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

NIGHTJARS AND THEIR ALLIES

(for K.)

The nightjars and their allies

have their heads down in the woods today,

dreaming of wild nights,

a chance to sing on the flickering wing.

And you my dark-haired songstress

could writhe naked on a bed of their feathers

as I touch with my aching fingertips

the tips of your sprawling bliss

in all that lushness between the trembling trees.

For you are dusky,

silky-tailed and

white-winged;

you are my European Nightjar

churring as I make you

spring to life in shivers of moonlight.

White-throated and golden,

star-spotted and black-shouldered,

you straddle your strapping limbs around me,

wrap my leaping heart in charcoal ribbons,

fly me screaming in a flock of black birds

and drench me

with jars of night song.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

FAT MAN LODGED ON DOG LEAP STAIRS

He pounded the cobbles

of the Castle Garth,

bowling along

with his brain hanging over his neck

and his belly

looming over his huge pants.

His overeducated head

weighed a ton

and bore down

on an arse

fattened on home-made pies.

He was carrying a plan

for the working classes

but forgot his heart was too small,

dwarfed by his huge mouth

and an expensive ego.

He had a board meeting to go to,

the big fart,

and he sweated grants

as he blundered along

to the narrow alley.

He was far too broad of beam really

but he was late for everything,

including his funeral,

and thrust his plates of meat

onto the slippery steps.

History closed in on him,

the Black Gate,

the Keep,

as if to tell him

it wasn’t his,

as if to say

‘get out of my town’.

He squeezed himself onto this narrow stairway

and, like his poetry,

got stuck.

He couldn’t move

for his lack of lyricism.

The Fat Man

was firmly lodged

on Dog Leap Stairs

and the crows

began to gather

to swoop

and pick

the bloated power

from his face.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Silence Does Most To Impress

Just what, exactly, is a life?
Mere accumulated years,
Or no more than a single day?
An hour of laughter and tears


Might well be sufficient, enough
To satisfy appetites
That are, mostly, easily sated.
Although some would prefer nights,


Most would choose to enjoy their days,
However many or few,
In sun rather than moonlight.
But, how to be sure what’s true.


Teachers proved so disappointing;
In the past they would have known
But, the curriculum stops them
Having answers of their own,


As ministers of state decree
Which lessons have to be learned,
Which improving books must be read,
Which libraries must be burned,


Using carbon capture, of course,
To prevent harming the earth.
Bankers were worse. They had no way
Of calculating the worth


Of a minute, or agreeing
A common conversion rate
By which financial exchanges,
With weighting, could calculate


The precise value of an hour.
Perhaps a soul lodged inside
A life might have intrinsic worth:
But, priests remained mystified,


Mumbling vague prayers and platitudes,
Quite unable to mention
Fabulous realms beyond theirs or
Anyone’s comprehension.


As for the physicists, they were,
It appeared, quite overjoyed.
The well of everything, they said,
Was nothing, a fecund void


In which time began to tick. Good!
There was a watch after all,
Though no watchmaker. Better ask
The sextons, those who install


Cold clay in measured pits of clay.
They aren’t fooled by fancy words,
Watching even marble crumble.
The worst for them are the turds


Dog walkers leave behind amongst
Sad sentiments set in stones,
Where they must carefully excavate
For the next skin-bag of bones.


So, on their recommendation,
Prostitutes are consulted,
They know the price of flesh at least,
If not its value. It’s said


By most, there’s no correlation
Between cash and the spending,
Or the time taken for either.
Yet, there’s pleasure in blending


Good whiskies, in grand-fathering,
In choosing a politics
Deliberately out of step,
In a bag of pick and mix


Selected just to stop the mouth
With sweetness, sickly sweetness,
Knowing each day there is less to say,
Silence does most to impress.



Dave Alton

Brief Encounter in the Centurion Bar

She’s no Celia Johnson and he’s not
Trevor Howard.
(Is it actually
Possible to be adulterous
While wearing a trilby?) 
And where’s the smoke?
Great sooty billows from grimy funnels,
A monochrome miasma making eyes
Of parting lovers, tearful with regret
And irritation, while spinning steel wheels
Screech for purchase on slick rails.
Of course,
There is only the efficient hum as
Electric locomotion whispers
Through the station almost unnoticed.
Now, liaisons end at the barriers;
Only one has a ticket.
Until then
They stare across unquaffed glasses, utterly
Oblivious to magnificence
Of ceramic clad walls, to the lagers
Going flat between them, to breaking news
Newcastle United might be signing
Trevor Celia and Howard Johnson
According to Sky Sports report glaring down
From the big screen by the modest mezzanine
Where a poet’s declaiming his peon
To the Centurion Bar’s glazed splendour
And the table with two halves abandoned.


                                                        


Dave Alton

Little Self

Little Self is insistent, determined to be heard, shouting from hilltop, echoing along the valley. Too often the church is concerned for its roof.


Little Self sees only its own reflection in mirrors, watching with suspicion, blind to all other possibilities. A bench in a garden at midnight does nothing to obscure constellations.


Little Self is never satisfied, not even with total victory, nor recognition and honours. Unexpected snowfall means the bird-table needs replenishing.


Little Self claims ownership of the house in which it lives, the land on which it stands, the world through which it moves. A moment’s love is the pearl beyond price.


Little Self is certain about God, wants to be certain about God, needs to be certain about God. A flat battery is a chance on a winter’s morning.


Little Self consults timetables, makes detailed plans, sets the alarm to be absolutely sure. A book is only the beginning as reading goes way beyond it.


Little Self is easily slighted, considers creation to be a conspiracy, insists malice is merely concealed when none is apparent. The singer needs music as well as the lyrics.


Little Self can be so comfortable, settled and warm behind drawn curtains, quietly thrilled by the storm raging outside. Commandments are enduring but the stones were soon broken.


Little Self is fearful, seeks safety in not doing, negates risk by denying its own possibilities. A single cell once sought out another.


Little Self may find no recognition, despite being sovereign, while seeking immortality. As the very beginning is a fecund absence so must the end be.


                                                                                                                                  


Dave Alton

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 may 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 it’s 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,


While what is wrong is the right attitude.


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

Keith Armstrong: Under the Fantastic Sky

Event name: Lunchtime Lecture: Keith Armstrong – Under the Fantastic Sky

Date and time: Wednesday 1 June, 12.30 – 13.30

Venue: The Laing Art Gallery

Description: Poet and performer Keith Armstrong will speak about John Martin and his brothers and their relationship to regional culture. Armstrong will also perform a sequence of his own poems inspired by Martin and his family.

Admission: Free – no need to book.

Contact: For more info about this and other events at The Laing, call (0191) 232 7734 or visit the official site.

ANGELS PLAYING FOOTBALL

NEW FROM NORTHERN VOICES

KEITH ARMSTRONG

ANGELS PLAYING FOOTBALL: NEWCASTLE POEMS

Keith Armstrong was born & bred in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a community development worker, poet, librarian & publisher. As an industrial librarian at I.R.D. in Newcastle, he was christened 'Arts & Darts', organising an events programme in the firm including poetry readings, theatrical productions, & art exhibitions by his fellow workers, as well as launching Ostrich poetry magazine using the firm's copying facilities & arranging darts matches between departments! 

This selection of his poems on his beloved home city reveals both its sunny and dark sides.

Keith is a noted Geordie wordsmith, a bloke whose musings were always radical, though of their place. (Folk Roots magazine).

In another part of the field, another field, let's face it, sits Keith Armstrong's rakish gaff. (His)poems are rooted in the Tyneside music-hall tradition, closely behind which was the august balladry of the Borders. Throughout the collection, the authentic lyrical note of this northern poet is struck. (Michael Standen, Other Poetry).

PRICE £6.50         ISBN 1 871536 19 7       

*ORDERS (ADD £1.50 POSTAGE PER COPY) TO: NORTHERN VOICES, 

93 WOODBURN SQUARE, WHITLEY LODGE, WHITLEY BAY, TYNE & WEAR NE26 3JD, ENGLAND. TEL 0191 2529531.

I DON’T MIX WITH POETS

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re so boring.

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re too self-adoring.

I mix with drunk Magpies,

I mix with no lies,

I mix with a bit on The Side.

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re parasitic.

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re soporific.

I mix with nice girls,

I mix with dumb animals,

I mix with wild birds on The Wall.

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re stand-offish.

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re too foppish.

I mix with my fantasies,

I mix with realities,

I mix with the maids of the seas.

I don’t mix with poets,

They’re just sycophants.

I don’t mix with poets,

They get Arts Council grants!

Keith Armstrong

Commissioned by BBC Radio Newcastle for National Poetry Day 

Las Vegas

It’s glass ‘n’ steel reared in desert,
It’s neon gas burning so brightly
Stars are extinguished, It’s standing
On the walkover by Harman
Watching the life blood of traffic
Flowing vitally vivid red
One way, diamond white the other.
It’s darkness, yet The Boulevard
Blares and glares, sidewalks are seething
As the hour strikes up novelties:
Spumes of crystallized water dance,
Monumental Olympians,
Sculptured in faux stone, creak and groan
Into brief life; a volcano erupts,
And the gawping mob interrupts
Its promenade. All done by five past.
Then the huge slug of a crowd heaves
Into motion, oozing along
The silver trail towards the next
Stun-their-eyes gewgaw. It’s clicks
At every intersection, flick-
Flicking business cards to attract
Attention. Their business? Pimping!
In soiled T shirts brazenly bearing
“GIRLS4YOU”, a dumb show performed
In a city that’s dumb enough
To believe if no one speaks out
There’s no soliciting. It’s not
Bread and circuses anymore,
But sex and illusion, tacit
Collusion with an unspoken
Conspiracy to defraud
The willing and gullible.
Gambling is certainty disguised
As chance, the slots and deals and dice
Unremitting devices for
Dipping of wallets and purses.
It’s rock ‘n’ roll and too many
Elvi – deceiver Las Vegas.
It’s burlesque and stripper bars, it’s
Song and dance and rat-pack still
Packing ‘em in. It’s hypnosis,
It’s psychosis, it’s not saying,
“Enough! Enough! I’ve had enough!”
The only fear here is ennui,
Guilt at being caught not enjoying
A moment: howl and yowl is case
There’s slight suspicion of boredom.
Laugh and the whirl laughs with you,
Cry and there’s the Samaritans
On your cell phone singing, “Only
The Lonely…” It’s dreams and nightmares,
It’s cashing your paycheck at six
And broke for a month by half past.
It’s baby-boom of Superman
Born beyond Good and Evil,
It’s paradise synthesised, where
People pick accessible fruit
From the Knowledge Tree’s lowest branch.
It’s an avenue of sky-rise,
Vertical lily ponds in which
This city is drowning through its
Own reflection. And it’s cola,
Cold beer, iced tea.
It’s half-yards of margaritas,
It’s basques and baggies, stilettos
And trainers. It’s never sleeping,
But closing eyes to waking up.
It’s a galaxy of lights making
Beyond city limits so much
Darker. It’s electric guitars,
Chords and discords. It’s pretence,
A real sense that nothing is real.
It’s the compass abolished, it’s
The Strip as the sole direction,
Strip-stripping away refusal.
It’s bought! It’s sold! It’s Las Vegas.
It’s vague! It’s vain! And it’s Vegas.






Dave Alton