OTHER PEOPLES’ FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Mary Clark: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read708 views

David kindly asked me to contribute to ‘Other People’s Flowers‘.  I’ve enjoyed his poetry for more than half a decade now, having linked up on LinkedIn. His encouragement while I was writing one of my more complex books, Community, was invaluable. Community is a political memoir, tinged with urban scenes and community activism. For David, though, I included several excursions into the art world, including a brief description of a book signing and reading at New York University’s student center in 1986. In it, Germaine Bree and actress Irene Worth read portions of Marguerite Duras’ work.

During the pandemic I began writing memoirs of my insignificant life. I hoped to convey the tenor and the ethos of the times in each book. Tally: An Intuitive Life harkens back to the idealistic and sexual-political revolutionary 1920s, quiet by comparison to the 1960s and more vibrant than the 1980s when the aging, impoverished Bohemian artist looks back critically at his life.

Into The Fire: A Poet’s Journey through Hell’s Kitchen is the story of my years at the New York Poetry Festival at St. Clement’s, a midtown Manhattan west side church. The program was founded in the late 1970s when the “anything goes” 1960s and early 1970s were fading and the arts becoming less grassroots and more corporate run. I came to the program in 1978. Many poets, both well-known and less established, read or had their work performed there until the Festival’s end in 1983. Changes in the church and my transition into the community outside its doors led to the next phase of my life.

Chapter 2, Culture Review, of Into the Fire…, includes a description of the church sanctuary and theater space, bits of my poetry, and some of the characters rolling through town, as well as two recommended poems and references to others

Chapter 2, Culture Review – view here

The book I’m currently working on also revolves around art and artists, the inner and outer drama of our lives, and the perceptive and honest analysis that drives us forward, if we have the courage. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it is the most intensely personal of my memoirs. It takes place in the mid-1970s amid moral and ethical unmooring, a lost world in more than one sense. The attached section is one among the several points of view or ways of telling stories juxtaposed within the text.

Whether I – view here

©Mary Clark 2021

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: ‘Twelve Poems’ by Clive Watkins

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read845 views

David Selzer and I first got to know each other in 1965 through the University of Liverpool Poetry Society. Under David’s energetic leadership, in 1966 the Society brought a young Seamus Heaney and a young Michael Longley from Northern Ireland to read to us. This was some months before Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, appeared from Faber, and at this point Michael Longley had published no more than a single pamphlet. Neither had read outside Northern Ireland. The third of the notable young Northern Irish poets to emerge during those years, Derek Mahon, was at that time teaching in Canada, but it was through Heaney and Longley that I discovered him, too. For me these readings were cardinal events. I have followed the work of all three with admiring attention ever since.

After university, David and I lost touch for over four decades until about ten years ago when we re-encountered one another on the web – indeed, through this very site. By then we were both long-married and had families; both of us had pursued our careers in education, often – as we  were to discover – in surprisingly similar grooves; both of us had continued to write. Though during my early twenties I had placed a few poems in little magazines for many years my professional and family life had taken most of my energies. When I retired, however, I was able to give more time to writing. At last, in November 2019, David and I – and our wives – managed to meet at his lovely old house in Chester – some fifty-three years late, as one might say. Given this history, being invited by David to post these poems here stirs for me a host of charged and poignant memories.

David has asked me to say a little more about myself.

I was born in Sheffield in April 1945. In 1948 my family moved to Liverpool when my father took up a post at a large hospital on the northern fringe of the city. I was educated in Liverpool, and, after a post-graduate year at the University, I went on to teach English in local comprehensive schools, first in Walton and then in Anfield. (In Walton, one of my students was for a time a certain Alexei Sayle: it was already apparent what kind of career he was destined to follow. On the staff as a French Assistant was the future manager of Liverpool Football Club, a youthful Gérard Houllier.) The mid-1970s saw me working as Head of English at a school on the Wirral – as David had, too, though at the time neither of us was aware of this. In 1980, with my wife and three children, we moved to a sub-Pennine village in West Yorkshire, where we have lived ever since. (Think, if you will: Last of the Summer Wine Country.) At my retirement I was the head teacher of a prominent local high school whose origins lay deep in the Middle Ages.

My first collection, Jigsaw, a selection going back to the early 1970s, was published by the Waywiser Press in 2003. Little Blue Man appeared from Sea Biscuit Press in 2013 with photographs by Susan de Sola. Already the Flames (Waywiser Press, 2014) was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. In 2018 I won the Robert Graves Poetry Prize. My latest collection is Pedic’s Dream (Common End Press, 2021). I have read at venues around the U.K. – amongst others, at Grasmere for the Wordsworth Trust and at Oxford University – and at literary festivals in the U.S.A. and Greece. My critical writings encompass poets as diverse as Edward Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Eugenio Montale, E.J. Scovell, Robert Mezey and Michael Longley.

My university days are now a distant memory, but what my acquaintance with David gave me, as I knew even then, was a sense that my odd avocation – the writing of verse – was not an addiction unique to me and indeed that it was “permitted”. Encountering Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and (indirectly) Derek Mahon was a powerful confirmation of that. Of course, in 1966 David knew nothing of this, but I am happy to acknowledge here my gratitude to him for his unwitting and, as it turned out, his life-long gift.

‘Twelve Poems’ by Clive Watkins – read/download here (click to open /  right click > save as):

 

©Clive Watkins 2021

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
3 Comments
OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: Three Poems by Alan Horne

David Selzer By David Selzer8 Comments3 min read1.3K views

I read once – perhaps it was a quotation from José Saramago – that the writer’s life is the detritus left behind by the work. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it sounds better than any autobiographical introduction I can think up. I worked years ago in a steelworks, have a very longstanding interest in psychoanalysis and – perhaps it’s a reaction to all those clinics – now spend a lot of time outside. Here are three short poems which bear on these matters. Thanks to David for the chance to put them before you. At age 14 I found that we had a new English teacher called Mr Selzer, a young iconoclast without whose bracing wake-up call none of this would have been written.

 

********************************************************************************************

 

THE ELECTRICAL CELLARS

Someone directs us all down the electrical cellars

beneath the mill.  By switches and hot valves

we duck like drowsy priests avoiding callers,

counsel the machines to help themselves.

Please read the plastic notices.  They mark

the wiry, shirtless dead: Victorians

entombed like broken tools right where they fell,

the gauntlets only passing to their sons.

Not us.  For us, the moment of control:  at worst

the hole in the overall and the small burn;

the alcoholic customs of the blast.

We’re special men just now.  But markets turn

on us, will cut our cellar-space.  We’ll squeeze

like pitmen, skid by on our knees.

 

 

********************************************************************************************

 

WILFRED BION ON A MOONLIT ROAD

As I was taught at the institutes: write it all down straight away.

So.  Someone has a light going; no, it’s the moon in a late guise:

supermoon, blue moon, doo bee doo bee doo moon.  Never the sun,

but a white light on the modern tumps, the subterranean reservoir.

 

And here you are, strolling past the moonlit earthworks

at the borehole, by the warning sign about voids and crawlspaces:

still a little military, still a little medical, politely unco-operative

– those you annoyed might say bloody impossible –

still chewing over Freud’s Two Principles of Mental Functioning.

 

And it’s a stranger’s light you walk in, to the junction.

All too pale, it brightens the lane from the wrong angle.

See how the shadows won’t disperse, but huddle in cracks

in the roadstone, argue back, point out that it’s night really.

 

You liked Freud’s letter to Lou Salomé, about the dim forms

lost in the daily glitter: they could be glimpsed, perhaps,

in a beam of intense darkness.  Or by this light,

aslant and incorrect, which picks out unmarked facets

of the sheds at Pollards Nursery, and calls up ghosts like you.

 

 

Note.  Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) was a tank commander in the First World War who later became a prominent psychoanalyst.  His writings continue to be very influential within the psychoanalytic world.  He wrote a remarkable memoir, The Long Week-End 1897-1919: Part of a Life.

 

********************************************************************************************

 

NEW ENGLAND

Veils of rain dressed the seedheads of high summer grasses

with a load of water, pulling them over

 

into mats that wound a cloche, a twilit subway

a foot off the ground, in whose steaming fosses shieldbugs prospered.

 

Through the burnt colours of gone-over grassland

yellow sparked: the vetch swimming; the hawkweed’s hand.

 

Only where the fields broke was the grass propped upright in the wires

bracing rotten posts like teeth in the jaw of the intake:

 

these of timber; others of a pebbly concrete – army surplus,

back of a trailer – bucked at crazy angles,

 

saving this old vertical: cable halo, flag of twine, spinnaker

plastic bag, it was steadying the line

 

of new barbed wire that scrambled past its comic adjutant,

the buckled straining post. Wires ran in all directions

 

out of the daylight.  Hills over in Wales dispersed like cigarette smoke,

and the track of the uprights parted the kneeling meadow.

 

 

Acknowledgement: ELECTRICAL CELLARS first appeared in the Poynton Poetry Trail, Poynton, Cheshire, in 2017.

 

©Alan Horne 2021

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
8 Comments
OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS: ‘The Point of Vanishing Stability’ John Huddart

David Selzer By David Selzer6 Comments3 min read946 views

I set out believing I was a reader, a collector of books. It was marvellous that the children I taught could write engagingly – and it would certainly stand them in good stead when they became readers too. Years into teaching, struggling with the burdens of so many unread books, I was plucked from the classroom and deposited in the National Writing Project, because I had been snared by word processing.

The Project had several key principles – one was that teachers of writing should be writers too. How can you expect them to, if you don’t? So I started to write, to record observations, to explore poems as models, and to enjoy technical formality. And in those days, teachers often met and worked with professional writers – today, they simply have to work with the National Curriculum.

And then there is David. Always wise, and always a writer, he has been a continual example and inspiration. If you are reading this, you are one of David’s fans as well, and look forward to his monthly collection.

I too have a poetry website, and publish what I write on it. The url is www.jahuddart.com, and I email my friends with regular updates, though in not so timely a fashion as David.

The Point of Vanishing Stability I wrote after a week’s sailing in very stormy weather off the west coast of Scotland, which explains the context.

Some poems rush into the world, almost fully formed, and find their connections to the wider sinews of life, almost instinctively. This is one of them – would they were all like that!

 

The Point of Vanishing Stability

In a yacht, the point of vanishing stability

is reached when the vessel decides

it has had enough of gales and tumult,

and will overturn. In the boat we are on,

this is a measurable angle, defined

by calculation and testing. We are pleased

to learn it is 120°.

Summoning up our mathematical imagination

we place the mast well below the surface,

with our boat springing back to save us

as we tumble about our ends.

It is a phrase that seizes. Passing

straight from the workshop manual

to the page of possibility. As we charge

the waves, and crash through with

jovial insouciance, the world and

its endless chaos breaks upon the

decks to tumble past in salty streams.

 

And so we trust to all designers

that the keel will hold beneath, that

the mounting pressure on the sails

will spill from the tops like so much

laughter. And so with all the lubberly

uproar from our safety-conscious lands,

with bitter crowds converging

on the monuments they would disown,

with grave ministers of state who

battle with the tide of numbers

competing for our panic or our grief.

 

May the bow split water still,

may whosoever did the sums

and placed us in this sea have got it right.

Through edgy fears and sacrifice

we stand fast to the wheel, and

still keep on tacking home, past tipping

points that howl but never come.

 

 

 

 

©John Huddart 2021

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
6 Comments
OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.1K views

The idea for this section of the website was  inspired by A. P. Wavell’s OTHER MEN’S FLOWERS [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/oct/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview5]. It is designed to showcase other creative people whose work I like and admire. They are to date:

John Huddart – https://davidselzer.com/2021/04/other-peoples-flowers-the-point-of-vanishing-stability-john-huddart/

Alan Horne – https://davidselzer.com/2021/05/other-peoples-flowers-three-poems-by-alan-horne/

Clive Watkins – https://davidselzer.com/2021/06/other-peoples-flowers-twelve-poems-by-clive-watkins/

Mary Clark – https://davidselzer.com/2021/10/other-peoples-flowers-mary-clark-writer/

Tricia Durdey – https://davidselzer.com/2021/11/other-peoples-flowers-tricia-durdey-writer/

Sylvia Selzer & Evie Chapman – https://davidselzer.com/2021/12/other-peoples-flowers-monsieur-datouffe-tortoise-of-taste-words-by-sylvia-selzer-illustrations-by-evie-chapman/.

Sizwe Vilakazi – https://davidselzer.com/2022/04/other-peoples-flowers-sizwe-vilakazi-writer-performer/. 

Harvey Lillywhite – https://davidselzer.com/2022/06/other-peoples-flowers-harvey-lillywhite-writer-teacher-consultant/.

Howard Gardener – https://davidselzer.com/2022/09/other-peoples-flowers-howard-gardener-artist/.

Ian Craine – https://davidselzer.com/2023/04/other-peoples-flowers-ian-craine-writer/.

John Wareham – https://davidselzer.com/2024/01/other-peoples-flowers-john-wareham/.

Rosanna McGlone – https://davidselzer.com/2024/03/other-peoples-flowers-the-process-of-poetry-rosanna-mcglone/

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment

Recent Posts