‘ELSEWHERE’ 1973 & 2023 PART 4

In 1973 a book of my poems entitled ELSEWHERE appeared in the first Peterloo Poets Series edited by Harry Chambers and published by E.J. Morten (Manchester).

Elsewhere – Poems by David Selzer Peterloo Poets Series – Edited by Harry Chambers © 1973 by David Selzer ISBN 0 901598 85 2

2023 being the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication I have decided to re-publish the volume on my website as a flipbook and as a pdf. Each has been painstakingly produced by Sam Hutchinson, who designed my website and maintains it.

Each is a facsimile of the original book and not just a copy of the poems.  Readers need to bear this in mind when searching for a particular piece. For example, the first poem Connections 1 is on page 15 of the pdf but listed in the Contents as being on page 11 of the actual book.

View the pdf page turner:

[dearpdf id=”6575″ ][/dearpdf]

View / download original .pdf:

The ELSEWHERE 1973 & 2023 project is in four parts. The first three appeared in April, June, and September 2023  respectively. The flipbook and the pdf were included in each part, accompanied by an article about the work.

I decided that I would write the article to be included in the fourth part of the project, and that it would predominantly be a factual and reflective account rather than a review.  In deciding who to approach to write each of the other articles I had in mind the following: the writer must have an interest in the work itself; be himself/herself a poet and/or editor; be both as objective and original as possible; have read the poems more or less when they were first published.

The first article [https://davidselzer.com/2023/04/elsewhere-project-1973-2023-part-1/] was by Alan Horne – editor of Between Rivers, and one of the original contributors to Other People’s Flowers.

The second [https://davidselzer.com/2023/06/elsewhere-1973-2023-part-2/] was by Clive Watkins [https://waywiser-press.com/clive-watkins/] – another of the original contributors to Other People’s Flowers [https://davidselzer.com/2021/06/other-peoples-flowers-twelve-poems-by-clive-watkins/].

The third [https://davidselzer.com/2023/09/elsewhere-1973-2023-part-3/] was by John Huddart [https://jahuddart.com/home/] – the first contributor to Other People’ Flowers [https://davidselzer.com/2021/04/other-peoples-flowers-the-point-of-vanishing-stability-john-huddart/]. .

ELSEWHERE – A Personal Retrospective  David Selzer

PREAMBLE

When the third part of the project was posted in September 2023 my daughter, Sarah Selzer – one of the dedicatees of the book, which has been a given fact of her environment for most of her life – asked me the following question in an email: ‘What do you think of the 50 year linguistic treasures you’ve got here?!’ My immediate response was: ‘What a good question? I’m working on the fourth part of the project – to appear December – and, so far, I realise I’m avoiding that very question, focussing on stuff like  the price of second hand copies on Amazon. I’ll get back to you when I’ve got a proper answer!’

A SORT OF ANSWER

I had intended to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of ELSEWHERE by editing most of the poems and publishing them on the site. I had already edited one of the poems, ‘New Heroes’, and published it as ‘Same Old, Same Old’ –https://davidselzer.com/2019/07/same-old-same-old/.

Much of the editing I had in mind related to the eponymous poem ‘Elsewhere’. It is thirteen pages long – more than a quarter of the whole text – and, in effect, comprises twelve poems that might have benefited from being stand alone, each with its own title.

Fortunately, Alan Horne and Sylvia Selzer [http://www.sylviaselzer.com/] persuaded me – quite separately – to abandon the perfect, exact science of hindsight, and republish ELSEWHERE in its entirety and unchanged.

There is, however, one piece of editing I have always wanted to do. It concerns ‘Old West Africa Man’. The title is correct on the Contents page, but appears above the poem as ‘Old West African Man’ – the only typo in the book!! An ‘old West Africa man’ was a phrase used to a refer to a white British male who had served the British Empire in The Gambia, The Gold Coast (Ghana), Sierra Leone and/or Nigeria. And ‘old West African man’ is, obviously’ an old, black man from West Africa, whose ancestors, of course, might be related to the ‘West Indian’ mentioned in the penultimate line of the poem.

I initially thought that, for the regular readers I am lucky enough to have, the original collection would be of some antiquarian interest. However, re-reading it I realised that the subject matter of every single one of the poems might well be the content of a poem I might choose to write and publish today. In addition I was pleased and proud to find some good lines – for example, the opening of the first poem ‘Connections 1’:

Between wind and water

the sea’s vanishing line

rusts through the steel hull of the ship.

and the closing lines of the final poem ‘Scott’s Last Expedition’:

O, brave, recumbent boys in sliding

ice, inching, like slow

torpedoes, into the ocean’s

massive dark.

THE POEMS

The poems in ELSEWHERE were written in the six years from late summer/early autumn 1966 to autumn 1972.

The collection is technically eclectic in terms of form. There is: ‘Monuments’ – the earliest of the poems to be written – more or less in blank verse; ‘Times Countries’ comprising iambic pentameter six line verses rhymed ABCABC and iambic tetrameter six line verses rhymed ABABDD; and the remainder – the overwhelming majority – in so-called free verse, and in a form inspired by projectivist verse [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse].

While I was at university I became used to reading my poetry aloud to willing audiences – Liverpool University’s Poetry Society and the London-based The Group [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Group_(literature)], for example – and that continued into the ’80s – the Wirral-based Jabberwocky (now First Thursday), for instance. From 1966 until 1975 I was an English teacher and was used – in any term time week – to reading poetry aloud to captive audiences of high school students. Those experiences – of being very conscious of the aural and oral aspects of poetry i.e. the dramatic  as well as literary aspects – attracted me to projectivist verse, where the line breaks act, in effect, as stage directions.

Though some of the poems on the website are in free verse none are what I would describe as projectivist. In fact, in terms of form, the first poem to be published on the site – ‘A Short History’ [https://davidselzer.com/2009/04/a-short-history/] – is very typical of the overwhelming majority of pieces I have published to date. It was written in 1983.

In addition to ‘Times Countries’, during the years 1966 to 1972 I wrote a number of other rhymed poems in traditional meters. None of them, obviously, were deemed good enough to be in the final cut.

‘Lost Tribes’ [https://davidselzer.com/2012/09/lost-tribes/] also did not make it into ELSEWHERE. Like ‘Monuments’ it is autobiography set in a cultural and historical context. I published it on the website in 2012. Apart from the reference to Drogheda, the last line being shortened, and capitals removed from the beginning of lines where not needed for grammatical sense, the poem is as it was written in 1964.

THE EDITOR

ELSEWHERE was the fourth volume in the first series of Peterloo Poets, an imprint created by Harry Chambers to publish ‘Poetry by new or neglected poets’. Harry was lecturing at Didsbury College of Education in Manchester, hence the title Peterloo, referring both to the massacre of 1819 and a group of Manchester-based poets active in the 1950s.

After the first series Harry became his own publisher as well as editor – and, for thirty seven years, managed, developed and promoted what became a very successful and highly respected independent poetry series, comprising an impressive 240 volumes: https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/b8dd7c04-0769-349f-9360-008f01982a84.

When I began my first year at Liverpool University Harry was just starting his PGCE (Post-graduate Certificate in Education), having graduated the previous year. We met through the Poetry Society, and Harry informally and quite naturally became my literary mentor as well as a friend. Both the friendship and the mentoring continued after Harry had left to take up a teaching post in his old school in Doncaster. ‘Larkin Revisited’ [https://davidselzer.com/2011/06/larkin-revisited/], published the year before Harry died, is an attempt to capture the spirit of the mentorship and friendship.

THE PUBLISHER

E.J. Morten, the publisher of the first Peterloo Poets series, was a Manchester bookseller with a national reputation, one which the family firm maintains [https://www.booksmanchester.com/]. Somehow Harry managed to persuade Eric Morten that there was money to be made in publishing new poetry. When Eric realised that such publishing was, at best, a long term investment their partnership ended – The Fates having seemed to intervene.

In 1975 Eric wrote to Harry to tell him that a warehouse fire had destroyed all of the unsold copies of Peterloo Poets – and that, in my case for example, the number of sold copies was about 50 (far short of the 250 needed in order for me to receive any royalties as per the contract I had signed). Some ten years later I discovered, by chance, that copies of the book were still being sold by Mortens. I wrote to Eric, mentioning this, and the fire. I received a cheque for £10.  Some thirty years later, through the Authors Licensing & Collection Society – of which I have been a member since its inception in 1975 – I received a royalties payment of £75.

COMPLIMENTARIES

I had received a dozen complementary copies on publication but, over the years, that number had been reduced to one or two. Some I had sent, with covering letters, to people who, in way or another, had inspired me – my English teachers at The King’s School, Chester, for example – and to one of my mentors as an educator, Roy Hopwood [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2013/dec/10/roy-hopwood-obituary].

So that Sam Hutchinson could create a facsimile of the book I bought a second  hand copy on Amazon for £5 or so and had it sent to him. Neatly folded between the hard cover and the first page was the covering letter addressed to Roy. Remarkably – because I am a hoarder rather than an archivist – I have Roy’s reply readily to hand. He described the poems as ‘sinewy, cerebral and restrained’ and mentioned that he was going to ‘use with my senior classes The Zoo, The Chimney and Old West Africa Man’. ‘The rest’, he continued, ‘I’ll share with you, because Chester, Wales and areas round about are my own memories of many happy years in your part of the world’.

CODA

I asked Sam Hutchinson not to bother to reproduce the back dust cover – which comprises a photo and brief bio of the author –  but, as a very touching surprise, he posted the photo in the first draft of Part 4.

The photo was taken by a photographer who specialised in weddings and passports, and whose studio was almost literally round the corner from where I live now. (A Bangladeshi takeaway occupies the space where the studio was). I should have credited the photographer. How careless the young can be.

Since the work the project republishes is that young man’s creation I’ve left him here – like a patron saint perhaps. I hope he would have approved its resurrection.

APPENDIX: A BULL MARKET?

Second hand copies appear for sale online quite often, and seem to be rising in price. One recently – on Amazon – was priced at $309.99, and seemed to sell quickly. Making the book available pro bono may, of course, have knocked the bottom out of the market.