IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART
Whether from intellectual snobbery or a formally made choice
or wilful ignorance I genuinely cannot remember but,
while my peers strove to be tuned in to the Station of the Stars –
the shifting wave lengths of Luxembourg, and the easy wiles
of Horace Batchelor’s ‘Infra-draws’ and Jimmy Savile’s ‘Guys ‘n Gals’ –
I would listen, on a plastic Bush valve radio in my bedroom,
to the Third Programme and heard, one night, by chance,
in Richard Burtons’s malted baritone, ‘To begin at the beginning:
it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless
and bible-black…’ and I knew then that the making of words –
the dark, solitary skill – would craft mind and heart, soul and brain.
Ashen
October 17, 2014I just connected, your poetry reminds me of W S Graham. I think Eliot was his publisher.
Some time back, Sept 2013, I wrote a blog post that included some lines of W S Graham.
I’m looking forward to your novella coming out soon ?
David Selzer
October 19, 2014An interesting and flattering comparison, Ashen – for which thanks. What is it that prompted you to make the connection, please?
Ashen
October 17, 2014The question mark was supposed to be a sun.
Keyboard misinterpretation 🙂
David Selzer
October 19, 2014Freudian?
Steve
October 20, 2014The memories that it recalls, though mine weren’t solely of Luxembourg but VOA’s Jazz Hour, classics that remain to enliven the jaded palate to this day.
Thanks as always, David.
David Selzer
October 20, 2014Ah, Voice of America!
Jeff Teasdale
July 24, 2026David… hairs on neck standing up! I had the same moment in The Whitworth Art Gallery in 1961 when, across an empty room, a self-portrait by Frank Auerbach was staring back and stopped me in mid-thought, mid-word, mid-step. I was barely in the ‘4th. Year’ at school, but out on a trip with ‘The Big Boys’… the 6th Formers on my first visit ever to an ‘art gallery’ (I had years earlier kicked a football against its railings, but going in there was ‘not for the likes of us’).
My friends and contemporaries back in school at this moment would have been on ‘playtime’, or some such activity, but here I was having my eyes and brain flung wide open, and then knowing (after only ‘thinking’ it) that this was what I wanted to to do for the rest of my life… And I did (and, like you, still do).
I thought of you and Sylvia on Sunday at Parkgate, mentioning to Lorna that you spend many happy and creative hours there, looking across the marshes to Wales. We had cycled there from Thursaston Country Park for a coffee and a croissant on the way to the trail’s ignominious end…
Then I was in Laugharne in a similar estuary-scape, looking at it through Dylan Thomas’s writing shed window, and I knew straight away that here I was in the personal and creative space of your mentor…
Lorna reminded me that many years ago we were in Renoir’s house, and in HIS studio there was his chair and his easel, and the crowds just evaporated and I stepped over the barrier, sat in his chair, and looked at an unfinished painting of his, right in front of me. Five seconds that I can stretch into an hour of ‘dreamtime’. I stepped back from the forbidden territory…. and as in Thomas’s shed, more people arrived and again we moved on, with just birdsong and curlews for company (and eating my first four blackberries of the year!).