OUT TO SEA

TEXT AND SCULPTURE PROJECT

Tyneside based poet Keith Armstrong and conceptual artist Rolf Wojciechowski recently completed the tour up the Northumberland coast of their text sculpture and poetry performance project, ‘Out to Sea’. 

Keith performed his poetry on the local beaches with a loudhailer.

The project was launched at the Dove Marine Laboratory in Cullercoats and a display based on the journey was staged at various venues, including the Maltings Arts Centre in Berwick, Amble Library, The Ship at Low Newton by the Sea, South Shields Central Library and St. Mary’s Lighthouse, Whitley Bay. 

Performances by Keith and folk musicians were also staged at the above venues.

This amounted to a literary and musical trail along the coast.

A selection of Keith’s poems from ‘Out to Sea’ are featured on this new CD. Further poems are also included from his recent Northumbrian projects, with sequences on Northumbrian Piper Jamie Allan (1733-1810), the fishing village of Spittal, Whitley Bay’s Spanish City and North Shields’ pubs. 

Grants from Commissions North, Arts Council England North East, Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and North Tyneside Council facilitated the ‘Out to Sea’ project and enabled this souvenir CD to be recorded.

Artists: Keith Armstrong - poetry, Ann Sessoms - Northumbrian Pipes, The Ancient Mariners - sea shanties, Jim Mageean - sea shanties.

Recorded at Time Studio, the Buddle Arts Centre, Wallsend, North Tyneside.

Mastered at Shoebox Studios, Newcastle upon Tyne.

ORDER YOUR COPY NOW BY SENDING A CHEQUE FOR £5 (INCLUDES POSTAGE) TO:

Northern Voices Community Projects, 93 Woodburn Square, Whitley Lodge, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear NE26 3JD, England.

Tel. 0044 (0)191 2529531.

Tyneside based poet Keith Armstrong and conceptual artist Rolf Wojciechowski recently completed the tour up the Northumberland coast of their text sculpture and poetry performance project, ‘Out to Sea’. 

Keith performed his poetry on the local beaches with a loudhailer.

The project was launched at the Dove Marine Laboratory in Cullercoats and a display based on the journey was staged at various venues, including the Maltings Arts Centre in Berwick, Amble Library, The Ship at Low Newton by the Sea, South Shields Central Library and St. Mary’s Lighthouse, Whitley Bay. 

Performances by Keith and folk musicians were also staged at the above venues.

This amounted to a literary and musical trail along the coast.

A selection of Keith’s poems from ‘Out to Sea’ are featured on this new CD. Further poems are also included from his recent Northumbrian projects, with sequences on Northumbrian Piper Jamie Allan (1733-1810), the fishing village of Spittal, Whitley Bay’s Spanish City and North Shields’ pubs. 

Grants from Commissions North, Arts Council England North East, Northumberland Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and North Tyneside Council facilitated the ‘Out to Sea’ project and enabled this souvenir CD to be recorded.

Artists: Keith Armstrong - poetry, Ann Sessoms - Northumbrian Pipes, The Ancient Mariners - sea shanties, Jim Mageean - sea shanties.

Recorded at Time Studio, the Buddle Arts Centre, Wallsend, North Tyneside.

Mastered at Shoebox Studios, Newcastle upon Tyne.

ORDER YOUR COPY NOW BY SENDING A CHEQUE FOR £5 (INCLUDES POSTAGE) TO:

Northern Voices Community Projects, 93 Woodburn Square, Whitley Lodge, Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear NE26 3JD, England.

Tel. 0044 (0)191 2529531.

HIERONYMUS BOSCH 1450-1516

In 2016, 500 years after Hieronymus Bosch died, Den Bosch celebrates this medieval painter and his fantastical imagination. Exhibitions and activities will be organised throughout the year. One of them is Bosch by night, an open-air spectacle on the famous Markt square in Den Bosch.












 


THE HEARING FOREST

(to Hieronymus Bosch)

‘Oh this world is a waggon of hay

and everyone grabs what they can.

Be you Philip the Handsome or the rag and bone man,

you’ll sink like a toad in a vat of dismay.’

Jereon or Jheronimus,

Jerome or Hieronymus,

El Bosco or Bosch,

the crackle of your piercing laugh

crawls across this busybody city of your’s;

subverts the barrel organ’s clanking tunes

and the melancholic cackle of a demon priest.

This dark Carnival of frogs and trombones,

leaps from the graves of beggars and cripples;

this dualist fantasy,

this Oeteldonk nightmare,

where even the sewer rats dance

and the River Dieze drinks to high heaven.

I once saw a man who looked like you,

staring at me like a hag of a gargoyle

at the bar of the Bonte Palet.

He was a dribbling grotesque,

the kind you find among the monsters and workmen astride St. Jan’s.

A member, no doubt, of Our Lady’s Brotherhood,

he lived in a dream world,

a glutton for punishment,

ogling a lusty Brabant girl

with his popping, panting, eyes.

He was throwing genevers down his throbbing canal,

drinking at the confluence of Dommel and Aa;

he had brown paint on his hands so I knew it was you,

Master of Alla Prima.

The next time I dreamt I saw you smile,

I was floating in Venice in a boat of lost souls.

And your face shone from a passing cloud

as I lay back and drank in the scum and the sky.

Pray tell me, El Bosco,

what are these chambers of rhetoric for?

Why do the organ builders and bell founders scrape?

You with the heavens in your eyes,

was there a God between Aleyt Goyaertsvan den Meervenne’s thighs?

All this sin,

eternal damnation of lost souls;

in McDonald’s, I see scenes of horrendous torture,

galleries of carnal mutilations,

and, in the Market Square, there are stalls from Hell,

there are poets,

drunk in the sinister depths of imagination,

who should be eaten alive

by bureaucrats.

Oh paradox-riddled Jerome,

‘Master of the monstrous,

discoverer of the unconscious’,

I am sick with life,

scraping my shoes full of lice

along the dark slabs of Stoofstraat.

On my last night in ‘t-Hertogenbosch,

on my last fucking cockroach legs,

I slid my painter’s hand up a posh lady’s dress;

with musical demons

gabbling around us,

I plucked her devil’s fruit

like the strings of an evil lute.

And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed

to rid myself of the adders and dragons

that scorched like Hades

in my screaming heart.

‘Oh this world is a waggon of hay

and everyone grabs what they can.

Be you Philip the Handsome or the rag and bone man,

you’ll sink like a toad in a vat of dismay.’

Oh Jheronimus, Jheronimus please,

please take me to the Seeing Field.

I want my bones and my flesh to burn

to set this starving Spirit free

in the Hearing Forest.

Keith Armstrong

THE STATUE OF HIERONYMUS BOSCH

Look down Hieronymus:

the blonde kids dancing at your feet;

barrel organs churning songs out

against your deaf and cheesed-off ears.

Blink blind, stone eyes,

cobble cheeks,

dig the electric pleasure garden,

frame the nuclear canal

and sigh you weary statue you.

Chipped cloak,

cold painter’s

nose drips with rain.

Drunk, we piss on the past,

slash and splash against the dark canvas.

Bosch, we still play the games.

I catch an angel barmaid’s eye

and swallow the blueness of it

in my aching head.

Beauty lodges overnight in the skull.

Unlucky Hieronymus:

missiles haloing your frown of a brow;

clouds crashing over the market square.

They’re building the greatest nightmare ever around you,

but your hands have grown too stiff to paint.

Keith Armstrong

Den Bosch, The Netherlands

IN THE FIRE STATION, WHITLEY BAY

photo by dr keith armstrong







The screen
in the corner
flashes celebrity images
above the hunched heads
of craggy regulars.
Subtitles punctuate
the horror of Syria,
shallowness of Beckham’s mouth
gabbing
like a demented fish
over supping plebs.
Their talk is of aches and pains
and scraping through,
their question time has no answers,
only weary
resignations.
The TV mocks
the ordinary
struggles
to bring up soft babies
with tough futures.
The thing
is forced upon us,
dumped upon us,
scoffing
at the weak
on cheap beer.
It says:
DAVID CAMERON IS IN BRUSSELS.
Well, we are drinking in Whitley Bay
and HE,
he can piss off.
In the Fire Station,
we have thirsts to slake,
bets to be placed
on whether we’ll make it
through to another tomorrow
just the same
and just as unjust.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

IN THE GALWAY HOOKER BAR

IN THE GALWAY HOOKER BAR

(Heuston Rail Station, Dublin)



I’m back in the Galway Hooker,
heading out to the west
and, as usual, it’s teeming
with the scheming
pond life of Dublin:
the newts
and wits
who twinkle
in this bowl
of moving humanity,
at swim
in sunlight,
slumped
in a beaten economics
and those boom days
that are past.

And Jimmy Joyce and his literary travellers
leer at us from a corner
of streaming consciousness
and bad girls’ skirts
drift upwards
in an afternoon
with miles ahead
and the promise
of a kiss
of Irish Coffee.

I’m crawling
today along
this beaten track to Limerick,
the chance occurrence
of a poetry event,
the opportunity for fickle friends
to catch my dreams
in inquisitive ears
and despatch
my skimming words
to the gutters of shot memories.

‘By God she’s a looker,
that one on the stool,
making an awful fool
of  a lad in the Hooker.’

‘Her legs go the whole way,
her terrible sin,
she sings
from here to Galway.’

 
And then The Boys from Tipperary
they’re here
in a clump of blazers and ties
and every one has a lass
on his hurling arm
and a pint of Guinness in his face.
We envy them
their youth and not their sense,
we wise old men of Heuston
who’ve seen the heroes come and go,
heard the guns ring out
across the Station
and learnt
to savour
the slaughter
in our glasses.

But now friends
we must be
heading off
to the dawn
and hope
that these trains
we leave behind
can find their way
to that which our history
sheds.

So remember
Sean Heuston,
the railway clerk,
a crucifix he kissed
and the freedom he died for,
every drink
that you down
in the Hooker.





KEITH ARMSTRONG