BALLAD OF THE LITTLE COUNT

I’d dance and skip and play

On my fiddle and guitar all day.

Across the vales and dales,

My peacock’s feathers I’d display.

And I’d never forget my roots,

The springs that ran through my boots.

In my mind and ears and eyes

And in my native skies.

For Poland was my cradle,

England is my nest.

And Durham is the quiet place

Where my weary bones shall rest.

I’d flit from Court to Court

And mingle with every sort.

From Kings and Queens to Pawns,

Whatever the morning spawned.

And the women I’d admire

Wherever I found the fire.

I chased their skirts and their smiles

For all my livelong miles.

For Poland was my cradle,

England is my nest.

And Durham is the quiet place

Where my weary bones shall rest.

Keith Armstrong

(From ‘Where My Weary Bones Shall Rest’ written for Durham County Council, with music by Andy Jackson and Benny Graham)

Joseph Boruwlaski ('the Little Count') (1739-1837), Travelling performer and memoirist

Boruwlaski was born into impoverished lower gentry in Poland. At 3 feet 3 inches tall and styled as 'Count Boruwlaski', he was exhibited around the salons and courts of Europe. He moved to Britain in 1782 where, for a charge, he would 'receive company', holding a breakfast to which the public could come and be entertained with music and exaggerated tales of his adventures. He was briefly taken up by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and George IV but high society tired of him and, after travelling the country, he retired to Durham. 

from 2006! - intro to 'radical north east'

 A RADICAL NORTH EAST ANTHOLOGY

ARMSTRONG’S VISION

‘Can Tyrants hinder people from singing at their work, or in their families? Sing and meet and meet and sing and your chains will drop off like burnt thread.’

(Thomas Spence)

‘The older lads in the pit had a habit of ballad singing. It was seldom that they knew a ballad right through but they used to sing snatches of ballads and songs at their work and these fastened themselves in my memory.’

(Joseph Skipsey)

‘Geordieland’, we are given to understand by the City Fathers, is undergoing a cultural rebirth. The banks of the Tyne are pampered with a gushing stream of Lottery money, the new Music Centre rubs shoulders with the new Gateshead Hilton. We ‘Geordies’ aren’t so thick after all. We don’t just jog like manic lemmings to South Shields each year in ‘The Great North Run’ but we’re wired for Beethoven and Damien Hirst as well.

Gone are the grubby pits and the dorty back lanes, this a new and dynamic place rising from the squalor of the cloth-cap and the doleful whippet.

The Geordie-joint is buzzin’, we’re even thinking of joining Europe now. So who needs History when you can Party?

And then we have the self-styled ‘Geordie Intelligentsia’, the true proclaimers  of ‘Geordie Genius’, who wallow in an analysis built actually on mythology and inflated regional pride.

So we have, by way of example, the genius Bunting hauled from obscurity by the romantic Pickards operating from their beloved Morden Tower Poetry HQ in a haze of Geordie dope and literati splendour. The stuff of legend! But how much of it is true and how many people know or care? Who really believes in their own bones and hearts the tale of the good St. Cuthbert?

Do they celebrate our glorious Christian heritage doon the Bigg Market of a Friday? Are the Lindisfarne Gospels Alan Hull’s best work?

Even our esteemed Novocastrian academics can’t put their finger on the derivation of the ‘Geordie’ but still we’re proud to be one aren’t we? The most likely roots of the term derive from Newcastle’s opposition to the Jacobite uprisings and the city’s loyal support for the monarch. So much for a progressive culture then!

The new Music Centre will allow the classical ‘Northern Sinfonia’ to share digs with the traditional ‘Folkworks’ outfit. You see there can be no contradictions in ‘Third Way Geordieism’, the cultural boat has come in and we’re all aboard and happy to enjoy ‘the buzz’ created for us by our Glorious Municipality and its entourage of quango-speakers and cultural money-grubbers. All aboard you poets, musicians, thespians, and public art workers! There are grants to be had and we need the loot to fund our coffeehouse lifestyles, we need the tingle of ‘Success’!

In proposing a different look at things through the prism of a Radical North East anthology,

I am seeking to argue that there is a heritage of dissidence in the region and that this needs to be kept alive if there is to be any real vitality and space for argument on the banks of Tyne, Wear, and Tees. To do this, we need to uncover what is truly challenging and subversive in our culture, what is not only local but of universal significance. My own sense of this goes back to the Border Ballads and on to 17th and 18th century Newcastle, to the times of Thomas Spence and Thomas Bewick and Swarley’s Club, where poetry and song spoke for the underclass and sedition was in the air, side by side with the beautiful craftsmanship of Bewick and his school.

We have others from the grass-roots like Joseph Skipsey and Jack Common who offer a more radical insight than the romance of Cookson or the school of ‘Larn Yersel Geordie’.

We need to see our regional pride in world terms to give it a balance with the culture of others. Whilst I would expect the anthology to have a strong focus on working-class and indigenous culture, a culture which the City Fathers would prefer to skate over, we need to to look at this in the context of race and gender, nationalism and multi-culturalism. We need to see how us ‘Geordies’ can celebrate the world.

So the vision is of a refreshed grass-roots culture built on the positive bricks of the past with a sense of a regional universe rejecting cultural imperialism and asserting cultural democracy.

Dialect is important but not hand in hand with feudalism. Folk-singers can be as inspired by the Chilean Victor Jara as much as by Derwentside’s Tommy Armstrong.

I support the Campaign for a North East Assembly but as a stepping to empowerment at a local level not as an extra arm of the Labour Party, which to my mind has become culturally sterile and opportunist in using culture to paper over the gaps in its own political ineptitude.

Not long ago the City Fathers were scarcely bothered about the Arts now they’re a gravy train for inward investment. We need to challenge this use of the Arts to promote Business and the relationship between the two. We need to return the Lottery money to the people.

We are suggesting that the way forward is through a conflict of ideas based on an historical perception of our regional identity. If a Radical North East anthology can contribute to such a debate then it will be worthwhile.

‘In Gateshead, we passed some little streets named after the poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Tennyson Streets ...... and I wondered if any poets were growing up in those streets. We could do with one from such streets; not one of our frigid sniggering rhymers, but a lad with such a flame in his heart and mouth that at last he could set the Tyne on fire.’

(J.BPriestley, English Journey, 1934)

‘Watch me go leaping in my youth

down Dog Leap Stairs,

down fire-scapes.

The Jingling Geordie

born in a Brewery,

drinking the money

I dug out of the ground.’

(Keith Armstrong)

  

                                                                                     KEITH ARMSTRONG

alan c. brown - new poems

ABOUT ADOLF HITLER 

“We have burned our bridges – more, 

we have burned the land behind us”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Beginning your metronomic rise to Führer, from grotesque zero,

We follow your staggered course with eyes half shut. 

What was it made such possible, smooth as butter?

That question still has no clear answer to us.

Maybe that’s why your shadow still haunts our steps;

There seems to be a flaw in this old fascination;

But we can’t yet put a probing finger on it.

Does it go deeper in us, than most can guess,

That we can’t shut the book, or shift acid debris,

Clotted with blood, from off our hands, our face?

The answers crumble in us, thick as laid dust.

Why’s that? To go back enlightened of mind 

Should give us strength to understand the black lust 

Within all of us, that is unbeaten, unhurt,

We don’t like to concentrate on that overmuch,

Like Rousseau we like to look on the bright side,

And think, we weren’t born tainted and weak,

And if evil exists, it isn’t our fault at least;

We wouldn’t accept a crooked, evil mystique 

What can we say in conclusion about our theme?

That seems to have an extended life, half blind:

Nietzsche would not have been fazed by such bald lies;

Spinoza, not by Hitler’s threadbare mind.

NAKED BENEATH THE MASK 

to Anais Nin 

When it began, with Joaquin perhaps,

The fugue and counterpoint of Paris life; 

Drunk on music, first and last - the child,

And yes the woman differently; the Persian 

Venus, a temple prostitute, baptised as such; 

Drowned, by the beauty in men, in women;

Incense, black slaves, cushions, lilies,

Fantasies, follies; ambience, openness; 

The sterile love of two ghosts; cold mirrors.

What else? Dark eyes. Red mouth. Noh mask, your self, 

Seeking a new image in others, impossible. 

With eyes the colour of water; open to miracles;.

Astarte, caged behind bars of gold, you go 

Already imprisoned by myth, masked. 

Tired, too tired to fight on, too tired to hope;. 

Music, flowers, at the last, these only, 

Bending pain into a harp of gold; 

Until over blue ocean a scatter of ashes fall; 

And come full circle; emptied, you’re full;

Naked as dawn - without the mask.

NAKED VOLTAGE      

“What fortitude the soul contains.

That it can so endure.”

 Emily Dickinson

Though you resist I think you back earth-side: 

Amherst - soil-smell, breathing buzz if bee-sound;

Life-fever in your living veins – enough joy;

Absence – a presence, fractured light behind woods.

I grow in the heat of your shadow, comforted.

My bones stitched to Naked Voltage – yours;

White absence under my hands, earth-heat and home,

However late by owl-light I yet return,

As you did - Wayward Nun - to holy ground. 

Rooted in arid earth you’re still answering gold.

Groomed for death – no-where abandoned by God.

See how your words – small children – each one in turn

Held heavily in the crook of one bent arm,

Dazzle like liquid light, being re-born.

Did you taste death before them? No, you’re alive!

Un-menaced by the world; by whirling cinders 

Of love; you balance equally – heaven and earth

With inexhaustible tenderness, shouldering still 

The numinous - in everything - low or high.

Back of you fields of grain - vast as the sky. 

DANGEROUS SANCTUARY 

“For me love is always more significant more sacred than

The object that stirs it” Rosa Luxemburg

I enter you, dangerous sanctuary

Through the flash of your intense eyes.

Sister of Judith and Faust’s betrayed beloved,

You flare out from those enigmatic mirrors.

In every dark fibre of your voice

There’s no escape; I lose myself 

Afraid to scald your wounds 

With impotent broken-backed words.

Your malevolent assassination is

A window of farewells; a caravan

That goes off, leaving behind sour ground.

The thud of rifle butts, the lugers fatal bark!

The malice of mangy, jack-booted dogs.

Look! You wait for me even though

You died three years before I was born.

You are a bridge without a road, 

A night-star not yet named; 

Receding light, moving on yet 

 towards a vague, distant shore.

No you’ve not missed your time.

 It’s yet to come. I reach out my hand 

Testing the tracks - they’re inaccessible!

Look, through yourself you’ve gone!

Through your self the universe flows,

History slows and is stopped

By what you marked out as yours.

Anxious we ask, where now can 

Someone like you be found,

(Shrewd, erudite, passionate)

To seed unsown fallow ground?

Look! Full harvest brightens -

Serene, harmonious, abundant,

(Not the silliest of political programmes.)

Something alive earth-side you 

never knew. But posthumously saw.

Something textured in your veins:

A terracotta jug wedged in sand?

A portrait unframed behind cracked glass?

No. For you, to whom love was a faculty of seeing;

Freedom, always for the one who thinks differently;

Mens santa in corpore sano

(The wise keep up with the spirit of the times)

Revolution, a fanfare declaiming

Jch war, ich bin, ich werde sein!

(“I was, I am, I shall be again!)

Don’t fret because of you stature,

Small things can also bewitch us!

Look now the sky over you – is an epiphany!