A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO DURHAM & KOSTROMA!

I'm currently taking part in a poetry exchange with Durham's twin city Kostroma in Russia with the support of Durham County Council's International Relations Office. On the morning of Friday January 16th, I discussed my poetry in a live video exchange with the Russian twin. Kostroma is one of the oldest Russian cities. It is located 330 km to the North East of Moscow on the confluence of the 

Volga and Kostroma rivers. Its population is c270,000.

The following are the poems I read and discussed in the video exchange:

TWIN THE WEAR WITH THE VOLGA

Twin the Wear with the Volga,

let salmon jump in Red Square.
Join in a Durham Revolution,

let a peaceful breeze blow here.

There’s this comrade in the Market Tavern,

looks like Nikita Khrushchev.

There’s a Moscow moon on top of his head,

his face is all ruddy and red.

Back in Russia, 

there’s a border reiver,

a wild vodka look in his eye,

he’s riding a horse like a cossack

from Kostroma to Crook Town and back.

Reach across water me darling,

it’s worth it.

Spread out your nets and your arms.

You might get a hot Russian lover

and Igor a sweet Wearside lass. 

So twin the Wear with the Volga,

let salmon jump in Red Square.

Join in a Durham Revolution,

let a peaceful breeze blow here.

There’s this strapping lad in the Kremlin,

he’s from an Easington back lane.

He’s wearing old Lenin’s disused fur hat,

there’s a Marxist tattoo on his chest.

Back in Durham,

there’s a soviet cosmonaut,

with a fishing rod in his hand,

he’s trying for a catch in the gathering dusk

as the river slides from yellow to black.  

Share a strong jar with me sweetheart, 

it’s warm now.

Hold the smile on your face.

You can sail light on the Baltic

and fly to the Urals with me.   

So twin the Wear with the Volga,

let salmon jump in Red Square.

Join in a Durham Revolution,

let a peaceful breeze blow here.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

NOTES TOWARDS A POEM ON RUSSIA

1

Red star night.

A badge in the sky.

Banners at the cross-roads.

Oh Mother Russia,

your past bleeding,

we are driving to the future

in a black limousine.

2

Rubbing hearts

in the lift

with travellers,

an atlas in microcosm,

all telling us,

by their accents,

the rooms

that they were born in.

In the Ukraine Hotel,

the bathrooms drip

with voices

and many tongues

sleep,

with the last words of the day

melting away on their lips.

3

Vodka is as warm

as a kiss.

It thrusts a burning finger

down your throat.

After a few,

we embrace.

Our arms surround

the World.

Warm Russian that he is,

Igor kisses me.

After fish and caviar,

the kiss

tastes good!

He signs away his writing:

To Keith,

who is both happy and sad.'

Another night

spurts into a dream.

In and out of trouble,

people will always

dance.

4

TO A FELLOW WRITER IN RUSTAVI

Last night we swopped our shirts.

They didn't fit our bodies too well

but they fitted our mood exactly.

5

WHITE NIGHTS

The huge spread of Leningrad.

Cold courtyard heart.

The winter is hard,

but the nights are turning,

from black to white,

to red and back again.

6

Circus,

and I'm dazzled;

not by the slender sway

of the supple trapezist

but by the spotlight

of a girl's blonde hair.

Shining from the audience,

she smiles

and all Russia smiles at me.

Such tricks in this moment.

I know I'll never see her again.

7

ZAGORSK

All the wailing

behind fine railings.

The seminary domes like suns

catch the sun

and priests, with long nights in their beards,

harmonize brilliantly.

Their voices,

polished gold,

sound out the walls

as a rocket

glints in the sky.

8

RUSTAVI STEELWORKS

It's hellish hot in here.

Beneath the Earth,

these are

men and women

sweating steel,

forging

futures for

their children.

Steel bars for prisons,

steel bars for playgrounds.

It's hellish hot in here.

Like a heart,

burning.

9

Three swaying silhouettes.

Three bureaucrats.

Along the street,

they joggle towards us.

In their cases,

they carry documents with drink

seeping between the lines.

And now they are laughing,

and now the words are laughing.

They are peace documents.

Messages.

Meant for bottles,

meant for oceans.

Keith Armstrong

Elvet Bridge 

(inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire)

Under Elvet Bridge the rain

flows with our loves.

Must I recall again?

Joy always used to follow after pain.

The days pass, the weeks pass

all in vain.

Neither time spent nor misspent

nor love comes back again.

Under Elvet Bridge the rain

flows with our loves.

Must I recall again?

Joy always used to follow after rain.

Keith Armstrong

SPIDER: A MEMORY

 

Spider's in

The Half Moon afternoon,

eyes beaming under the peak of his cap;

a drinker's smile

from the salt of the earth.

He's dreaming of the raging sea

and he sups a fretting old pint;

getting ready to walk

over the teeming hill.

A drool in The Shakespeare,

a let-slip of a grin,

academic locals

jawing themselves still

in dark rooms

of a Durham past;

brass bands blessed

on rampant days,

waves tumbling

from a balcony.

Praise be to Spider,

honour his life,

and the days spent

twinkling

through a city of bars.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

Reception for Kostroma delegation at Durham Town Hall. 
Photos by Tony Whittle.

SHY BAIRNS GET NEE BROTH

HESSE RELOADED FESTIVAL IN TUEBINGEN

http://www.hd-campus.tv/video/Hesse-reloaded/ed9f7f5c5301be6756e64e7920201958

THE YOUTH OF THE POET OF YOUTH - Die Jugend des Dichters der Jugend

(Hermann Hesse in Tuebingen, 1895-1899)

The sunflower opens as does my heart,

Longing,

Expanding

In love and hope.

Spring, what is your intent?

When will my thirst be quenched? ...

(Eduard Moerike)

Today a prayer

in my nervous heart,

starting the tasks of the day

at 7am

with the edge of a warm coffee

on my silent tongue.

Through the window,

people’s bodies stir

leaves

and beating birds

swim in the fresh daylight

‘My growing wings should carry the songs’

on my way to work

in the beautiful city,

smitten with melancholy,

no spring in my shoes,

back to the yawning books,

back to the cellar of Hades.

7.30,

another stretch of a morning,

Carl August Sonnewald

and his Swabian breathing,

Henirich Hermes

and that cough thick with the phlegm 

of heavy tomes;

the ethic of work

rampant,

all-consuming,

eating away at joy,

sucking the melody

from the throats of songsters.

O painful youth

where will it all end?

Where in this cosmos

is the love?:

‘My gods are better and more faithful

than that Sunday God.’

I scramble up the hill 

for lunch

taking the air within Castle walls,

Father Goethe keeping me company,

clinging to the beauty

of butterflies

in the gardens,

something to hang onto

to get through the afternoon with

at the enduring bench,

overfowing with commerce

and the daily grind of monotonous money.

Sometimes

a swim in the Neckar

is the only way to cool off

and midnight walks on sleepless nights. 

Writing means singing,

poetry is song.

Chopin

ripples in the trees

along Herrenberger Strasse,

dances in Lauscher the Listener’s

lonely little room.

A sip of Frau Leopold’s bitter cider

makes me drowsy,

ready to cave in,

looking for love

in the strings

of a violin.

Student suicides,

funereal music 

waft by,

a fraternity carousing

in the dirty street.

Half the night,

I lie at the window

reading Moerike

and Novalis,

surrounded by books

all the time;

and that bastard Herr Christaller upstairs

whistling at night,

bumping about

in his boots.

Swabian stories

at the Swabian Clerks’ Club,

startling misadventures

and fairy tales

keeping me awake in bed,

unused kisses on my bachelor pillow,

moths of poems

taunting me

down centuries.

And Otto and Ludwig and Carlo, Oskar and Wilhelm,

‘Le Petit Cenacle’,

surrounding me at another Last Supper,

sinking in the beer-soaked words

of this pissing city.

Life is so lonely for us all in the end

with only the glint of a smile on the face of Helene

or the hint of a tune in a line

to redeem it:

the smile on a mother’s glad face,

the grace of a feather in sunlight.

I am looking for a lake

to rest my Romantic Songs by;

I am looking for a cab

out of town,

a way of leaving Tuebingen

without ever leaving it.

Step out of my way,

a writer is coming.

Let me reach for the sky

with the fountain pen 

of a spirited man,

grown beautuful

from the twitching bones

of shy youth.

One day the stars above 

Shall flow in golden wine, 

We will enjoy it all, 

And as stars we will shine.

(Novalis) 

KEITH ARMSTRONG

SKULLHEAD

Oh, how soon

Beauty and form disappear.

You shine with your cheeks

Just like milk and purple shine.

Alas, the roses are withering.

(Wilhelm Hauff)

An ageing, independent scholar disturbed my musings - a dessicated, lonely and embittered bachelor known as ‘skullhead’. For years he has been living all alone. He injected his bitter mockery into the elegy I had just begun and walked around those paths with me for a whole hour, talking and grumbling. It was a strange thing to watch: he couldn't help making bitter and angry jokes, yet he needed so badly to talk about himself and be sociable that he thrust himself upon me in a manner I found almost moving.

(Hermann Hesse, letter from Tuebingen 2/10/1898)

I clocked him

again 

yesterday,

a long and lonely Sunday,

falling out of the Boulanger

with the moon in his top pocket.

He’d had a schnapps too many

and it showed

on his slobbering tongue.

He was hanging round 

nooks and crannies,

last year’s stubble

stuck

on his crazed cranium.

He could have been Hermann Hesse

but he found himself 

in a rut,

got his heart broke too often

got his bones frozen

too many times,

embittered,

brittle as old crumbs.

But his eyes

gleamed

with knowledge

and foreboding,

his wiseness

bothered people

in their aimlessness:

folk growing kids

to make themselves feel useful.

Skullhead knew different,

he knew that the Neckar

was full of piss,

that the trees on the Platanenallee

had brains

and feelings,

that the sky screamed

and churches were awash 

with shit.

Young girls and boys

basking by the Cafe Piccolo Sole d’Oro,

eyes playing

with sunlight,

flinched

when they saw him.

They might just end up like him,

brilliant and unloved,

stuck in a town called Tuebingen,

shoelaces trailing 

down Hafengasse,

branches creaking,

river murmuring,

footsteps in the memory,

fallen leaves.

That 

and the dull thud 

of spiritless music

everywhere,

no God,

no hope.

Only Skullhead

to remind us

that we’re going nowhere

but the graveyard,

like Hoelderlin

without the poetry.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

HERMANN HESSE IN THE GUTTER

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’ (Oscar Wilde).

Headlong, headstrong

Hermann Hesse

fell, flat on his face, in the Tuebingen mud.

“That’s it! Get stuck into the shit!”,

an ageing Swabian yelled.

And the church-bells throbbed along Lange Gasse,

and the dust fell on Heckenhauer’s Bookshop.

And, as young Hermann slithered to his fumbling feet

and cleaned his shitty glasses,

his first poems

shone in the moonlit gutter.

                                                                               Keith Armstrong,

                                                                               Tuebingen.

Note: The writer Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born in Calw and, at the age of 19, began a four year period of work in Heckenhauer’s bookshop in Tuebingen. It was then that he began writing and, during this time,  he published his first poems as ‘Romantic Songs’.