POETRY

POETRY

IN THE LONG AGO

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.6K views

A week to the day before 9/11

we were sitting on the open top deck

of a Lower Manhattan tour bus.

We passed many places to conjure with,

like the New York Criminal Court with its

classical portico supported by

nine Corinthian columns. On its steps

the last scene of TWELVE ANGRY MEN was filmed,

Sidney Lumet’s unmatched movie about

bigotry, justice, and being human.

But, because of the so-called War on Terror,

the most vivid memory of that tour

is the bronze globe turning in the fountain

in the World Trade Centre’s busy plaza.

 

We were staying with a friend on Long Island –

in Jamaica Estates, Queens. In those days

we got our news from The Guardian, which

was not available in the local

Key Food Store! – so we missed news about

the first World Conference Against Racism

then being held in Durban, South Africa.

Inevitably the Global North

and the Global South fell out about

agenda items regarding reparations

for Atlantic Slavery and whether

Zionism is a racist concept.

9/11 sidelined the outrage, that

act of terror which was used to fortify

the dominion of the North. To be human,

it seems, is to choose: be selfish or just.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

AND THE STARS

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

One of the few survivors of the attack

on a Gaza City refuge – that had once

been a school – is a five-year-old girl,

who walks alone through the burning building.

Her name is Waad. Most of her family

have perished, including her mother.

Traumatised she speaks softly: ‘I love Mama

as big as the sky and the earth – and the stars.’

She is surrounded by concrete rubble,

domestic detritus, and the unfound dead.

 

An hour or so’s drive away, a horde of

well-fed men is striding through the narrow streets

of old Jerusalem chanting ‘Death

to the Arabs!’ Though the Arabic

and Hebrew for ‘death’ and ‘love’ have the same

Semitic roots, the child and the chanting mob

seem galaxies apart.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

MERELY PLAYERS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.8K views

John Clare – the celebrity bard, the ‘peasant

poet’;’drunkard’; ‘madman’; as famous

in his time as Keats – acquired many loyal

and enthusiastic patrons, among them

Bishop Marsh of Peterborough and his wife.

He sometimes stayed in the medieval palace.

On one occasion, Mrs Marsh took Clare

to see a performance by a touring

theatre company, whose repertoire

comprised French melodramas and Shakespeare’s plays.

The production that night was THE MERCHANT

OF VENICE. Clare sat through the first three acts –

in the box reserved for the Lord Bishop’s wife –

totally engrossed in the words and the actions,

oblivious of Mrs Marsh’s asking him

if he were enjoying the play. At the start

of the fourth act – set in a Venetian court –

he became agitated, and, at the point

where Shylock does not give the ‘gentle answer’

hoped for, Clare stood, shouting, “You villain,

you murderous villain!” – and leaped from the box

onto the stage. A couple of the more burly

actors prevented his reaching Shylock,

and strong armed him, with difficulty,

back into the box. As Mrs Marsh

tried to soothe the distracted poet,

the play was abandoned.

 

 

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POETRY

NOTORIETY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.7K views

In 1963 the final footage

of CLEOPATRA – then the most expensive

movie ever made with its casts, locations,

and special effects – was completed

at the Cinecittà studios, Rome.

 

The two stars of what would become the then

most profitable blockbuster ever screened,

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton –

daughter of an American art dealer

and son of a Welsh miner, creations,

creatures of Hollywood – flew to Sicily,

to continue their affaire. They stayed

at the San Domenico Palace,

a luxury hotel in Taormina.

 

Two of the highest paid movie actors,

and both married with children, they were grist

to gossip columnists and public

moralists alike. Much was made of their roles

as Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

 

The San Domenico Palace Hotel

was originally a monastery.

Built on the top of a cliff high above

the Roman Sea it has had many

notorious celebrity guests,

among them emperors from the New World –

George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.

 

In 1967 the movies stars

returned to the hotel. Showbiz legend

has Elizabeth Taylor, on the terrace

of the bridal suite, break either an

acoustic guitar or a mandolin

over Richard Burton’s head or back.

As Martha said in Edward Albee’s

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

‘Truth or illusion, George, you don’t know

the difference.’ To which George replied,

‘No, but we must carry on as though we did’.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

THE MOVIES

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.6K views

I am sitting with my laptop at one end

of a long table, beyond which I can see,

through the window on the far side of the room,

a narrow road sloping upward to a rise –

like the road in WITNESS that Harrison Ford

as John Book, almost fatally wounded,

drives his sister’s VW down to save

the Amish boy and his widowed mother.

 

Stretched across the top of the rise is a wire,

like the one on the poster for Hitchcock’s

THE BIRDS. Starlings perch there as evening comes –

ready to swoop, if the plot requires,

on the hair-do of an unsuspecting blonde,

or a whole class of theatre-school children.

 

Stories in the dark: transparent fictions

that frighten and move, tickle and shock,

all following Aristotle’s tale-telling

rules. In the dénouement of CINEMA

PARADISO – masterwork of the flashback –

the famous filmmaker, the ironically,

poignantly named Salvatore Di Vita,

always fearful of loving too much,

weeps as he watches, for the first time,

his dead mentor’s splicing of all the scenes

of longing and lust that were cut from his youth.

 

The road, at the top of the rise, has become

an untended pathway, flanked by dry-stone walls,

bordered by nettles, brambles, and thistles.

Suddenly…

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

WORD & IMAGE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.3K views

‘Language is much closer to film than painting is.’

Sergei Eisenstein, A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO FILM FORM

 

We are watching a subtitled crime series

taking place in Central European Time,

and set in the three Slavic, post-Soviet

cities of Odessa, Prague and Warsaw –

though when the three protagonist detectives

meet they must speak in English, entertainment’s

international lingua franca.

 

It is the usual tale of murders

and mobiles, of kidnapping and corruption,

where we may find, in the last reel, that we had

already spotted the villain in episode three

– that sinister photographer with sunken eyes,

and a Germanic surname, perhaps?

 

It is a series using stock shots like Warsaw’s

Palace of Culture & Science and Prague’s

Charles Bridge, and action taking place in cut-price

locations – except for this current scene

taking place on the Potemkin Stairs:

two hundred steps cut from grey-green sandstone

bordered with granite, forty feet at the top,

seventy at the foot, built in the reign of Tzar

Nicholas I, giving the Odessa

elite gracious access to the harbour,

and its cosmopolitan cargoes;

famous for the collage in BATTLESHIP

POTEMKIN of the baby carriage bouncing

down the steps through the carnage wrought by the Tzar’s

soldiers in their white caps and tunics;

a paragraph of silent terrors and distress,

each sentence an icon of horror.

 

In the scene we are now watching a witness

is being interviewed half way down the steps

by a Ukrainian detective.

Behind and above is a group of what

appear to be co-educational

sea cadets posing for selfies. Judging

from the manner of their movements they have been

recruited from a school of physical theatre.

The director presumably thought this

scene shot from at least two camera angles

a suitable homage to his predecessor,

the master, the maestro of montage,

one of its Soviet begetters.

 

The crime series was made, of course, before Russia

invaded Ukraine. However, and

nevertheless, by chance or design, the stairs –

with their iconic place in Russia’s public

memory – have remained untouched by war.

 

 

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