Thursday 29 October 2015

THE POETRY OF JAZZ






















PRESS RELEASE

THE POETRY OF JAZZ  
A NEW PROJECT: POETRY BY KEITH ARMSTRONG & IMAGES BY PETER DIXON

Tyneside artists and jazz enthusiasts Keith Armstrong and Peter Dixon have created a display of colour paintings, images and poems celebrating the greats of the jazz world from Lous Armstrong to George Melly, Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus and many more. The exhibition can be viewed at JG Windows in Newcastle's Central Arcade in the Printed Music Department on the first floor of the store for the immediate future. A live jazz and poetry event is being planned at Windows to launch the display - look out for details of this later.

Contact - Keith Armstrong tel 0191 2529531 or Rupert Bradbury (JG Windows) tel 0191 2321356 for further information.

KEITH ARMSTRONG
Born in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked as a community worker, poet, librarian and publisher, Doctor Keith Armstrong now resides in Whitley Bay. He is coordinator of the Northern Voices Community Projects creative writing and community publishing enterprise.
He was awarded a doctorate in 2007 for his work on Newcastle writer Jack Common at the University of Durham where he received a BA Honours Degree in Sociology in 1995 and Masters Degree in 1998 for his studies on culture in the North East of England. 
His poetry has been extensively published in magazines such as New Statesman and Poetry Review as well as in the collections Splinters (2011) and The Month of the Asparagus (2011) and broadcast on radio & TV.
He has performed his poetry throughout Britain and abroad. 
In his youth, he travelled to Paris and he has been making international cultural pilgrimages ever since.

PETER DIXON
North Shields based artist, photographer and graphic designer Peter Dixon began his working life as a designer at the Shields Gazette, later becoming Senior Visualiser at the North East Co-op. He has worked in several advertising agencies and runs his own design company.
In 2012 he had a major exhibition of paintings and photographs, entitled The River and the Slake, displayed at Bede’s World, Jarrow. 
He has produced and co-written many publications and exhibitions for Northern Voices Community Projects.

MELLY

Something sad about clowns;
something thin between laughter and tears.
Pity the dignity, the love and the hate,
the twitching wire between body and soul 
and you on that stage,
drunk on rum and borrowed blues again;
unique in the balance you keep to yourself -
never quite losing it,
never quite making it;
bawling out between Magritte and Morton,
playing the droopy-drawered clown
with yourself,
you

do the Melly Belly,
the Ovaltine,
big brash belly laugh blues.

                                                                                                    

Keith Armstrong




Sunday 25 October 2015

GRAINGER MARKET, NEWCASTLE - A NEW PROJECT

































Grainger Market 180th Birthday Celebrations

Date and Location: Wednesday 28th October, Grainger Market



5.30pm - Entertainment from Sawdust Jacks (local folk group), Keith Armstrong (poet), Gordon Phillips (poet), Ann Sessoms (Northumbrian Piper)
6pm - Welcome to celebrations by the Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Councillor Ian Graham
6.05pm - Welcome from John Phillips, Chairman of Grainger Market Traders Association
6.10pm - John Grundy – talks about the Grainger Market and Newcastle
6.20pm - Lord Mayor and Sheriff award Grainger Market Customer Service Award winner with certificates and hamper
6.30pm - Gifts awarded to dignitaries/special guests
6.35pm - Lord Mayor and John Phillips cut the Birthday cake and open the Buffet
6.40pm - Entertainment from Sawdust Jacks, Keith Armstrong (poet),
Gordon Phillips (poet), Ann Sessoms (Northumbrian Piper)
7.30pm - Finish

Access - Please note access to this event from 5.30pm is via Entrance 1 of the Grainger Market on Grainger Street between Skipton Building Society and the Wildtrack store.



This is life,
the gloss and the flesh,
Weigh House of passion and flame.

You can get lost in this market’s amazement
but you can never lose yourself.

Sometimes,
a sleep walk in these grazing crowds
can feel like a stroll through your brain.



Keith Armstrong


A city
within a city,

light cage.

Bazaar and blind,
these swollen alleys

flow with a teeming life’s blood.

Geordie !

Swim for your life !




Keith Armstrong



MAUD WATSON, FLORIST

bred in a market arch 
a struggle
in a city's armpit

that flower
in your time-rough hands 
a beautiful girl in a slum alley

all that kindness in your face

and you're right

the times are not what they were
this England's not what it was

flowers shrink in that crumbling vase
dusk creeps in on a cart

and Maud the sun is choking 

Maud this island's sinking 

and all that swollen sea is 

the silent majority 

waving




Keith Armstrong


Photos: Keith Armstrong & Peter Dixon

Saturday 10 October 2015

JAZZ POETRY - A NEW PROJECT: POETRY BY KEITH ARMSTRONG & IMAGES BY PETER DIXON
















































'Some great stuff here! I always love the headlong gay abandon and celebration of life in your poetry Keith.' (Harry Gallagher).






LOVER MAN



A blurred blue evening sky,
an exhausted sun
propped up by the rooftops.
A vision
of the wracked shrieking body
of Charlie Parker
running a losing race
with his music,
the man reenacting
his bitter tortured love.

A memory,
a sense of the World,
and a nagging restlessness:
that mixture
of sorrow
and the joy
of loving,
turning
in the cold dark air,
the sound of life’s full circle.
‘Lover Man’,
a whirlwind spins,
sings in my ears,
swirls out
to the street
where the children play
and a blind man taps
in a cul de sac.

The swirling soaring passions
of Parker
are ready 
to boil
again and again,
burning away
the revolving strictures
of dull monotony.

To snatch inspiration
from the lap of conformity,
Charlie has rotted
but his spirit leaps
and speaks from grooves,
renders me
airborne again.

I cry 
and float 
on the sweetness.



KEITH ARMSTRONG

THE SUN ON DANBY GARDENS


The sun on Danby Gardens
smells of roast beef,
tastes of my youth.
The flying cinders of a steam train
spark in my dreams.
Across the old field,
a miner breaks his back
and lovers roll in the ditches,
off beaten tracks.
Off Bigges Main,
my grandad taps his stick,
reaches for the braille of long-dead strikes.
The nights
fair draw in
and I recall Joyce Esthella Antoinette Giles
and her legs that reached for miles,
tripping over the stiles 
in red high heels.
It was her and blonde Annie Walker
who took me in the stacks
and taught me how to read
the signs
that led inside their thighs.
Those Ravenswood girls
would dance into your life
and dance though all the snow drops
of those freezing winters,
in the playground of young scars.
And I remember freckled Pete
who taught me Jazz,
who pointed me to Charlie Parker
and the edgy bitterness of Brown Ale.
Mrs Todd next door
was forever sweeping
leaves along the garden path
her fallen husband loved to tread.
Such days:
the smoke of A4 Pacifics in the aftermath of war,
the trail of local history on the birthmarked street.
And I have loved you all my life
and will no doubt die in Danby Gardens
where all my poems were born,
just after midnight.



KEITH ARMSTRONG
















































































FOR DAVID STEPHENSON


David Stephenson was a deep friend,
I met him through books.
He came from Carlisle
with that intense and craggy look.
We studied life together,
smoked Full Strength
and sipped Real Ale.
He liked his women big.
I learnt from him
to visit pubs at lunchtimes
to end up pissed in lectures
but, most of all,
to read the letters of Van Gogh,
the diaries of Franz Kafka,
to go inside 
the jazz 
of Ornette Coleman
and Cecil Taylor.
David told me that 
‘Most people are thick’
and, as a socialist of a kind,
I sometimes think he had a point.
I wonder where he is today.
Back across country I surmise,
smoking and looking at the sunrise,
with a fat woman kissing his neck,
listening to Mingus 
and the sky.


KEITH ARMSTRONG





POEM FOR A BLUES HARMONICA

(for Ad van Emmerik)

A poem is an organ of the mouth,
a verse I suck and blow.
It sings from my heart on the wind,
it breathes with my life.

I place my poetry between my lips,
like licking my girl friend’s breasts.
I smoke it like a cigar
and squeeze the good juice from it.

My poetry is a fire,
it screams blues murders.
I craft it with my gentle fingers
and shout it around the world.

This poem is a drink wet with rhyme,
a harp in a rowdy beer museum.
I am a drunk whose rhymes stagger,
my words are music in your ear.


Keith Armstrong






















































MELLY

Something sad about clowns;
something thin between laughter and tears.
Pity the dignity, the love and the hate,
the twitching wire between body and soul 
and you on that stage,
drunk on rum and borrowed blues again;
unique in the balance you keep to yourself -
never quite losing it,
never quite making it;
bawling out between Magritte and Morton,
playing the droopy-drawered clown
with yourself,
you

do the Melly Belly,
the Ovaltine,
big brash belly laugh blues.

                                                                                                    
Keith Armstrong



THOSE PORTHOLE BLUES AGAIN

It’s Tuesday again
and the sun in the Stella is shining.
Yellow dust fills 
the dappled Porthole
with a Golden Fleece
and the jazz, hot jazz, 
belts out
raging
from this pulsating lounge.
The saints and ghosts of ancient seamen
go marching in.
Let the liquid trumpet
pour out,
my legs slide to the floor
with the trombone lilt.
Cry me this river,
lurch for the ferry.
I will ping the dart
of a blue note
through your soul.
I am only a poet,
a saxophone with words,
an improvising shantyman
thanking the landlord
for still serving me:
despite all
this poetry slurping,
this lovely drivel
dribbling
from my wicked Geordie tongue.


KEITH ARMSTRONG











































CHET - FROM A WINDOW

(in memory of Chet Baker 1929 -1988)

The constant onslaught of Amsterdam
surged through Zeedijk 
on that hot night
when a full moon
dragged you
flying to your death.
In your room, 
in the Prins Hendrik Hotel,
your clothes lay 
neatly folded
in your suitcase,
with your body
a foetus on the street below.
Great white hope
fallen
offstage,
a love for heroin never shaken.
Sorrow was your stuff,
a plaintive,
lyrical anguish,
an excess of gloom
and charm.

This undernourished and parched body,
a singing corpse,
searching for an uncollapsed vein,
an expert driver hating the road
and the bleak hotel of his doom.
Such a foolish love.

Oklahoma farmboy on a golden trumpet,
his teeth knocked out in San Francisco,
become chained to an album a day
for a thousand dollars in cash. 

And the Italian you learned in a Lucca jail,
your spirit surviving its deportation, 
a lonely and melancholy master drifter
whose pianissimo
touched the soul.

Friday 13th May 1988,
Chet’s heart stopped 
and his horn
lost its tongue.




KEITH ARMSTRONG




LADY DAY

(dedicated to Billie Holiday)

‘For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.’ (Christopher Smart)

Our Lady,
Art in Heaven,
feasts on
a bed of petals,
croons over
the Angel Gabriel’s
String Orchestra,
floats on beauty’s scales.
Swollen with scent,
her skin is so pure,
alabaster smooth.
Such long stamens,
such eye lashes:
such cascading, flowering hair:

this Lily,
perennial
of the flowing Valley,
voices fragrance,

voices
the driven snow.




KEITH ARMSTRONG


from ‘The Darkness Seeping’ : The Chantry Chapel of Prior Rowland Leschman in Hexham Abbey. Poems by Keith Armstrong with drawings by Kathleen Sisterson.

 Sara Vaughan

NIna Simone