets at the crossroads
A wraith quietly creeps.

Tongues, having been salted with ashes,
Cannot recant their vows,
Ears stopped by indifference ring with
Songs of unspoken rows.

There’s a glacier in the hallway,
Avalanche on the stairs,
Icicle becomes a stiletto,
The assassin despairs.

Absolution

Fresh faced visions
Lie abandoned in sock drawers
While wings
Meticulously unpicked
From backs of angels
Hang flaccidly
Behind the bedroom door
One hook along
From the red suit
Worn by the hobgoblin
That once stalked Europe.

Dave Alton

Wednesday 28 October 2009

high praise indeed!





'THE Public Orator's speech was 'a bit like a review in Poetry Tyneside'.' (Poet Philip Larkin, quoted by Alan Bennett).
BLUE PLAQUE FOR PITMEN

So, where is the pit shaft, that tall
Column of darkness driven
Hard into the ground to support
The earth, having been riven
Open, its integrity prised
Roughly apart and compromised?


An absolute blackness beneath,
Hewn from the coal and left deep,
Deep down, packed in long galleries
Allowed to settle, to keep
It just in mind, but out of sight,
Where it cannot pollute the light.


Bare hands belonging bare bodies,
Draped only in sweat and dust,
Long since committed to the ground,
Their tunnels sealed, the earth’s crust
Healing, covering up lives spent,
Earning remission for the rent.


And yet, pressed in solid darkness
Must be feint indentures, fragments
Of stories, fine fossils of tales
Untongued for years. Time relents
When memories of old pitmen
And their ways are unearthed again.


Not that many folk care to dig
Too deeply, the past’s deceased,
Better build the new estate. But,
There should be a plaque at least,
A blue one, like a lump of coal
Caught under skin, a miner’s mole.


Dave Alton

Poetry and Football

Verse has myriad forms and purposes. The rhymed couplet written as a celebratory incantation serves as an accessible confection for a publication not actually concerned with poetry. “When the Ball Moves” is a fanzine dedicated to the promotion, in all senses of the word, of Burnley Football Club. In May the team achieved elevation to England’s top division for the first time in over three decades. This happened the day after Newcastle United confirmed their own relegation, a club whose supporters have been bedevilled by frustrated ambition. “Dare to Dream” was the slogan the Clarets took into the Play-Off final: I recommend it to all “Maggies”.


Promoting Dreams


Losing once again to a lesser team,
How many Clarets really dared to dream
Or even entertain the wild notion
That the season might end with promotion?
How many, at kick off, on the first day
Thought it the first step along Wembley Way?
How many already saw their chance gone
When, by full time, they had lost four to one?
The grail of promotion, all fans seek it,
Yet, for fear of hubris, they won’t speak it.
An ill-judged boast and all hopes start to pale;
For the gods punish hubris without fail.
Those supporters who attempt to intrigue
Against fate by being confident the league
Can be all but won by Christmas, find pride
Punished with a sharp series of Yuletide
Defeats by teams that are the negation
Of success; just missing relegation
Their lone ambition. When the season’s done,
When promotion has finally been won,
When scarves and flags have flown, when the fuss,
The chanting, cheering, the open-top bus
Has bourn its soccer demi-urges through
Thronged streets surging with Claret and Blue,
When that joy has flowed and ebbed, then reason
Will turn boldly towards the next season.
Reason enough for season ticket sales
To soar like expectations, since the grail’s
Quest needs one last triumph: the precious cup
To be won now is to toast staying up.
Doom-sayers must be baulked and defeated;
Seventeenth spot and success is completed.
So, quickly let the first new kick off come,
So, let the Britannia Stadium
Ring with Claret anthems as the mission
Commences, with partisan ambition
For victory in the season to come.
Faith, like that which sped ships to Ilium,
A campaign seemingly of daunting size
Makes all the more valuable the final prize
And legends of those who fought for the cause,
Who, for their lifetimes, will receive applause
Whenever they can return to Turf Moor.
Tales will be told of them, a whole folklore
Passing parent to child; they will belong
In the annals, names recorded in song,
Glossy portraits gracing histories still
To be written. But, none of this until
That first whistle blows, then, when the ball moves,
Anticipation simmered beneath rooves
Of every Burnley abode will, by choice,
Discover its proud Claret and Blue voice.
No matter the final destination
Nothing can take away the elation
Of that brilliant afternoon in May
Ensuring BFC would have its day.
Dare to dream, but the dream cannot mask
The daunting enormity of the task.
Yet a town, whose population it seems
Could sit with the Theatre of Dreams,
Is where dreams and reality converge
And long dormant ambitions emerge.
Where claret is the dominant fashion
What’s missing in money is by passion
Made up. What message does such passion send?
“Coyle is God” is the popular legend.
But, football is football, not religion,
Though who can doubt that Owen the pigeon
Was a carrier of good fortune when
Half the gathered town rose up as one,
When the other half held its breath, and then
Commentators confirmed, “GOAL!”. commotion!
Acclaimed realisation! Promotion
Had at long, long last been truly sighted
And, on that day, Burnley was united.
Even people who steadfastly professed
Disinterest in football at best, confessed
Their rudimentary loyalty sated
By that goal: even they were elated.
Burnley will be impossible to ignore
When the Theatre of Dreams comes to Turf Moor.
Let the Longside sing, the Bee Hole acclaim
This is a new season, a whole new game.


Dave Alton

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Tuesday 20 October 2009

The balladeer

Shortly after moving to the North East from Lancashire in 1971 I became associated with the Tyneside Poets. My first experience of seeing one of my poems in print was in "Poetry North East", then the regular journal for this group. I don't suppose I then thought this would lead to nearly four decades of writing. Presently, I am concentrating on combining my love of folk music, folk tales and legends with my writing through writing a series of narrative poems based on traditional stories from around the UK. These are being regularly podcasted by "Folkcast", so I can be heard reading them at http://www.folkcast.co.uk/ betraying my Lancashire roots with the accent. The latest one concerns a story from Northumberland.




THE DUEGAR

Not so very far from Rothbury town in Northumberland,
The canny folk of Simonside won’t stray abroad unplanned
Into the hills when night and mist might make the way unseen
Where just one mistaken step can be into a ravine.

Strangers indeed are well advised to stay away at night
And not to try and cross the moor even in full moon light
Yet being still late afternoon when a young man’s car broke down
He left his wheels to cross the hills to get to Rothbury town.

He should have been there by sunset, but then he lost his way
And all his self-belief faded with the last light of day,
A shepherd might have recognised a peak, a stream, a track,
But this young man could not make out a way forward or back.

So finally he felt it wise to find some sheltered place,
Until the dark had slipped away and the sun showed its face,
When suddenly, to his surprise, an unexpected light,
Faintly glimmered not far away, an answer to his plight.

“Perhaps it is some shepherd’s hut and I might shelter there.”
He said to himself with hope, dispelling bleak black despair.
At last he found the wooden shack roofed over with thick sods,
Within a little fire flickered: a palace for the gods!

On entering he found himself to be in there alone,
And either side of the modest fire stood a rough hewn stone,
By the side of one a pile of sticks lay upon strewn straw,
Lying next to the other two sturdy gateposts he saw.

Sitting himself on one stone, feeding sticks into the flames,
He thought he heard a strange sound, or was it wind playing games?
Then to his utter disbelief, terror and amazement,
An evil looking dwarf came in, all twisted, gnarled and bent.

Trousers and coat made of moleskins, his clogs were two lambs skulls,
Fur for his hat was from fox pups, killed in one of his culls.
Strode in without a greeting and sat on the other stone,
An evil glint in his eye chilled the young man to the bone.

The goblin stared and scowled and sneered, but never spoke a word,
While in his memory from childhood the wary young man heard
His gran telling of travellers being lost beneath moon and star
In the hills by Simonside must beware of the Duegar.

“Do nothing to offend him for he means mortals great harm,
There is no protection against him, no magic, no charm.
If he’s given the slightest cause into a rage he’ll fly,
The only way to hold him back is look him in the eye.”

“Thanks Gran.” He muttered to himself, “I’ll not provoke his ire.”
And reaching down he picked up sticks to feed the fading fire.
The Deugar gave a disdainful snort as effortlessly
He snatched up a thick gatepost and broke it over his knee.

Threw both pieces on the fire which surely stopped it dwindling,
Then looked up as if to say, “A child can snap thin kindling.
Now you pick up the other post, break it and show some pride!”
But the young man made no such move and never looked aside.

By and by the fire died down but the man maintained his stare,
The room grew darker and darker and oh so cold in there.
The Duegar continued scowling, a challenge in his eyes,
“Come and get the gatepost and feed the fire before it dies.

“For, if there’s total darkness you’ll not be able to see,
Then, completely blind, you will be alone in here with me.”
Although the words sounded clear and he heard all that was said,
The Duegar never spoke, it was all in the young man’s head.

So he kept his silent gaze, he would see that long night through,
The room became ever gloomier, yet the young man knew
That the dawn was approaching, it could not be far away,
And he certainly would be safe once came the light of day.

He began to feel so tired and his eyelids weighted with lead,
“There’s a straw bed in yon corner, go and rest your nodding head.”
The Duegar sounded solicitous, words sonorous and deep,
“Why not leave that hard stone chair and lie yourself down and sleep, sleep.”

He tried so hard to stay awake, but as the feint flames faded
His eyes seemed oh so heavy and his will to fight felt jaded.
Blearily, through narrow slits, he saw the Duegar start to smile,
An evil grin that betrayed a soul that was both bleak and vile.

There were only embers left and the fire was almost out,
The darkness was pressing in as shadows gathered about,
When through the door, from the distant east, came a pale grey light,
At once the Duegar, the hut and fire, vanished from his sight,

By dawn’s illumination he saw, and felt heartbeats miss,
The stone on which he perched was the peak of a precipice,
And he knew that had he tried to do what the Duegar willed
He’d have plummeted to rocks below and certainly killed.

Dave Alton