SURIANNE’s Neighborhood

Before the Writers Cafe closed Jan 2008, we recorded a series of poems and songs by a number of poets and songwriters who were regulars at the Writers Cafe or otherwise guests. It was intended as a CD anthology but as the Cafe closed we thought the best way to share them was via a You Tube anthology which would enable us to include more material and more poets etc. This is a work in progress with more poets / songwriters to be added as we go along but already there is varied programme on the site - take a visit..

Ann Wainwright - a co-organiser of the Writers Cafe, has a new and developing on line Writers Group on blogger -

It was Ann's birthday so I recorded this little 12 bar for fun on Audacity and put a video together. Ann Wainwright was editor of Poetic Licence and Station Identification on Teesside in 1982 - we ran the Castalians / New Poetry Scene at the Dovecot Arts Centre - a poetry / music venue ( the beginning of the Cleveland Creative Writing movement and more recently Ann helped me run the Writers Cafe at the Georgian Theatre Stockton.

 

 

A FILM ABOUT THE LITERARY DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEESVALLEY IN THE 80'S EARLY 90'S

Also A New Outlet Site - Documenting the history of Creative Writing in the Teesvalley will be forthcoming - soon

Outlet Literary History Site

 

 

 

In the early 1980's I was involved in developing grassroots publishing, performance facitilites to encourage and develop

 

local writers in the Teesvalley/ Cleveland area. By 1986 we had established Outlet - a Northern Arts / Cleveland County funded poetry magazine - distributed free through the librarys to the whole Teesvalley / North Yorkshire area. It encouraged first time or new writers, many who made redundant from Cleveland's Chemical or Steel industries or the isolated housewife. It became a spring board for other developments. It's main editor, Trev Teasdel developed a range of Creative Writing classes around the area and writers groups. Eventually the team

 

initiated a grassroots Teesside Literary festival called Write Around. Over the years a lot was built on those early intiatives as the offical bodies stepped in to fund projects. In 1990 we made a short Open Space TV programme about the pioneering work.

The film features Trev Teasdel, Andy Croft, Terry Lawson and more and the Outlet team were involved in the planning, scripting, filming and editing etc. It was quite a long film but had to be edited to about 10 mins. At that time the media only protrayed Teesside in negative terms and the area was regared as a cultural desert. We start the film with footage of ICI at night and juxtapose negative media broadcasts against the voices of some of the new poets emerging from the area commenting on the issues. It then outlines some of the work of Outlet and Write Around.

MARK BEEVERS ON VOX

MARK BEEVERS ON MY SPACE

Mark Beevers hails from Saltburn but has been globe-trotting and

 

teaching in recent years. We met him in the mid 80's when he sent some unusual poems to Trev's

magazine Outlet. From there he had success in the Write Around

anthologies and the international small press and the Middlesbrough

Gazette Poetry pages. His small, witty and unusual poems were a

success and he's produced over a hundred chapbooks and poem

sheets over the years as well as producing Saltburn Scene

magazine, Wavelength and the Captain's log. In the 90's he

produced a series of tight, humourous and socially relevant sketches

- some of which were performed as part of the Stockton Riverside

Festival, has written lyrics for local bands.  For

those on the Teesside Writing scene who remember Mark's poetry

in the Gazette, Write Around, Saltburn Scene and Outlet - he has a

new Vox blog.

Two audio files of Mark performing his poems with Trev Teasdel

on guitar. There are some of Mark with Trev from the 80's to come

to this.

 

 

 

 

 

Last week, Margaret Mawston passed away at the age of 80. She was a well liked figure in the North Yorkshire village

 of Gt. Ayton, former sectretary and long standing member of the local branch of the Worksers' Educational Association and a village poet. Margaret had attended my Creative Writing classes in Guisborough in 1988 and we punblished her in Outlet Magazine and in the Write Around Festival Anthologies. Margaret then joined the Phoenix Poetry Group in Middlesborough and went on to get involved as the Cleveland writing movement developed, being published by Middlesbrough based Mudfog Press with severla later self published pamphlets.

Margaret wrote about nature and environmental issues both infused with her love and observations of nature and her scienticific background - she was a chemist at ICI for a long while and versed in many languages, including Grrek and Russian.

I produced a little booklet of her work for the Wake, and here are the poems, some we published in Outelt and Write Around and others she submitted for a more recent magazine I was involved with alongside some sent to me by Carol Morgan.

 

A ‘Christmas’ Carol, with a new,

Environment-related Message

Good King Wenceslas looked out

    On the feast of Stephen,

England’s prairies met his gaze –

    Hedges bull-dozed even:

Nest-sires, cover, food-chains lost –

    Birds had left for ever;

Fertilizers drain from fields and

    Algal blooms taint river.

‘Hither, page, and stand by me;

    If thou knowest it, teach us –

Why this dearth of mobile life,

    Worms, mice, feathered creatures?’

‘Toxins lace the soil all round –

    Aimed to guard the crops, but

Pesticidal residues

   Ensure that all life stops.’

‘Bring me comfort, better news –

    Are waters better treated?’

‘No, Sire, rivers are all defiled,

    Oxygen depleted,

Fouled by sewage, factory wastes –

    Fish asphyxiated;

Toxins take their toll as well –

    Fish contaminated.

Sire, the atmosphere is worse:

    Chimneys belching, smoking,

Acid fumes return in rain –

    Old folk, children choking.

Every citizen’s motor-car

    Brings its evil share; and

Halogenated hydrocarbons

   Injure the ozone layer . . .

 

Ultra-violet in excess starts

    Cancer of the skin;

Radioactive fallout may

    Invade further in.

Nuclear energy uncontrolled, with

    Leakage, spells foreboding –

Local evil – but world-wide with

    Reactor exploding.

Unforeseen these ills arise

    From thoughtless, careless deed;

Evils further come about

    From our wicked greed;

Forests hacked down, not replaced –

    Soil is washed away, and

CO2 accumulates –

    Greenhouse state holds sway.

Elephants are killed for tusks,

    Rhinos for their horn.

Plunders man his planet from

    Iniquity inborn:

Earth is ransacked, world is robbed,

    Environment is ravaged,

Wasted, poisoned – Guilty Man

    Must repair the damage.’

           By Margaret Mawston

Aware And Alert, Part 3: Places in a Miscellany, page 26

 

Cockerel Key

A distant cockerel crows.

Subconsciously I hear.

My garden chores go on.

Plugged-in I am to work.

            But mind’s straying far away,

            East European village claimed –

            A Magyar hamlet…geese in flocks…

Quite soon returned…amazed…

Hands occupied with plants.

Faint cockerel crows again…

            I’m Balkans-bound – on Bosnian hills

            Or steep Greek village street stone-stepped,

            Stone slabs on roof, mid mountains hid…

My row of plants is done;

The clank of tools now yanks

Me westward home from dreams:

I wakeful wonder why

Mind wanders absentee

From work repeatedly

            To Bosnian valley, Grecian isle…

Cock crows now muffled, far…

But mental pounce now grabs the core,

Collects and threads the exotic beads –

Locales all linked by air that’s filled

With farmyard cock’s still vivid calls –

Familiar there but here now rare.

By Margaret Mawston, from Aware And Alert,

 

 Viewpoints Changing

Reviewed in age, our life is seen with changing shapes

As changing viewpoints, recognised, reveal new scenes.

So, travelling by train to school, surprised I saw

An ash tree, elm or oak rotate, new shapes to show

My eager eyes – the flatness false – with tang to teach

My quickening mind to grasp the three-dimensional truth.

Examine all that comes to mind. Both good and bad appear,

A mélange spins and twirls of downbeat gloom and upbeat cheer,

Our earlier able selves replaced by straw, our tools now blunt;

The light has waned and clouds crowd round, soon twilight too is quenched.

To walk the heights, push on through gale, explore the wilderness

Will soon not be an option free for crumbling folk like us,

Contentment with our lot’s the job, so face the other way!

Displace the gloom and celebrate a multi-coloured day!

The world has all its beauty still: just take a look around –

The seasons’ changing loveliness; the natural world abounds

In varying shapes and sounds and patterns: mammal, bird and moth

And fresh spring growth and long-lived trees and tinkling water’s froth.

Now flowers open, give out perfume, bees hum, wings flash by

And small forms flutter, twitter, sing and music fill the sky.

With fewer tasks, we’ve time to bask in all that’s given us free.

Let joy and pleasure in full measure hold down misery.

                       By Margaret Mawston, from Aware And Alert,

                  Part 2: Sandwich, Serious With Fun Filling, page 50

 

Garden Warfare

Cut-throat combat in my garden plagues my plants,

Harsh gales and rain-spikes slice my seedlings – what is left

When foul black oozy beasts have bitten off the best,

Their cousins in protective armour viciously attack

Even well-grown plants, from delicate lettuce to brawny broad beans,

And cloaked, and hidden from view they think, they dare to climb

And scramble four feet, more, up succulent juicy stems,

With rasping mouth-parts grip and suck the youngest sappy shoots,

They send their sothers and bristers – (hermaphrodite this tribe) –

To scale the house-wall to scout for finest crops

(Or – what’s the game? My bricks have no green film to graze)

And leave their nauseous shiny trails of slime.

I’ve allies who will do my dirty work –

They spear those carapaced molluscan pests

And bash their brains out on the hard stone steps;

- And benefit, with slimy feed their rich reward.

Yet other avian friends may forage midst the leaves and soil,

Or swoop on a crawler ascending stalks aloft,

Crunch up, destroy, consume the grub or insect menace.

Even my friendly robin, tolerant of nearby humans,

Watching my soil-delving movements closely, jumps

For a cruel, easy slaughter – a turned-up worm.

(I forgive him this gaff; but earthworms should be spared)

Among the ranks of raspberries, soldiers standing straight,

The wicked willow-herbs invade en masse:

They choke the rightful residents, aim to evict;

And weave themselves round raspberry roots, for theft of soil-sunk food.

Convolvulus uses the furthest hedge as a climbing frame;

It winds a stranglehold round every vertical stem,

Tops out with a blanket of green to smother its host,

Flaunting its flowers in a virginal show of disdain.

It needs the mobilisation of my own nastiest moods

To unbridled violence to tear down the throttling bonds.

 

Belligerent bramble in the tortured hawthorn weft

May curry favour with tasty juicy fruits as gifts

But, prompted by warlike stance of established hedge,

Will readily rip my flesh with prickles, egged on by the thorns.

They bid their scions lie in wait likewise among my herbs;

These sharp-barbed shootlets claim the space of parents’ feet,

Insist this soil is theirs: they pierce and cut my working hands.

Then climbing rats with furry tails intrude from thirty feet away.

They strike from base beyond two boundary lines,

Assault my garth in thieving raids and, jumping at a fence,

Ignore protective nets I’ve stretched over ripening fruit:

By their violent kicks, the reticulate barrier’s badly torn.

I saw a sparrow-hawk pounce on a hedge-hidden nest; the nestlings’ cries

Brought full-grown birds in hordes; amid crescendo noise

The adults fought the villain off with beaks and talons.

Fences too, defenders surely of my garden’s arena,

Stab me in the back by harnessing wilful wind,

May hurl themselves across my green and living world,

Destroy whole years of growth in one onslaught.

And something nasty roams my terrain when it’s dark,

Snatches chunks to leave large notches in my brown cat’s ears,

What brutish spiteful demon so could spoil his looks!

So come on, Bristles, before you settle to hibernating sleep,

Search out the savage malevolent devils still a threat,

Make corpses of them, end their evil lives!

Big spiders too, come lay your traps, come catch those lying forms

That lay their eggs, that eat my crops, that taint my favoured plants,

Come, catch them, gobble, rid me of these troublesome brutes!

By Margaret Mawston, from Aware And Alert,

Part 2: Sandwich, Serious With Fun Filling, page 40.

Best Time of Day

The early morning hours are those I prize,

Before the world’s awake, when all is fresh

Washed clean from dull and tasteless yesterday,

By dark hours’ dew erased – slate blank again.

By rest perfused, the memory’s cleared of gloom,

A sleep-conferred amnesia frees the mind.

When new light scours the darkness from the soil,

Our world is different: evening shadows lost,

Replaced by shine dispensed by light reversed;

So – rigg and furrow stripes, with light-side switched;

And windows, rooms surprised by grant of light

Which all those people miss, who later rise,

The unusual light supplants stale day-used dregs

Full-charged with piled-up sorrows, mischief, woe.
 

Then, watched with hope, the sun itself will rise,

A slow sky-rocket aimed at mid-day height

Or, viewing its forecast frozen field of work,

It totters grounded, along the horizon rolls,

Just slowly gaining strength to lift itself.

In summer it leads the field, ahead of us all,

In winter appearing late - awaited long.

I squeeze day’s first sweet drops, while friends sleep on.

I float on morning’s uplift - powered and sparked

Blaze up, - for time without limit is offered free,

The goad of time’s compulsion dropped, withdrawn.

The mind free-wheels, released from rules; released

Are feelings from inhibition; and naked thought

With lubricated language comes clothed in words.

                                   

                                    By Margaret Mawston, from Aware And Alert,

 

 

Waiting

Silently resting, the village lies waiting

And still, after storm in an early morn calm.

Sunshine-bather brick-work basks in this blessing;

Weathered dull ochre, the roofs soak it up;

And from gutter to ridge every sequence of tiling

Is waiting . . . for waking of folk? . . . or for winter?

For changes of autumn approach, herald tremor;

But late summer sunshafts seem portending peace.

While the still resting roofs now redden warmly in sunlight,

Their late-lying occupants drowse in the drifts of their dreams,

Cossetted yet in their blankets – as roof tile and brick wall

Nestle still likewise in close-gathered shawl of green leaves.

A breeze has arisen, will waken the somnolent homesteads’

The waiting is ceasing, each household is waking – to what?

While the house-martins busily pass their last days here, the people

Now wake to the last fling of summer – free Monday, sun-bright!
 

                                         By Margaret Mawston

 

North West Greece

To Northern Pindos I will go –

Stout mountain boots snug ankle, toe.

Astraka calls, Gamila too,

And Smolikas gives back the view –

Gamila’s saw-edge, pink at dawn;

Crag-foot A-?-os stream is borne

Past K?nitsa, Albania-bound,

Its link with Voidomatis found –

That’s Vikos Gorge’s icy spring

Where bathers gasp and rock-walls ring.

To Astraka hut from Papingo

And on South East to Tsepélovo –

Zag?ri’s hidden grey-stone villages

Delight the eye, like its ancient bridges.

I’ll be welcomed there by all I meet

In North West Greece, off the tourist beat.

By Margaret Mawston, from Aware And Alert

Part 3: Places in a Miscellany, page 31

Light Our Darkness

Black skeletons of trees and roofs,

A single early eastern beam:

Sun slits the mist, to slice downpouring rain -

A shaft that breaks the block of black-walled sky,

Received, restores a summer blaze to autumn’s faded leaves.

Enlivens old stone houses’ golden lichen crusts;

A jet of light imprisoned, - escaped, -

Rekindles burnt-out cinders’ glow;

A force from curtains emergent, power transmits

Transmuting threat to hope in the ambient black;

Light burst from darkness there,

Here darkness yields to light;

A moment’s promise of ultimate evergreen

In the eternal grey of the ephemeral;

And I at the centre, between good and evil,

Conscious of this unforgettable, perhaps unrepeatable instant,

See, in the flash of disclosure, a revelation

Of truth, of the options before us.

Margaret Mawston

 

 

January / Spring

The last days of January still are to come -

Ten days more but spring is arriving.

Though daylight’s still short and it’s not over warm,

Spring plants in the garden are thriving.

 

Crocuses, golden, still unopened ovals,

Stand up near the edge of the lawn.

For days now a thrush has been singing up high,

The tree though still leafless, forlorn.

 

Dormancy’s dominant widely : small birds

Search bare branches for aught to devour;

But on sun-flavoured soil, in it’s rosette of green

There’s a pale yellow primrose in flower.

 

Margaret Mawston

 

 

NOVEMBER CALM

I walked where autumn’s rarity held sway -

That bliss emerged from gale, fog, frost and rain;

Soft sunshine stilly soaking passive fields.

The calm that filled the place passed into me.

 

Long simple lines of moorland ‘gainst the sky

Quelled inner turbulence like oil on heavy sea;

A lakeside image roused itself in mind -

                                                 Smooth surface spreading stress-relieving balm.

Margaret Mawston.

 

Bird Business 

Rooks rove westward, - dusk decision;

Drove on drove, high twilight trek;

Thirties, fifties, wings slow-flapping:

Training flights for this year’s young -

              routes to learn, perhaps.

 

Dove perched, breast arched pink,

Poised as a finial on pink-tiled roof,

Neck arched, counter-curved, - seeking mate:

He being added, plumed pink too,

              the pair now purposefully depart.

 

Family of five fine mistle-thrushes

Invaded the crown of the rowan tree

Feeding furiously; greedily feeding

In minutes had stripped the tree of its fruit

                  - ensuring dispersal of seeds.

 

Arcs of flights weave like wool,

Skeins of bird-track lace the sky,

Twitter-chatter fills the near-space:

Bird-life busy—planned performance

               with patterns prints the air.

Margaret Mawston

 

 

The following poem is republished from Cleveland’s Poetry magazine Outlet

April 1990 and is untitled …..

 

This pastel and charcoal evening arrests

My attention,

My awareness is held to it as to a magnet.

A sensation of wonder and awe creeps

Through my being and I would, were I able,

To perpetuate it in paint.

Indescribable in simple words is

The sight before me,

But insistent is its appeal to be registered.

It’s persistence will surely be short -

I must drink while there is time

Of this precious ethereal fluid distilled

From the sun now sunk from the sky.

Already the vision

Slithers out of my grasp, and slight is

The seepage that shows where the stream still

Slides beyond the Horizon.

Blacker now against fading light

The violent and velvet shadows and

The strange blue hue

Of the grass: unique is the evening;

- yet here is this bus-load of people

Absorbed in their sordid selves.

 

 

Acquainted with The Night

Reprinted from Outlet  March 1991.

Soft-bodied, frail-winged moths fly out

When daylight dims, - bats after them.

Night need not end it: - trace of light

When honeysuckle’s perfume’s found

And moths work on, bats scoop them still -

both beasts acquainted with the night.

 

Wee rodents, daylight sleepers, scared

Of daytime foes, Man’s noisy world,

Creep out in darkness, deed and fight

And mate, scarce rustling fallen leaves.

The quiet, the darkness suits their needs

- All acquainted with the night.

 

The dark does not disguise them though -

Rats, mice and such small furry forms

Yield feast for feathered ones on wings, -

Keen-sighted, soundless, swift they pounce,

Hooked beak’s quick snatch takes prey, Yes

Owl’s are -

Well acquainted with the night.

 

While in the fields, on downs and moors,

When winter’s past and season’s mild,

All night they lie and sleep , or stand

And feed and chew, - our friends with hoofs,

Our cattle, goats and horses, sheep,

Content, acquainted with the night.

 

 

The green too is tranquil: plants

Sit fixed to spot through night and day,

In daylight busy making food,

In darkness busy still, - they shift

The sugars made, for use and store, -

Through life acquainted with the night

 

Through town and country nightly stalk

Their prey, - slow creeping, stealthy, hushed

With final flash, - our feline friends:

Mild, sleepy, cuddly brutes by day

In darkness fierce, they spit and fight

And howl, - acquainted with the night.

 

And human hunters skulk by night,

Set snares and traps, raid banks, knife foes;

Such lawless lads invade the realm

Of other men, to steal their wealth.

The dark’s ideal for burglars, they’re

Alert, acquainted with the night.

 

But human life for most part needs

The light of day for work and play:

Most people sleep the dark away

Till sky is white and calls; but some

On night-shift sleep the day, then work

Acquainted with the night—awake.

 

Yet other humans dance and drink

In lighted rooms, escaping night;

While darkness charms some human souls:-

Lovers are blessed and thinkers are clear,

Artists are moved, poets inspired, -

Acquainted with the night’s own peace.

.........................

 On Roseberry Topping at Sunjustset

First published in Write Around 1989 Anthology

Flat plates of rock, an island in a twilight lake,

Deep in that sea a thousand feet creep cars

Like phosphorescent worms of the dark depths

And other living creatures, - living lamps…..

 

Naked to the sky, asprawl we ride our raft,

A lantern at our mast-head hangs the moon;

Vast is this ocean, reefed by mountains round,

Ranges now wild though gentle in sky-lit day,-

The undulating Cleveland moorland verge.

 

Vivid a rainbow strip of western sky -

Unnoticed diminution of the day-sky shell;

But upward turning, our eyes through green and blue

In ten degrees by solid light are met,

Thence shock-cast floorwards find reflected night

And only between the meeting jaws this streak

Blinding our whale-mouth-dwellers’ unaccustomed sight.

 

But for the moon’s, our lantern’s westward drift

Drawn in unconscious wish to trail the sun,

These minutes’ clarity could seem to touch eternity

Floating in timeless medium, voyage unsensed.

 

 

You speak of Austrian lakes, a childhood scene,

Welling in colour up from mist of years;

I can accompany you, can clearly view

Imagined landscape at Europe’s unroamed roof

Just as this gable-end just now new world unfolds.

 

Silent upon a peak we view our world,

Our heavy bodies pressed to this crust upthrust,

Curling our wormlike softness around this crystal

Point protruding of earth from her rocky core,

Bearing us up as on altar, a sacrifice to the gods.

 

Nearer are we at this moment to their estate:

Earth has no power; we float above her sphere.

Far from our island raft and impotent at this hour

Teeming industrial Tees-side, as milky way

Reflected at northern shore of the lake, is manifest.

 ......................

 

First published in Write Around Poetry

Anthology 1991

I walk the now familiar curve

Where river Leven flanks the road:

The green pasture penetrates

To village centre, meets those banks.

Low sunshine streams across on me;

The old stone houses quietly stand

Behind, around the village green,

And cluster close again downstream.

I turn to check the hills still rise

Behind, above the building’s bunched;

Assured, I’m satisfied, walk on.

This loved locality fills my being.

 

And now subconscious cries out ‘Snap’ -

No visual matching in the mind

But echo pulses from the past -

Familiar feelings recognised.

The scene’s now subtly changed—through half

A century suddenly time’s wound back:

A child, I’m wandering freely through

Green London suburb, - trees and fields

Still dominant there—it’s peaceful, quiet -

A village still though spreading fast.

I stop beside the village pond; I wade

Into water, watch for fish; I climb

A tree—for animal pleasure, view from height

For joy in freedom, lordship, solitude.

 

My feelings smoothly past and present  link,

As present satisfaction now restates

That long-past childhood’s consciousness of place.

That love that now this village generates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Newcastle poet - Keith Armstrong - who has appeared many times at the Writers Cafe, is planning a new book of his poetry from Newcastle and Europe. I've written the Introduction - I will post details when the book is out. (Trevor)..

the jingling geordie:
 
AN INTRODUCTION

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.

The collected poetry of Keith Armstrong (‘The Jingling Geordie’) is, in my opinion, as iconic as Lindisfarne's ‘Fog on the Tyne’.
 
I kicked out in Half Moon Yard,
bucked a rotten system.
Fell out with fools in All Hallows Lane
and grew up feeling loved.
 
By far, I would maintain, the best poet from the North East of England over the last forty years, his evocative poetry reverberates with life, rooted in Newcastle’s rich working class history, its architecture and cloth capped streets; its atmosphere, highs and lows, its heroes and reformers, minstrels and poets.

Armstrong on Newcastle writer Jack Common:
 
He bowled along the corridors through Milburn House
and stalked the nightmare of his past;
all around him fell bulldozed history
and his suit shook with soot.
He sensed a shallowness in the air,
a city with its guts ripped out.
He blinked at the scale of the new Law Courts
and thought of battles the workers lost.
 
Part of the strength of Armstrong's work is his ability to weave multiple threads into his poems seamlessly, blending a sense of history with full-on contemporary themes (and sometimes the old themes are also contemporary!). He'll wrap sensuous rock and roll and earthy colloquialisms around startlingly evocative, yet realist, images, alongside a full-tilt narrative.
 
His honesty is almost confessional at times; his empathy with the downtrodden and oppressed stems from experience and
observation. His odes target the hypocritical, the insincere and the exploiters, putting them squarely in their place and yet there's also humour and irony and downright irreverency.
 
There's love and lust in there too and vulnerability. All the various shades of his humanity animate his poems.
His poems are often word-videos that leave you with that feeling of having just emerged from a cinema and they capture the sense and heart of the city and its people like no other poetry that I've read.
 
I am the talk of the Tyne,
one of the many mouths
of this swilling river
in our blood.
 
Like other iconic poets and artists in Europe, Armstrong lives the lifeof the outsider, poet and raconteur. You can feel the alchemy that transforms his observations and experience and his pub crawl conversations with strangers into poetry with a full head of brilliance on it.
 
The breath of Europe
is recorded in the Bodensee's sighing:
the wars and agonised cries,
the shrieks of pleasure-boats,
the dying of pointless ideals.
Her castles and churches bear testimony
to all the joy and futility,
the spasms of birth.
 
Armstrong is an energetic grass roots networker, twinning writers and their groups from Groningen and Tuebingen, Edinburgh and Limerick and organising a yearly round of exchange visits, joint readings and performances.
 
O Limerick Days you are haunting my soul,
my songs cry out for your old Summer Street.
Make love when I pour you a glass of my verse,
with hope may it set your ancient soul free.
 
Along the way, there will be joint cross-cultural anthologies. Ontour, he'll hang out with European poets in historic bars, sharing his soul and teasing out what makes them tick until well past midnight, transmuting it all into poems as stunning as his Tyneside odes.
 
Yes, Tuebingen,
it's me
looking for myself once more
in your troubled mirrror.
So I dive
into La Boheme
and back and back and back
into the Boulanger.
So I stagger
out of Hades
and into the arms
of the Neckarmueller
to feed the ducks
with scraps of my trembling poetry.
 
No middle class poetry poseur, Keith is out there with pig farmers, building workers, football fanatics, barmaids, divorcees and anyone who will talk to him about politics, poetry, religion and life. He'll probably give them a book or CD of his and not trouble them for the price. He's made a lifestyle out of poetry and, although an Arts Council grant and a paid gig help, it's not all about money or the fame - it's just what he is - it's important to him to give of his light through his words and images and that people read, listen to and enjoy his poems.
 
He cares not a jot for their fancy Awards,
their sycophantic perambulations,
degrees of literary incest.
These trophies for nepotism
pass this peculiar bird by
as he soars
high
above the paper quadrangle,
circling over the dying Heads of Culture,
singing sweet revolutionary songs.

None the less, now over 60, isn't it time someone made a documentary about this iconic Geordie poet whose poems
form a soundtrack for cities all over Europe? If you look deeply enough into the fog on the Tyne, you'll see the poems of Keith Armstrong emblazoned on every street and alley, a theatre of myth, legend and history that characterises his home city.
 
sing of the fish in the tyne
sing of the lost yards and the pits.
 
His poems are also dangerous - you might just end up questioning your beliefs. That's what poets are for - to
challenge us.
 
Get the UK out of your system,
no going back.
We take the power
to rule ourselves,
make community,
build our own spaces.
Break
the hegemony
of dead parties,
lifeless institutions,
let debate flower,
conflicting views rage.
 
Read and enjoy these specially selected poems and images from Tyneside and across Europe and experience the real magic of Armstrong’s words.
 

Trevor Teasdel - poet, songwriter, tutor and editor; director of the Writers Cafe, Stockton, 2008.

 

And here is a new poem from Keith -

 

You've got to be joking
 
if you think this is democracy,
this quango land
of the pampered middle classes,
this apology for socialism,
this New Labour
egocentric insult to our history,
this emptiness
of false celebrity,
this Blairite shallowness,
this shattered ignorance
of all that shines from our fought-for heritage,
this media connivance
and bone idleness,
this following of the fast buck,
this grovelling to the greed of capital,
this sickening homage to materialism,
this lack of human spirit
in our city centres,
this brutal selfishness
encouraged by a government
that denies our European roots,
that scans the wonder of the vast Atlantic
for feeble ideas to run with,
this rat race of a society
that puts self above solidarity,
these feeble careerist substitutes for activism
who have lost any real will for change,
who have become corrupted by a power-lust,
who lack any passion
other than to climb grimly up their greasy poles,
clinging on to their self-delusion,
ignoring, in their centrist way,
the true beauty of community,
handing out their gongs to the servile
and rubbishing the selfless folk
who work their little miracles every breathing day.

 

Keith Armstrong

 

More of his poems are on his blog

 

Keith Armstrong's blog 

 

This post is really for Ann Wainwright so she can link to  some of the takes

 of A Teardrop in the Tees on her blog.

<Solo Version

This song was written by Trev Teasdel (me!) around 1981. Ann heard a solo version of the song and at the time Ann, myself and Colin Walker were organising a similar event to the Writers Cafe called then The Castalians (later New Poetry Scene) at the Dovecot Arts Centre in Stockton on Tees. Ann played the tape to Colin who was also a musician. Colin worked out an arrangement for the song (of which the solo version appears on Trev's Songs from the Coventry Underground) (the song was started in Coventry but finished on Teesside!

The song features Trev Teasdel  - clawpicking guitar and vocals / Ann

Wainwright Flute and backing vocals / Colin Walker Violin and arrangement.

The two versions on here with Ann and Colin are practice runs for the proposed performance at the Dovecot Arts Centre (where Tyne Tees Telly were talent hunting!) they weren't looking for us though - we were the organisers who did a bit too!

<One version breaks down when Ann looses her place!

 

 

 

 

 

<The other is just about complete.