POETRY

POETRY

REFLECTIONS ON IMMORTALITY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.7K views

From our bedroom window I can almost touch

the laburnum’s tresses of yellow blooms.

The tree was here before we moved in

fifty years ago. Most years it has fountained

flowers – which, from a distance, seem golden.

A quarter century is the likely span

of a laburnum. Though this tree is on

borrowed time bees congregate regardless.

 

Perhaps being featured in one of my poems

has encouraged its longevity:

‘…By our side gate the old laburnum – whose wood,

in time, may make a chanter or a flute –

is in bloom. I look up through its branches.

There is a little azure and smidgens

of green – and droplets, ringlets, links, chains

of cascading yellow, a torrent of gold….’

 

I am long beyond my allotted span

of the psalmist’s ‘three score years and ten’,

and take note of her/his admonition:

‘…if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,

yet is their strength labour and sorrow;

for it is soon cut off, and we fly away’.

I shall be good enough only for ashes

the wind might scatter. This tree, however,

might make music.

 

Note: the poem mentioned above is AN AFTERNOON IN MAY.

 

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POETRY

‘AI’ & ‘REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST’: POEMS & GRAPHICS

David Selzer By David Selzer9 Comments2 min read3.6K views

The poems were inspired by conversations with the artist, Evie Chapman. The poems, in turn, inspired Evie Chapman’s artwork.

 

AI

For Evie Chapman

 

 

Not ‘artificial insemination’, nor

a cry of dismay or woe, nor a

two letter word approved by Scrabble,

nor a three-toed sloth from the Guianas,

but ‘artificial intelligence’.

 

***

 

I set the computer on my exercise

bike – with its read-only-memory –

and, as I pedal nowhere in the study,

sometimes to engage my mind on the journey

I pick a book at random from the shelves.

Today it is THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME,

Adrienne Rich’s selected poems.

Again at random, I access it

at page forty six. Helpfully the poem,

entitled ‘Artificial Intelligence’,

is dated: 1961. The poet

has been bested at chess by a computer.

‘I’m sulking,’ she says, ‘in the great tradition

of human waste’ and, deliberately,

personifies the ‘digital’ machine,

addressing it directly: ‘…denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams’.

 

***

 

We live much of our lives in metaphor,

frequently when ‘the tables have been turned’

and life becomes ‘an uphill battle’.

We often like to think ‘the grass is

always greener on the other side’,

especially after ‘it’s been raining

cats and dogs’. ‘Artificial intelligence’

was ‘coined’, yes, in that great tradition –

by USA computer scientists

nearly seventy years ago. So

why the current razzmatazz, the last ten year’s

of increasingly noisy razzle-dazzle,

about what AI will do for us

or to us now, as if it were some

recently arrived sentient being,

a software Golem come to redeem us,

a binary Godzilla bringing

the end of days – not something that needs

the electricity to be switched on

to work? Maybe somebody somewhere

is looking to make a fortune or two

out of  our gullibility – yesterday’s

news become today’s snake oil?

 

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

For Evie Chapman

 

 

Now that I have been summoned to bear witness

to the ‘swinging sixties’, a decade

half my lifetime away – when Liverpool,

according to the poet, Allen Ginsberg,

was the centre of ‘the human universe’,

when the empires of the USA

and the Soviet Union curtailed

the lives of millions, and raced, like small boys,

to be the very first men in the moon –

I shall make some notes in order to

blow the dust off the archived albums

of my memories: I was 17

when it began, a high school student,

and a poet, and 27

when it ended, husband, father, teacher,

property owner, and still a poet;

from adolescence to adulthood,

from dependence to independence,

in ten long sometimes joyful, sometimes

unsteady steps; from falling in love

with a pretty girl, and staying in love;

from youthful insouciance to the pride

and awe at having a daughter; commonplace

wonders, shaping futures.

 

 

GRAPHICS: ©Evie Chapman 2024

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

‘A SHROPSHIRE LAD’…

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read6.3K views

…is the first book of poetry I owned –

a breast pocket sized hardback, slightly foxing.

It was my father’s: his name neatly

in capitals on the inside cover

in indelible pencil – a Londoner,

the son of an economic migrant

and a refugee. When I was ten

my mother gave it me. I liked the first line

‘From Clee to heaven the beacon burns’,

imagining it set to music.

 

Following his death on active service, the book

was sent back with all his other things.

I never knew him. He never saw me.

He died, an ocean away, three months

after my birth. He could be my grandson now.

He touched this book. I touch it, sniff it.

Old paper smells almost aromatic

like incense, always comforting, always

intriguing. Into my forties, I

thought of him every single day.

 

The book falls open automatically

at poems 35 and 36:

 

…On the idle hill of summer,

Sleepy with the flow of streams,

Far I hear the steady drummer

Drumming like a noise in dreams…

…White in the moon the long road lies,

The moon stands blank above;

White in the moon the long road lies

That leads me from my love…

 

but this is the one I return to always:

 

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

 

Now, of my three score years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

 

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

 

 

Note: the poem was first published on the site in November 2017.

 

 

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POETRY

THE FASHION OF THE EARTH

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

In a letter published in The Times in May

1936 – the month after

A.E. Housman died – a former student,

Dora Pym, herself a classics teacher,

described a lecture the poet/professor

had given in 1914, one morning

in May when all of the cherry trees

of Trinity College, Cambridge seemed to bloom.

 

The subject was one of Horace’s Odes –

‘Diffugere nives…’ Housman analysed

the poem, both its sense and grammar,

with his usual erudition, wit,

and donnish sarcasm. Then, for the first time

in the two years she had been attending

his lectures, looked up at the students.

In a quite different voice, he told them

that he would like to spend the remaining

minutes of the lecture ‘considering

this ode simply as poetry’ – something

they would have previously assumed was

anathema to him. He read the piece

first in Latin, then in his own translation –

 

‘The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth…’

 

– obviously moved. ‘That,’ he said hastily

like one betraying a secret, ‘I regard

as the most beautiful poem in ancient

literature’, and hurriedly left the room.

 

While they were walking to the next lecture,

her companion, a scholar from Trinity

(who would be killed in the coming war)

said, ‘I was afraid the old fellow was going

to cry’. They thought they had seen something

not meant for them, or anyone perhaps.

 

 

 

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POETRY

BOOKMARKS: ART TROUVÉE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read1.9K views

Occasionally there is added value

in purchasing a previously owned

aka second hand book online – like today,

for example, when I opened the packet

and withdrew a used copy of the Penguin

Poetry Library’s edition

of A. E. Housman’s Collected Poems,

with an introduction by John Sparrow,

Warden of All Souls College, Oxford,

and found a number of improvised bookmarks

between some of the pages: a sliver

of cardboard cut with scissors from a box

of muesli or granola, and placed between

‘When I was one-and-twenty’… and  ‘There pass

the careless people…’; another piece

of cardboard from the same box, this time marking

‘Is my team ploughing That I was used to drive,

And hear the harness jingle, When I was

a man alive…’; between ‘Into my heart

an air that kills…’ and ‘In my own shire

if I was sad…’ copies of John Keats’

Sleep and Poetry, Wilfred Owen’s

Exposure, and Arthur Hugh Clough’s Say Not

The Struggle Naught Availeth cut out neatly

from the Daily Telegraph; lastly, between

‘Bring in this timeless grave to throw No

cypress sombre on the snow…’ and ‘Here,

the hangman stops his cart…’, a roughly torn

ad from the Stourbridge & West Midlands Express,

for a newly opened hotel and spa

in the hamlet of Fockbury, Housman’s

birthplace, purporting an unrivalled view

of Shropshire, and, quoting the famous poet,

‘those blue remembered hills’.

 

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POETRY

HOUSMAN’S BOND SLAVE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment2 min read2.2K views

In ‘My Antonia’, Willa Cather’s third

novel about European pioneers

on the Great Plains, and first published in

1918, Antonia’s father,

failing at farming the prairie, longing

for his old life as a musician

in Catholic Bohemia, kills himself.

Denied his burial on consecrated ground

his wife, a bitter woman, has him interred

at the south west corner of their small plot of land,

where two tracks meet – like the old country,

where suicides were buried at a cross roads.

In time, what was unfenced wilderness marked

by stakes, and ways marked by wagon wheels, becomes

ordered farmland and levelled roads. Fenced now,

enclosed with the last of the red prairie grass,

the grave remains untouched. The roads curve round it.

 

***

 

Shortly after the publication

of ‘A Shropshire Lad’ in 1896,

Willa Cather became, as she put it,

‘Housman’s bond slave, mentally’. Whenever,

wherever she could, she promoted the work

in the magazines she edited.

She acknowledged that his poetry

made its way freely throughout her own work.

 

In 1902 she went on a tour

of Europe with a friend. First stop, more or less,

was the county of Shropshire. They visited

most of the places mentioned in the poems –

like Ludlow, Wenlock Edge, the Wrekin, and Clee –

sometimes more than once, but could find no trace

of Housman, or anyone who had ever

heard of him. The single copy of the book

in Shrewsbury’s public library was uncut.

 

Eventually, she got Housman’s address:

a boarding house in Pinner near London.

Willa went with two friends. Imagine three young,

outward-going women, passionately

convinced that Housman had written the only

verse in English from the previous decade

that would last, that it was as remarkable

technically as it was in the ‘truth

of its sentiment’. Imagine Housman,

middle-aged, lonely, forever carrying

a secret close to the surface of his heart:

his unrequited love for another man.

 

Later, Cather, in a letter to a friend,

described Housman – ‘as the most gaunt and grey

and embittered individual I know’.

She went on to say, ‘The poor man’s shoes and cuffs

and the state of the carpet in his little

hole of a study gave me a fit

of dark depression’. After they had left,

she had wept on the pavement outside the house.

 

***

 

‘…the grave, with its tall red grass that was never

mowed, was like a little island; and at

twilight, under a new moon or the clear

evening star, the dusty roads used to look

like soft grey rivers flowing past it…’

 

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