POETRY

POETRY

A PIGEON FROM PORLOCK, A CRITIC IN THE HEARTH

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments1 min read2K views

There was a sudden and prolonged smattering –

some of the chimney’s ancient debris

falling lightly to earth – in the grate

close to my desk, then a clattering

against the metal back of the gas fire,

a shuffling of feathers, a scratching of claws.

I stopped writing. I guessed that a top heavy

wood pigeon – one of a number that perches

unsteadily on our gutters and ridges

and chimney pots – had toppled down the gloom

filled now with the rattle of broken brickwork.

 

To disconnect the gas, unscrew the fire

from its backing plate and have the dazed brute

flap around the laptop or find the creature

entombed beneath a tumulus of grime

was never really an option and yet,

for days, with the continuing chatter

of falling bits of masonry the bird

might have set bouncing off the brick-lined chimney,

my conscience was troubled: there was something

uncivic taking no action about what,

by then, must have been a death in a hearth,

putting aside the seeming indifference

to the dying. But supposing I had been

some latter day, domestic Howard Carter

and opened the tomb, filling the room with soot,

and found the bird had flown?

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
4 Comments
POETRY

MENLOVE AVENUE: VARSITY DAYS

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

Exiting Liverpool, on a whim, eastwards,

parallel to the river and then across

the Mersey Gateway Bridge – not as usual

through the Kingsway Tunnel – I took a wrong turn.

I found myself in Mossley Hill driving past

my old hall of residence. Another

wrong turn took me down Menlove Avenue.

A tour bus idled outside 121.

‘Though I know we’ve seen this place before,

someone keeps on moving the door’. Passing

the Jewish cemetery on Hillfoot Road

and a sign for John Lennon Airport

told me I was on the right road for home.

 

As I drove onto the Gateway Bridge I thought

of what I had learned in Academe’s Groves:

that Aristotle knew how many teeth

a horse has, and Bertolt Brecht was a fan

of Rudyard Kipling. Beneath me the river

was bright, and stretched like a silver lining.

I remembered, one damp November night,

walking from my lodgings near the Art School

down to Victoria Street’s sorting office

to catch the last post to faraway you

with my regular letter of love and longing.

Near Mathew Street, three working class teenage girls –

thirteen, fourteen, still in their school coats – sang

‘The world is treating me bad, misery…

I’ll remember all the little things we’ve done…’

I wondered then when and how I would use

such a piece of theatre.

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

TEN DAYS

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.6K views

George Steiner: polymath, polyglot,

storyteller; Jewish genius,

anti-Zionist, iconoclast,

storyteller; literary prodigy,

literary prodigal, European,

Cosmopolitan, storyteller…

 

“Anti-Semitic jokes often contain a

grain of truth. Hegel told this one: ‘God arrives,

and in his right hand he is holding

the holy texts of the revelation

and the promise of heaven; in his left hand,

the Berlin newspaper, Die Berliner Gazette.

The Jew chooses the newspaper’.  Hegel’s

anti-Semitic joke contains a profound

truth: Jews are passionate about the ductus,

the internal current of history and time.’

 

In Steiner’s controversial novella,

‘The Portage To San Cristobal Of A.H.’,

A.H. – Adolf Hitler – escaped the bunker

and the Allies and, for thirty years,

hid in the Amazonian jungle

until Nazi hunters captured him.

Events – human and natural – prevent them

from reaching San Cristobal so his captors

put him on trial in the jungle. He argues

that the Jews should be grateful to him for

the Holocaust since it led directly

to the foundation of the State of Israel.

 

Steiner considered that both the First

and the Second World Wars were, in essence,

European civil wars, and viewed

history through the lens of the Holocaust.

His family moved from Vienna

to Paris as anti-Semitism grew

in the Thirties, and then to New York

before the Germans invaded France.

When he was six years old his father

taught him Ancient Greek so that he would

be able to read ‘The Illiad’

in the original, which he did aged six.

 

“When I get up in the morning, I

tell myself this story, so I can make it

through the day: God announces that he’s

sick of us. Really. “I’m fed up!” In 10 days,

the flood. The real one. No Noah this time. That

was a mistake. The Holy Father

tells the Catholics, ‘Very well. It’s God’s will.

You will pray. You will forgive each other.

You will gather your families and wait

for the end’. The Protestants say, ‘You will

settle your financial affairs. Your affairs

must be completely settled. You will gather

your families and you will pray’. The rabbi says,

‘Ten days? But that’s more than enough time

to learn how to breathe under water!’

And every day that magnificent story

gives me the strength and happiness to live my life.

And I believe it, deeply: Ten days

is indeed a long time.”

 

Note: the two quotations – beginning “Anti-Semitic jokes…” and “When I get up…”  – are from:

http://forward.com/culture/367139/you-really-need-to-read-this-terrific-interview-with-george-steiner/

 

 

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments2 min read1.4K views

Ezra Pound looks both querulous and almost

slightly shifty in Walter Mori’s

black and white photograph taken

on the Fondamenta Nani, Venice,

in the winter of 1963,

the ageing poet in overcoat and scarf.

 

The photographer was creating

a series of images of cultural

phenomena. He has his subject stand,

not in one of the usual settings,

like St Mark’s Square, but on this narrow path

beside the Rio San Travaso –

one the busiest, most direct walk ways

from the Grand Canal to the Zattere.

For cognoscenti, over Pound’s right shoulder,

dimly is the Squero di San Travaso,

one of the oldest gondola boatyards.

 

Caught in the image is a passerby

who has walked on then suddenly turned,

a man with startlingly large, black rimmed

spectacles, like a burlesque foreign agent,

who has stopped as if amazed or appalled

by what he has just seen – hence perhaps

Pound’s expression, his paranoia

overcoming his vanity. Like

some provincial tragic hero

in self-exile –  his hubris, by his own

confession, ‘that stupid suburban

prejudice of anti-semitism’ –

he poses reluctantly in a city

of decaying labyrinthine passage ways,

surrounded by unending waters.

 

A much younger man, during the First World War,

he wrote about poetry, charmingly

and dogmatically denigrating

the Fin de Siècle’s ‘…rhetorical din…

luxurious riot…painted adjectives…’.

His reputation suffers, in retrospect,

from what might be termed the Wagner Syndrome.

Genius and fascist – how is it possible to

both approve and condemn?

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments
POETRY

JERUSALEM DELIVERED

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read1.9K views

 

The statue of Sorrento’s most famous son,

the Renaissance poet, Torquato Tasso,

stands at the bosky edge of the piazza

named for him, where, each year, crowds gather

for Giro D’Italia’s pelotons,

spinning like the seasons and the tides.

In doublet and hose, he muses, gazing

ambiguously at the Isle of Capri

across the startlingly blue Gulf of Naples.

 

Displayed in the Museo Correale

– a patrician villa, privately owned –

are early editions of his work,

including the seminal epic poem

‘La Gerusalemme Liberata’:

a Hollywood version of the First Crusades,

where Christians trounce Muslims in the final reel,

and the guy more or less gets his gal.

Its ambition and modernity

influenced Milton in his project

‘To justify the ways of God to man’.

We walk, through the museum’s formal gardens

along sheltered paths bordered by plane trees,

to the ornate Belvedere terrace,

and glimpse Vesuvius dormant, vast.

 

The refuse collectors are on strike. It has

something to do with the local Mafia.

Black bags are piled neatly out of sight

behind the cathedral. In the side chapel

of St James the Just – the martyred leader

of the early church in Jerusalem –

are tiny replicas in hammered tin of body parts,

wherever the sickness is the saint might cure.

Down a back street we pass a craftsman’s workshop.

Above the carpenter’s bench, in shadow.

is a photogravure of Il Duce.

 

In the narrow garden of our hotel –

in the town’s geometrical Greek heart –

a blackbird sings each evening, until the nuns,

in the tower of the closed convent next door,

begin to chant the Evening Prayer: ‘O God,

come to our aid’. The poet’s patron

committed him to an asylum

run by nuns in Ferrara. He was,

we would think now, bipolar. He died

two days before he was due to receive

a medal for his poetry from the Pope.

In the room next door to us is a couple

from somewhere Scandinavian – pale-faced,

and frequently drunk. Their empties

roll across the tiled floors through the night.

 

The terrace of the Villa Comunale

is a belvedere for all citizens

to gaze, beneath the shade trees, upon the sea

the Ancient Romans saw, and the Greeks.

Over the parapet and many metres

down is the rocky shore. One of Tasso’s

brief odes – this one to the dawn – begins,

‘Ecco mormorar l’onde

E tremolar le fronde…

Here the waves murmur

and the palms tremble…’

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

A TANDOORI TALE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.4K views

‘A tale is but half told when only one person tells it.’
THE SAGA OF GRETTIR

 

Under the almost crepuscular lighting

in the British Library’s Gallery

endowed by Sir John Ritblat (London

property developer, Tory donor,

philanthropist) among the treasures displayed –

including ‘Beowulf’, the Magna Carta,

Gutenberg’s Bible, Da Vinci’s notebook,

Handel’s ‘Messiah’, the Beatles’ lyrics –

are three pairs of Jane Austen’s spectacles

and a first edition of ‘Paradise Lost’.

 

Close to Bloomsbury’s traffic-congested heart,

about half a mile from the Library,

is Woburn Walk, a short, pedestrianised,

cobbled, late Georgian shopping street,

designed with first and second floor lodgings –

named after Woburn Abbey, the country seat

of the first landlord, the Duke of Bedford.

The poet, William Butler Yeats, has been

blue-plaqued at what is  now Number 5.

 

Number 16 is a small, well established,

family run, Bangladeshi restaurant

with British staples – like papadoms,

prawn vindaloo, chicken tikka masala.

Tonight the two tables by the window

have been pushed together. The seven diners

are Icelanders – enjoying the curries,

and speaking the language of the forty five

sagas, like the one about the outlaw

poet. I wonder what Willie Yeats

and his pals, Tom Eliot and Ezra Pound –

and Milton and Austen for that matter –

would have made of all or any of this,

not least a mongrel bard like me.

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
0 Comments