David Selzer

1093 posts

POETRY

AT FAST EDDIES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2K views

The world has turned many times since I was last

at Fast Eddies on 4th Street in Alton,

Illinois, a Mississippi river town –

just after the First Gulf War to be exact.

Then Fast Eddies was a long, ill-lit room

with a bar and kitchen, wooden tables,

backless benches, and something of a

reputation. I had my pocket picked.

                               ***

Until the end of the Civil War

Missouri was a ‘slave’ state Illinois

a ‘free’ state. ‘Runaways’ would try to cross

the wide and headlong river to seek out

Alton’s few abolitionists, and then

be sent along the Underground Railway

north and east into safer states. The town,

however, was home to would-be slave owners,

settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee.

In the town’s cemetery – on top

of a chain of limestone bluffs that flank

the Mississippi at this point – is a

monument of big city proportions

placed so that it can be seen from across

the river. It is in memory of

Elijah P. Lovejoy, abolitionist

and champion of free speech, silenced

by a murderous pro-slavery mob.

                               ***

On the bluffs beside the Great River Road,

below the town, the first people painted

a giant bird, The Piasa – a creature

of myth, covered in multi-coloured scales,

with an eagle’s beak, and a fox’s head

surmounted by horns, that terrorised

the innocent in these fertile lands.

The people were exiled or slaughtered.

Archaeologists curate what they have left.

                               ***

The world has turned many, many times since.

Now at Fast Eddies there are neon lights,

live music, and cocktails, the furniture

is cabaret style, and customers dance

with iPhones on the website. But the beer

is still Budweiser from St Louis,

on the opposite bank of the river,

and the clientele is still entirely white.

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POETRY

AMONG THE BARBARIANS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.9K views

Not long before Vladimir Putin was first

crowned president in the Kremlin cathedral

where the Romanovs had been coronated

Tzars, we were lunching in a self-service

restaurant near Red Square – with vodka shots

for a rouble by the till. As we finished eating

a young man on his own at the next table

leaned over and spoke: ‘May I speak English

to practise, please?’ He was a Japanese

political science graduate student,

he said. He had flown from his home city,

Kyoto, to Vladivostok, and taken

the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow

(via Lake Baikal and Omsk) to study

the decline and fall of Boris Yeltsin –

and had stayed on temping as a translator.

He asked where we were from, and, when we told him,

“Chester”, expressed delight. He had visited

our ‘home city’ on a tour of Europe

with his parents. He remembered its central

thoroughfares following the pattern

of the Roman camp it was named for –

and described the first floor Victorian

shopping arcades, which line parts of those streets,

and which the last Kaiser had much admired.

The three of us shared our wonder at the world’s

smallness – and then were silent, thinking, no doubt,

of vastnesses travelled, and imperial

mishaps. This student of politics

exuded loneliness, but we had appointments

to keep at Lenin’s Mausoleum,

and so we wished him well.

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POETRY

A BREAK IN THE JOURNEY

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read1.8K views

We were driving from Paris to Bordeaux one

particularly hot August, more than

forty years ago now, through the shimmering

grasslands and sun flowers of the Beauce,

and decided to break our journey

at Niort. We stayed near La Venise Verte,

tree-lined canals constructed from marshland,

Marais Poitevin, reclaimed from the sea.

We hired a barque – a flat-bottomed boat

like a punt – and made our ungainly way,

far from autoroutes and determined cities,

past pollarded alders and under arching

willows, out of the August sun, noisily

at first, then silently, to a place

of dappled light, of almost tangible

stillness, of water and leaves, and the soft

murmuring of oceans.

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POETRY

MERRY-GO-ROUND

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments2 min read1.6K views

Our hotel was a dozen or more tram stops

from Prague’s city centre. Converted

from a Soviet-era apartment block

to cater for the influx of tourists

after the Velvet Revolution,

it faced a large rectangle of open ground,

flat and bare. On the other three sides

were similar blocks, but still used for families.

In the middle was a small carousel

and, to one side, a mobile shop selling

alcohol and cigarettes – Freedom’s

enterprising dividends. The hotel

welcomed groups – like the excited party

of Israeli High School students and teachers,

with their Mossad minders, jackets bulging,

waiting in the foyer, as we arrived,

for coaches to take them to the Ghetto.

                               ***

Hitler declared that the Ghetto be preserved –

once Prague had been pronounced wholly ‘Judenrein’ –

as if an exhibit in a museum.

In the Old Jewish Cemetery,

along the horizontal edges 

of the tomb of the scholar and mystic

Rabbi Judah Levai ben Bezalel

aka Rabbi Loew small stones rest.

According to German Jewish folklore

the Rabbi could conjure, in times of trouble,

a redemptive golem out of the mud

and clay of the wide Vlatava close by.

When the city was part of the Habsburg

Empire, because of its many gilded

cupolas, it was ‘Das Goldene Stadt’.

                                 ***

Our room overlooked the open ground.

Adults were queuing at the shop, and

children turning on the roundabout. We could hear

its generator’s wheezy chug-chug,

and the tinkling of a waltz. On its roof

were clumsy images of clowns painted

in a faded yellow. The street lamps came on.

Snow began to fall as the coaches returned,

their passengers subdued.

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POETRY

THE PARADE, PARKGATE, WIRRAL

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2.4K views

Because the Dublin packet’s draught was too great

for it to moor, irrespective of tides,

beside the quay, it would anchor in the roads

of the estuary. Passengers and goods

would be ferried to and fro by long boat.

 

Where the ship hoved-to a lagoon has been cut

among the fields of reed beds that thrive

on the rich silt accumulated, over

two centuries, this side of the river.

When sea-going vessels could no longer

sail the narrowing channels, when only

shrimping boats could find open water,

but the sandy beach was not yet overgrown

the place became a seaside resort.

The Customs House on the sea wall was razed.

A donkey stand was built on its foundations.

 

And there we sit today, contemplatively,

enjoying our Caesar Salad wraps,

watching a little egret on the lagoon –

and imagining George Frederick Handel,

for example, embark for Dublin

and the first performance of ‘The Messiah’,

and Dean Jonathan Swift returning home

to compose ‘A Modest Proposal’

concerning the children of the Irish poor.

Down river, too far to identify,

a raptor is circling; beyond, like

nets cast, flocks of waders rise and land.

On the horizon – where the river

and the Irish Sea mingle out of sight –

is the suspicion of white wind turbines.

 

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OTHER PEOPLE'S FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: JEFF TEASDALE – ARTIST-IN-EDUCATION

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments6 min read3.6K views

‘Caminante, no hay camino, sino estelas en la Mar…’
Antonio Machado

To teach or not to teach? That is no longer the question…

I am honoured to have been asked by David to contribute to ‘Other Peoples Flowers’ on his website, so please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jeff Teasdale and I have known David for many years, although exactly when our paths first crossed is a mystery lost in time to both of us. It was probably initially on one of the teachers’ courses that Cheshire LEA (Local Education Authority) was so good at providing in the 1970s and which took place in very special places like Cheshire’s Canolfan Conwy Centre on Anglesey/Ynys Môn or at Bangor University. In such environments, away from the hurly burly of the classroom, left behind in the exhaust(ed) Friday night fumes of what is now the westward-bound A55,  the environment for stimulus in the creative subjects was established, and was supported by a sympathetic and very human Director of Education, John Tomlinson. In those halcyon days we also had independent people called Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools (HMIs), who were knowledgeable, generous with their time, and helpful, and certainly not intimidating as their successors seem to be today. Such background support to our work in the classroom with students was – and remains so – essential to the well-being of education, both for its teachers and its children. Sadly little of that ethos exists anywhere in this country now, and I think David would agree that our years then and ‘in the thick of it’, were possibly the best years ever to have been working in education, and especially in places like Cheshire.

Prior to that though, I had had no aspirations to become a teacher. With the award of a degree in Fine Art delayed at Newcastle University because of the promise of becoming 1969’s Hatton Scholarship Student for the next year, the rug was pulled from under me in May by, of all funding bodies, Cheshire Education Committee itself. This was the first time a local authority had reneged on their fund-matching a promise since 1929. So, with my plans in ruins around me like Giotto’s earthquake-ravaged chapel in Assisi, and after an intervening job on a building site in Alderney, I went for an interview to teach English in Sweden, this to at least be with my girlfriend who had, being an essential part of the Newcastle Plan, by then reluctantly moved back home. The interview went very well, until I discovered the job was in an iron-ore mining town in Lapland, whereas she lived in the deep south of Sweden. In fact, it would have been easier commuting to see her from Manchester than from the mines in the Land of the Summer Midnight Sun – and its corresponding Winter Midday Moon. So, my teaching career did not lyrically begin in Lapland.

It did begin however – potentially somewhere somewhat less lyrical – in Wythenshawe. On the way back from that interview I had passed by the offices of Manchester Education Committee, which ironically had agreed to fund the Hatton Scholarship in my place to a friend. Elaine and I had unknowingly lived only five miles apart while at school, she on the Manchester side of the River Mersey in East Didsbury, and me on the other side in Cheshire. That’s how random one’s future apparently was: decided on the whim of a bureaucrat working at a desk in the dark recesses of a County Hall. Walking towards the Education Offices, I had reasoned that if I could get a job teaching English in Sweden, I could get one teaching it in England. By the time I was at the reception desk, the English had been replaced by Art in my head, so I asked to see the Art Inspector, John Waddington, for whom I had done some paintings for a local college bistro whilst at Sixth Form. What followed was what he described as being… “… The most bizarre job interview I have ever been involved in…”… Essentially, while I was drinking tea in his office he was on the phone to a head teacher in a school, and the first question over the desk was… “He asks if you can play football?”… Affirmative… “He now asks if you can be in Wythenshawe by three o’clock?”… Again, affirmative… “Well, congratulations Jeff, you’ve got a job. You’re playing on the staff team at 3.30 and teaching art tomorrow morning”… John lent me ten quid for a pair of boots and some apparently ‘”essential shin pads’” – this was a “needle match” against the school first team and ‘”here would be scores to settle”. So, I jumped on a bus to Wythenshawe, danced over some vicious scything tackles with ease out on the left wing only inches from a baying-for-blood school audience uncontained behind a slack rope, and I was teaching art at nine o’clock the next morning.

Within two minutes of starting work for the four weeks involved in a job that I had only intended to take in order to earn a bit of cash to pay my fare to southern Sweden (probably one-way and going there for good), I found I was engaged in something that I wanted to spend the rest of my working life doing. I loved every minute of it. After four weeks at Brookway High School, I became John Waddington’s ‘Emergency Supply Art Teacher’, working in spa towns like Ancoats, Beswick, Ardwick and Levenshulme – in fact, any place I could easily get a bus to by eight in the morning with my ‘art teaching kit’. I razor-honed my craft very rapidly, having a sense of humour being the most effective tool in my arsenal.

After two years back in Wythenshawe – why would I want to teach art anywhere else? – I began teaching in Cheshire, and eventually met David properly, two schools later, in a project called TVEI, and although enthusiasm-sapping as ‘Technical and Vocational Education Initiative’ may sound, it just meant that the creative risk-taking that had been the roller-coaster bedrock of my career to date, could rise to another and county-wide level.

It’s all in my book… chapters of which will be eventually appearing in my new and under-development website.

In the meantime, what follows are a few snippets – a small bouquet of flowers from the equivalent in size of RHS Bridgwater – of what will be on there.

The rest will appear on my new website, currently under re-construction for this purpose…

www.jeffteasdale.com

… and David will let you know when that is ready.

In the meantime….

This is where it begins…

‘…The bearer of these gifts is a young man called Michelangelo… Treat him with kindness and he will produce work which will make the whole world gaze in wonder…’

 We exist in two worlds; that world which exists for all of us whether we, as individuals, exist or not and in this image is represented by the Tuscan landscape in front of the student.

The second world is that which exists only for us, in this case the painting between that landscape and us, the viewer, and over which she, the young artist, is layering her own patch of personal and internal sunlight…

…and which is totally unique to her.

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