The poem which inspired us to publish Northern Wanderer was “After Breakfast (With Peter) Costing 5/6d” which appeared in Mr. MacSweeney’s first collection of poetry, The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother (1968), the relative success of which prompted his publisher, Hutchinson, to nominate him for the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University.

“After Breakfast…” is a pastiche of Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” the walking poem from which StepAway Magazine takes its name. Mr. MacSweeney’s after breakfast wander, however, takes place in his hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne, beginning outside the Cloth Market Café and ending outside the Green Market. Even in this early work, the poet demonstrates what Nicholas Johnson describes as an ability to “observe a situation in a split, if sometimes refracted, second”.

Two years after his death, Bloodaxe Books published Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000, which brought much of Mr. MacSweeney’s poetry back to print. Sadly, “After Breakfast…” was not included in the collection. It is therefore a great honour and pleasure to be given the opportunity to republish “After Breakfast (With Peter) Costing 5/6d” here in our Northern Wanderer issue. I would like to express my utmost gratitude to the family of Barry MacSweeney for allowing us permission to publish the poem online. I would also like to thank Neil Astley and Suzanne Fairless-Aitken at Bloodaxe Books for their support and advice.

Northern Wanderer is a celebration and rediscovery of Barry MacSweeney’s work. After reading “After Breakfast…” I urge you to lay your hands on a copy of Wolf Tongue, the title of which was chosen by Mr. MacSweeney himself, the “contrary, lone wolf”.

Northern Wanderer is also a way of encouraging contemporary northern writers to follow in Barry MacSweeney’s footsteps, to explore and observe the North East of England on foot. The issue will open with “After Breakfast…” followed by a series of new poems about walking in Newcastle upon Tyne and the surrounding area.

Stevie Ronnie’s “A Night in Morden Tower” is a winter walk to one of the oldest poetry venues in England. Located in Back Stowell Street on the West Walls of Newcastle upon Tyne, Morden Tower has played host to many celebrated poets including Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, Seamus Heaney and Allen Ginsberg. The sixteen-year-old Barry MacSweeney was inspired by the readings he attended here.

Ira Lightman’s “Consulting Barry’s Chapbooks in Newcastle Library Local Studies” is a fragmented literary journey through Newcastle from his parking bay to the fourth floor of the library. The line order of his poem is dictated by order in which the streets appear on his walk: “WORSWICK to CARLIOL Square, MARKET to PILGRIM. NORTHUMBERLAND along LISLE to JOHN DOBSON”. He comments on how the poem “conveys the way that humans now both see the streets, and their thoughts, and their anticipations (I was anticipating reading Barry MacSweeney’s chapbooks) and going online on their mobile devices as they walk”. His duties as a father also intrude as he navigates the city streets.

Bob Beagrie recently worked on a project with Crisis Skylight writing a play with the homeless. As part of the sequence, he wrote “Tracking the Tramp” while wandering around Newcastle and thinking about how people are effected when homelessness strikes.

Ian Davidson’s “Rolling down the river” is a stroll along the river Tyne which examines a rapidly gentrifying Newcastle. Passing by the British Engines factory and the Baltic, the poem marks the location where the city’s industrial heritage collides with its rapidly developing cultural centre. “The question of naming it” by Lizzie Whyman is also a drift downstream, ending at the Free Trade Inn perched high over a bend in the River Tyne. Finally, Keith Parker’s “Coastal Town, Cold Sunday Night,” is a nocturnal wander through Whitley Bay, a North Tyneside seaside town famed for its raucous nightlife.

Our cover photograph is courtesy of local photographer Andy Siddens. Mr. Siddens spent a number of weeks walking in the city and capturing its street life. This spectacular shot of walkers on Newcastle’s quayside was taken from the Tyne Bridge as a setting autumn sun cast long shadows across the paving stones. Mr. Siddens’s remarkable portfolio can be viewed here.

We consider Bob Beagrie, Ian Davidson, Keith Parker, Stevie Ronnie, Andy Siddens and Lizzie Whyman to be the founding contributors to Northern Wanderer. However, we intend for this project to grow. Northern Wanderer will remain open to submissions. New North East walking narratives will be added on a quarterly basis, to coincide with the publication of StepAway Magazine. Northern Wanderer will become a repository of poetry and prose devoted to walking in the North East. Submissions should be emailed to: north@stepawaymagazine.com

I hope that you enjoy Northern Wanderer as an introduction to the home of StepAway Magazine, Newcastle upon Tyne, and to the work of the talented and sadly missed poet Barry MacSweeney.

Darren Richard Carlaw
Editor
StepAway Magazine

StepAway Magazine would also like to thank: Apples & Snakes North East, Arts Council North East, Bloodaxe Books, Dr. John Beck, Olivia Chapman, Newcastle University, New Writing North, Northumbria University, Dr. Penny Smith, Poetry Newcastle, Jonny Tull, The Tyneside Cinema and Writer’s Block North East.

its so sunny. i spat blood
but i’m smiling now
in my soul i have yr photograph
you lying on the bed with coy curls
its in the fly paper of VOGUE magazine

walking past the GREEN MARKET i saw you no
it was a vision an
out of date Christmas tree
because

you too were tinsel & bonnie lights & streamers & presents

& Evergreen

Barry MacSweeney

This poem was published online by kind permission of the family of Barry MacSweeney
All rights remain with the MacSweeney Estate
First published in The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother (London: Hutchinson, 1968).

It begins on Keelman’s way in winter sun -
the Tyne flows to my right; morning ends
as fragile day ascends towards the one

time that sky dissipates and decides to lend
somehow an aspect of something outside
this globe. The path, perfected with snow, bends

past heron to car park to the train ride
that Tom Pickard once took in reverse
to meet with Basil Bunting and decide

to meet again and tack the course of verse.
It seems history’s breadcrumbs lie in lines
between Wylam and Back Stowell Street. First

Northern Trains Limited faces then mine
reflected back in ghost stations: Blaydon,
Dunston. The mall built on the mines

and over the river to the garden
of Victoriana that’s Central
Station. Directions. Accents have softened

since the dole queue’s descent to fictional
account. Pink Lane. City Walls – I see
how Chinatown has made them functional

by borrowing a section for its back alley.
I tread past a row of putrid dumpsters.
A burst conditioning pipe. Don’t dilly-dally

on cobbled lanes like this, where the jumpers
come to glue-up before they visit the bridge
and the pigeons sit in silence, plumper

than they ought to be. Refrigeration
outlets spin. And then a clot in the wall,
leans in over my head: this hermitage

of brick and ancient stone has stood this tall
for eight centuries or more and for less
than fifty years has been a place of all

existing literally outside the rest
of reading, peacefully and unchallenged.
Goldsmiths, plumbers: these artisans were guests

who stayed two hundred years and changed
the windows and the walls but not the air.
And here I stand, my destiny arranged.

My hand rests its weight on the thumb-drop latch.
The ghost of a bass line from the Stage Door
club rattles my subconscious. Lines catch

in my throat and I cough them free. And more
of this in life I need: words and a glass
of something, if I want; making time for

five shillings (as it was in days that passed
before my birth) and poems. O poems.
Those words smelted to nuggets of amassed

memory. Steps. Stone. Human verbatim
is too much but never enough and full
of rhythms of childhood: parental hymns

that I sing now, with all their shortfalls
and hit-givings to the psyche. Doorway.
Before it opens I pause to smoke, all

lack of willpower forgiven for today,
of all days, when I will spend a night in
Morden Tower. Solitary, the way

I was solitary as a child. When
so much of me is new, strange all I see
here is old. Medieval door pinned

with paper names that jog my memory.
The cigarette is stubbed. And I care
to heave the door of poetry’s colliery.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Inside. The square room is circled.
Connie sits with sherry and sandwiches
for sharing. We talk about radical

poetics, the funding of anarchy,
whether anarchy wants funding at all
until Connie melts into the walls.

I am alone. My muse’s sciamachy
begins with lists, observations: Pigeon
hidden behind plaster coos Tchaikovsky,

a case of donated books (with lines in),
rooms not dissimilar to this, a box
I suspect is for money, chairs with thin

legs (donated, with carpet) and stocks
of tea and sugar always free to use.
Spotlights – surely 80′s, as is the Vax

which must be brimming with skin accrued
from poets and listeners. Then aloud
I incant some names this tower once knew:

Adcock, Armitage, Bennet, Binta Breeze,
Bunting, Carter, Chaplain, Caddel, Corso,
Cleary, Creeley, Cobbing, Cutler, Crozier,

D’Aguiar, Darling, Diaz, Dunn, Durcan, Dorn,
Fainlight, Ferlinghetti, Feinstein, Ginsberg,
Greenlaw, Griffiths, Heaney, Henri, Herbert,

Hegley, Horovitz, Hughes, Jamie, Kinnell,
Kwesi Johnson, MacDiarmid, MacSweeney,
MacMillian, Mahon, Mapanje, Mitchell,

Monk, Morgan, Mottram, Mortimer, McGough
Nuttal, Nicholson, O’Brien, Paulin,
Patten, Patterson, Prynne, Pybus, Raworth,

Reed, Rakosi, Rumens, Shvarts, Simms, Silkin,
Sweeney, Summers, Stevenson, Standen, Smith,
Schneider, Turnbull, Trocchi, Williams, Wilkin.

*     *     *     *    *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Incanted and sensing sleep has come,
I fumble the voice that answers back:
And who are you to speak of me? A drum

of syllables. Are you here to leave plaques?
I come around as a stone hand airlifts
me out the door by the scruff of my back

and drops me by the moat. This is a gift,
one which I’d never believe except for
being here unwrapped with all the swift

dexterity of myth. The old Morden
Tower raised onto two columns of stone
inquisitive before me. After awe

comes realisation: we are alone -
it was her hand that plucked me from her mouth.
She stares with window eyes. I am bone.

In saying my names do you look for proof
of my existence? ‘No’, I say, my voice
strangely structural as if shock proofed

by my desire to obtain the choicest
morsels of this moment. Her sound is choir.
‘You sing. What are you?’ I ask. The noise

of every poet that has lyred
their verse in me, and none of them at all
I am part city, part outside, wired

to be boundary, a tower in a wall.
I exist on neither side of myself
and in both silence and the spoken call

of the words flesh brings to leave on my shelves.
‘What of music?’ I ask. Aye, music sounds
like poetry is poetry like music welded

to symbols we know like suns taking rounds
in the sky. I don’t know what this means but
it seems to fit my head like it was found

in the intricate prints of dragons she put
about our city. ‘Keep fighting Tower!
We need to know you’re there.” A cloud of soot

leaves her mouth as she recoils and lowers
her neck below the cultural axe.
Pollen on the stamens of history’s flower.

Antiphonography

1. Gordon Brown, High on the Walls: an Anthology celebrating twenty-five years of Poetry Readings at Morden Tower (Bloodaxe Books/Morden Tower, 1990)

2. Ciaran Carson, Opera Et Cetera (Bloodaxe, 1996)

3. Anton Checkov, The Steppe And Other Stories (Oxford University Press 1998) Transl. by Ronald Hingley

4. Polly Clark, Take Me With You (Bloodaxe 1995)

5. http://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/, accessed 12th March 2009

6. Michael Donaghy, The Shape of The Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions (Picador, 2009)

7. Paul Durcan, The Laughter of Mothers (Harvill Secker, 2007)

8. http://www.dur.ac.uk/basil-bunting-poetry.centre/morden.tower/, accessed 24th March 2009

9. Gina Ford, The New Contented Little Baby Book, updated edition, (Vermillion, 1992)

10. Lee Hall, A Strong Song Tows Us – Another History of English Poetry, broadcast on 
2 March 2009, 3pm, BBC Radio 4

11. http://www.mordentower.org/, accessed 23rd March 2009

12. Morden Tower posters, Northern Arts manuscript collection, Literary and Philosphical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne

13. James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover (Knopf, 1993)

14. http://poetsinalens.blogspot.com/, accessed 4th March 2009

15. David Rudd, An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman’s ‘Coraline’ and the Freuidian Uncanny, Seminar at Newcastle University 15th October 2008

16. George Szirties: Cold dark deep and absolutely clear: poetic knowledge as archaeology, Bloodaxe lectures and reading,16-19th March 2009, Newcastle University

Stevie Ronnie
“A Night In Morden Tower” was first published in Fix this Moment: Writers respond to North East literary history (Newcastle upon Tyne: New Writing North, 2010).

Without wit, halfday his wean was, without WORSWICK.
Cooked, called by cardindex, CARLIOL-commuter-carer can’t copy.
MARKET me if I’m minded on MacSweeney pores pan of peasy.
Parks, proximal, PILGRIM. Phone’ll photograph pages.
Not notes, no nanoseconds, navigate NORTHUMBERLAND.
The lil’un-loaded less loll than LOL & “like” along LISLE to library
joining JOHN DOBSON
FOURTH FLOOR flaneur fortnight’d fail, if infant’ll ROF.

Ira Lightman

Bitter breeze on the back of my neck.
It’ll be a cold night out on the streets.
Northern cities are unforgiving places
for anyone without a nest.
How quickly they strip you down
thin you out, turn you into ghost
flitting between spaces
through snatches of lives,
conversations that lack solidity.

British Engines?
I guess they make British Engines.
Sweet!

Where will he be?
I trace his steps along walkways
over footbridges that girdle slip roads
past closed doors, through reflections
of rooftops in mirrored windows;
stranded outside when everything
is heading for an inside.
Where in hell could he be?
Wrapped in a swaddle of stray cloud
round the back of that old church
on the far side of the fly-over.

Bob Beagrie

The men standing, smoking,
boilersuits unbuttoned
to the waist and around
them, on the floor, cigarette
ends and lime yellow
ear plugs. Over the river
clouds of kittiwakes
shriek into land
on the ledges of the Baltic.

A woman runs by, impossibly
pink trousers against black skin.
Another runner framed
against the brick wall while
all day in rain or shine they
pass me by like an identity
parade and taking the air for the
good of their health down
the riverside route past the
men from British Engines.

Ian Davidson

Lizzie Whyman

Keith Parker

She dragged my hand down Rabbit Banks Road,
there seemed nowhere else to take it.
We mucked about in Plummer Chare,
soaked up the painful rain.

I wanted to control my life,
shout songs on Amen Corner.
I’d carry bags of modern ballads,
hawk pamphlets on Dog Bank.

Wild girls who blazed through Pipewell Gate
taught my veins to thrill.
I caught her heart on Pandon Bank,
my eyes filled up with fear.

Wanted to carve out a poem,
inspire the Garth Heads dreamers.
A lad grew up to dance along
the length of Pilgrim Street.

I take my wild hopes now to chance
the slope of Dog Leap Stairs.
Follow the pulse of my Tyneside days,
burn passion down The Side.

Keith Armstrong

On Sunday morning we turned out as the bells of Sunderland Church were ringing and crowds of well dressed people were proceeding to their several places of worship. The lanes and alleys with which we have more immediately to do, furnished chance worshipper or two but these were exceptional cases. In a short time the streets were again almost deserted, and we determined to take a turn round the lanes at mid-day. One lane or alley was a counterpart of the others. Tawdry ill-clad females were standing at many of the doorways scowling at passers by, and a stray member of the “rougher sort ” would be met with now and again with hands in pockets and a short stumpy pipe between his teeth from which issued clouds of smoke in short defiant puffs. The last nights orgies had left their legacy of unrest behind them, and even the poor wretches we occasionally saw inside shivering over their scanty fires, produced an un¬favourable impression regarding the creature comforts of the Children of Night. The dirt and squalor, the doors which seemed ready to fall to pieces, and the windows broken in many places, and the gaps stopped up by odds and ends of anything which came handiest, had a lively and picturesque appearance, when dimly seen by gaslight, but it was indeed low life with the gilt of, as we saw it in open day. Verily one half of the world does not know how the other half lives.

The little chapel and the large bar

Whilst sauntering down the High Street in the evening, cogitating on men and things, our brown study was suddenly interrupted by the sound of music and we were agreeably surpassed to hear the words of a well known hymn come ringing through the air from one of the adjacent lanes.

“Jesus answers still; Send the answer back to Heaven; By Thy grace we will.”

We made a dash down the lane (Numbers Garth it turned out to be) and congregated in an open space, we found a motley crowd assembled from the centre of which the musical performance proceeded. At the end of each verse the leader gave out, in stentorian tones ‘and Sunderland vernacular, the words of the next, and so on to the end. The congregation, though rough was orderly and listened with outward decorum at least, and a goodly number res¬ponded to the invitation to attend a short service to be held in an adjoining room. I found the place of meeting after mounting two or three steps to be a long narrow slip of a room or rather two small rooms knocked into one, and not improved in the process. An awkward elbow of the partition projected a long way into the apartment from the side where I was located and consequently a portion of the audience were hid from the view of their fellow worshippers, though now and again a chorus of stentorian voices joining in the singing or ejaculating during the prayer gave evidence that they were keeping a sharp eye on the business on hand. Texts and scriptures mottos were stuck up along the white-washed walls and we suppose in honour of the season the gas brackets, were draped with a small attempt at adornment in in the shape of paper devices of various colours. The white-washed rafters close above our heads and the e small old fashioned window gave a quaint homely appearance to the -scene, and was in keeping with the motley congregation. The yellow or what had once been yellow or grey flannel jackets and heterogeneous apparel of the waifs and strays gathered in from the neighbouring lanes and alleys blended in pleasing harmony with the well ordered apparel of the’ regular worshipper. There was altogether a homely straight forward bluntness about the proceedings which pleased me and was a relief from the sober preciseness and steady decorum of ordinary religious meetings, A few unruly boys who had slightly interrupted the speakers opening remarks were audibly admonished by one of the leaders to “keep quiet or hook it,” and a singing brother whose soul was evidently in it, and who moreover taught by example as well as by precept, admonished the singers to exert their vocal powers as “there was no use in humbugging it.” The preachers’ remarks were simple and appropriate, and there was little beating about the bush for fine words or phrases, and yet I was rather startled at a sentence uttered in all earnestness during the prayer, “Oh, Lord shake us over the mouth of Hell,” and by the deep Amen emphasised which went round the room. One dear old lady whose whole heart was evidently in it, adding: “A good shake Lord.” These itinerant preachers deserve the highest praise for the patience and faithfulness with which they follow out their conceptions of duty, and we left the little chapel in Numbers Garth heartily wishing them God speed.

Dagoon (reprinted by Norman Kirtlan)