AN OUBLIETTE FOR KITTY

There’s a hole in this Newcastle welcome,

there’s a beggar with a broken spine.

On Gallowgate, a heart is broken

and the ships have left the Tyne.

So what becomes of this History of Pain?

What is there left to hear?

The kids pour down the Pudding Chare lane

and drown a folksong in beer.

So here is an oubliette for you, Kitty,

somewhere to hide your face.

The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city

and old scars are all over the place.

There’s this dirt from a history of darkness

and they’ve decked it in neon and glitz.

There are traders in penthouse apartments

on the Quayside where sailors once pissed.

So where are Hughie and Tommy, Kitty?,

the ghosts of Geordies past?

I don’t want to drown you in pity

but I saw someone fall from the past.

So here is an oubliette for you, Kitty,

somewhere to hide your face.

The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city

and old scars are all over the place.

While they bomb the bridges of Belgrade,

they hand us a cluster of Culture  

and tame Councillors flock in on a long cavalcade

to tug open the next civic sculpture.

And who can teach you a heritage?

Who can learn you a poem?

We’re lost in a difficult, frightening, age

and no one can find what was home.

So here is an oubliette for you, Kitty,

somewhere to hide your face.

The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city

and old scars are all over the place.

So here is an oubliette for you, Kitty,

somewhere to hide your face.

The blood is streaming from fresh wounds in our city

and old scars are all over the place.

 KEITH ARMSTRONG

LEITH WALK, EDINBURGH

Leith Walk it was

where Thomas Carlyle realised

that God did not exist:

Leith Walk

where Stevenson lit

his student pipe

and leched

after a shopgirl’s arse.

He spat

at dashing businessmen,

faces gripped

by hate,

and he loved

the night

did RLS:

the swinging hips,

and lifted dresses;

the tartaned whores spread

over a wild Scots wasteland,

showing their floodlit thighs,

keys flashing

in expert hands,

ready to unlock,

tease out,

the strangest dreams;

in full sight

of a devilish moon,

Leith Walk,

and a nonexistent God.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

http://www.scottishreview.net/KeithArmstrong57.shtml?utm_source=Sign-Up.to&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=287603-Spies+in+St+Andrew%27s+House%3F%3A+MI5%2C+dirty+tricks%2C+and+the+referendum

JINGLE IN LEEDS!

Wednesday 27th February - Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre (HEART) Ltd, Bennett Road, Leeds LS6 3HN  7.30pm.  A reading featuring three Ward Wood poets – Keith Armstrong, David Cooke and Joy Howard.

SKY THE GUIDE DOG

Sky is a guide dog.

He will lick you

into light.

His eyes are pools of sparks.

He is a star hound.

Sky leads us across the universal fields,

opens up the lids of daydreams,

teaches us to feel

those tender rays.

Sky’s vista runs deep,

shows up a braille galaxy.

In this cold, blind dark,

we follow his moonlit trail.

We marry our lonely visions with his

and see

heaven.

KEITH ARMSTRONG 

BACK TO TUEBINGEN MARCH 18TH-22ND!

THE FLAIR OF CENTURIES

As an owl flits across

Herrenbergerstrasse roofs,

we all must know 

of the shadows of

many lost hopes and careers.

There is no plaque to commemorate

the victims

of all those great and intellectual battles.

Their talents have leaked away

in the midst of a lifetime’s pleasures,

in this market place 

of all the Swabian Muses.

O the Ammer and the Neckar

ripple with fallen petals

and you can hear the strains

of the Rauberlied

drifting towards you

along rivers of song.

It’s a riot for bread and grain,

even the Professors get paid in crumbs,

above the heads of their hungry students.

And all the old comedians

chortle in their granaries,

as Camerarius discovers the sex of plants

and our Fuchs christens a flower.

Walk the Platanenallee and listen

to Silcher’s tunes in the trees.

Trace Hauff’s tales in the wood

and Uhland’s poems on the water.

It is the flair of centuries

of intellectual uplifting:

it is the scent of Tuebingen’s fuchsias

bursting open 

your heart.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

OH FARE YE WELL OLD RABY STREET

(in memory of Jack Routledge, folk singer)

In ‘The Phoenix’,

you belted out

your heart again

for us,

playing on those bones,

the minutes beating on your bodrahn,

and your lungs full to bursting

with the music

of days long gone:

‘the wash house

standing in the rain,

the smell of washing

through a broken pane.’

I thought you were a brick,

safe as houses,

but you crumbled,

just like your beloved Byker Bank,

broken.

Sinking the darkness of a Guinness,

I listen to a tape of you

that night in Lauffen,

your voice filling the pub,

and I can see

the sweat dripping from you,

all those sung memories

shared with us,

flowing 

like the Tyne.

We grew apart, I know,

but, friend Jack, now that you have gone,

I’ll treasure even more

the times we socked it 

to ‘em all

those nights merry

with my sweet poetry,

and brilliant

with your sweet songs.

                                   

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Your description fits him to a 'T' - his clear voice, lungs bursting, beads of perspiration, he put everything into his singing - oh, and not to mention his playing of the bones !!  Such memories stay with us.

With thanks and all good wishes - Ken Hudson

                           - Lower Wyke, West Yorkshire

NORTHERN INFORMER!

http://northerninformer.co.uk/news/news-select.php?id=19

another grand neet @ newcastle's mining institute

'The work, all the way from creativity in your writing across to encouraging others, organising events, and so on, in relation to North East culture is immense, in my humble view. This proud region would be very weakened if people like you did not put so much effort and time and talent into all its various aspects of life, not least its history.' (Brian Hall).

AWARD WINNERS

There are 2 winners of the Northern Voices Community Projects Joseph Skipsey Award this year:


Rachel Cochrane - Stocksfield based writer and dramatist and the brains behind the Listen Up North website. Her energy and motivation and the help she has given to the region's writers is phenomenal. This award is well earned and overdue.

Dave Alton - Burnley born Dave has battled away with his poetry for years on Tyneside, his adopted community, and he deserves wider recognition for this efforts. His work is rooted in the traditional folk songs and ballads of the region. With Keith Armstrong he helped establish the innovative Poetry Tyneside blog. Now that he has moved to Barnsley, he will be very much the instigator of Northern Voices Community Projects' enterprises in the Yorkshire area, developing exchange links with Tyneside, as well as maintaining his own commitment to the north east.

Further information: NVCP tel 0191 2529531

www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk

BURNS NIGHT!

Burns Night with The Black Light Engine Room!!!
Friday, 25 January 2013
19:00 until 23:00

Celebrate Burns Night with BLER by coming along with your poems and getting legless!

Featuring the legendary Keith Armstrong!! Sara Dennis!! Midway Arcadia!!

Blast into the New Year with the Best! £3 entry. 

O'Connells,
29-41 Bedford Street, TS1 2LL Middlesbrough

ELEPHANTS IN TUEBINGEN

Such a postwar circus, 

swill of pigs and drawn out cold war,

the bleeding never stops.

Under the straw,

the claw of a miserable history

grabs down the years

at the young who are innocent

of all the butchery and whoredom.

Imperial Germany is a fagged out colonial office,

a sweating prison

of bashed up ideals,

a broken clock

covered in ticks and leeches.

The animals have escaped

and invade the Market Place.

Elephants sup at Neptune’s old fountain,

spurt out the foam of stagnant days, 

trunks curling to taste the Neckar water.

This Tuebingen is a surreal pantomime:

barmaids swing from ceilings,

policemen hang from their teeth.

Frau Binder throws them buns.

And our Max Planck is a dream inventor.

Some boffin of his crosses a peach with a tulip,

the genetics of a bayonet in a breast.

The menagerie moves on to the Castle,

a giraffe nibbles at a church.

The sun gnaws at the clouds.

Like a clown,

I leap to down beer.

And a hideously sweet lady cracks a whip

and flashes her milky thigh at me.

It is no good.

I cannot raise a glassy smile anymore.

This circus is a tragedy.

The animals are sad 

and rotten

with the stink of carnage,

seeping 

from your television screens.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Poetry in Leeds

27th February - Headingley Enterprise and Arts Centre (HEART) Ltd, Bennett Road, Leeds LS6 3HN  7.30pm.  A reading featuring three Ward Wood poets – Keith Armstrong, David Cooke and Joy Howard.

out to sea!

http://www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk/Northern_Voices_Community_Projects/Out_to_Sea.html

Happy New Year from Listen Up North!

http://listenupnorth.com/newsletter/513-happy-new-year

NORTHERN VOICES COMMUNITY PROJECTS 2013!

http://www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk/

Twinning!

http://www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk/Northern_Voices_Community_Projects/Twinning.html

NEWS FROM GARY MILLER!

'MAD MARTINS' My 1st of 2 new albums due in 2013: I am looking forward to entering the recording studio in January 2013 to record the first of what I hope will be two new Gary Miller albums for 2013. This first of these two albums is 'Mad Martins' - a series of songs I began writing 10 years ago about the "infamous" Martin Brothers of Tynedale for a project originally conceived by my friend and regular collaborator Keith Armstrong. The album is being recorded by my very good friend and regular recent collaborator Iain Petrie. As well as a good selection of songs of mine (about 20), the album is also planned to include a series of poems by Keith, and perhaps some other bits and pieces still to be confirmed! It may even become a double album! Special launch events for the album to be announced soon… I have been carrying many of these songs in my head for the last 10 years so it will be great to finally "get them out there" and "lay them to rest" before I commence on my next album 'proper' of all new songs for autumn 2013.

2013!

NORTHERN VOICES COMMUNITY PROJECTS

COMMUNITY ARTS EVENT IN THE MINING INSTITUTE LIBRARY, NEWCASTLE:

Wednesday January 16th 2013 7.30pm. Admission free. Bar and bookstall.

Northern Voices Community Projects Annual Awards event. The presentation of the annual Northern Voices Community Projects Joseph Skipsey Awards and a commemoration of the Hartley Pit Disaster with poems and songs. This event launches Dr Keith Armstrong's writing residency at the Mining Institute and will also mark the 45th anniversary of the death of Newcastle writer Jack Common and the 110th of his birth, with readings from his works. There will be readings from the NVCP commemorative book on Hartley 'Still The Sea Rolls On', funded by North Tyneside Council, featuring Rachel Cochrane, Catherine Graham, Keith Armstrong, Robert Lonsdale, Geoff Holland, Dave Alton, Gordon Phillips and more, with songs by local folk groups 'Kiddar's Luck' and 'The Sawdust Jacks' and by Chris Harrison (great great grandson of Tyneside pitman poet Joseph Skipsey (1832-1903), who will perform a settting of Skipsey's Hartley ballad), Gary Miller of 'The Whisky Priests' and a special guest appearance by Northumbrian Piper Chris Ormston with a set of tunes, including his Hartley Lament.

The NVCP  touring exhibition on Hartley, produced with the support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and North Tyneside Council, will be displayed in the Mining Institute from January 7th to February 1st.