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ELSEWHERE Poems by David Selzer

'ELSEWHERE': 1973-2023

‘ELSEWHERE’ 1973-2023 PART 3

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment8 min read2.4K views

In 1973 a book of my poems entitled ELSEWHERE appeared in the first Peterloo Poets Series edited by Harry Chambers and published by E.J. Morten (Manchester).

 

2023 being the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication I have decided to re-publish the original volume on my website as a flipbook and as a pdf. Each has been painstakingly produced by Sam Hutchinson, who designed my website and maintains it.

Each is a facsimile of the original book and not just a copy of the poems.  Readers need to bear this in mind when searching for a particular piece. For example, the first poem Connections 1 is on page 15 of the pdf but listed in the Contents as being on page 11 of the actual book.

View the pdf page turner:

 

View / download original .pdf:

The ELSEWHERE 1973 & 2023 project will be in four parts, appearing in April, June, September and December 2023 respectively. The flipbook and the pdf will be included in each part, accompanied by an article about the work.

The first article [https://davidselzer.com/2023/04/elsewhere-project-1973-2023-part-1/] was by Alan Horne – editor of Between Rivers and one of the original contributors to Other People’s Flowers. The second was by Clive Watkins [https://waywiser-press.com/clive-watkins/] – another of the original contributors to Other People’s Flowers. John Huddart  [ https://jahuddart.com/home/] – also one of the original contributors to Other People’s Flowers – has kindly agreed to write the third article.

ELSEWHERE Poems by David Selzer: A personal review by John Huddart

Packed in behind the dashing photograph of the author on the back cover, whose enigmatic gaze conceals the trace of a smile, is a portrait of a life devoted to family, and to the world that made it. Here is an explorer whose interests already range from modern history to the display of scholarly erudition, and from felt experience to quizzical distance. And, as a book about family, it is immersed in ancestry, in forbears, and in the magic circle of the three people who make his world, who see him through.

It is also rooted in literary tradition, echoing the themes and perceptions of many writers, and paying homage to their influence.

Travel the fifty years to where we are, and ELSEWHERE still dominates David’s world – with the addition of a fourth person– a granddaughter who makes the trio a quartet. And the voice is still the same – sounding out from the corner of his front room study, with its view of the street and the outer world of traffic and pedestrians, and the vague threat of anarchy and crime; still filled with reference and connectivity – but now transformed into a poetic journal uniting the daily, the personal, the urgency of politics and compassion, and a continued radical despair – to which age has brought a ripeness, an acceptance, and a deeper love above all of everything, and everything that’s close.

But to the beginning. I first met David in 1974. Shortly after that I collected my copy of ELSEWHERE from a bookshop near Chester Cathedral. Its poetry taught me the serious value of words, and the respectability of ironic detachment. That gaze, often satiric, together with the handling of phrase and sound, makes for the excitement of the verse. Also the verse line – rhythmic, spare, usually free in form, but also happy to pursue a traditional metre when demanded. Finally, a use of concealment which allows the reader freedom to pursue his own ambiguities.

This meeting also led to the refreshment of Wrexham Lager, and the mighty power of usquebaugh – so great I hardly dare speak its English name! I was told by Margaret Spence, whose kindly wisdom launched the careers of many English teachers in Liverpool University’s Education Department, where she was a Senior Tutor, that David was a sensitive man with whom I would enjoy working, and she missed only one thing – that his friendship would become a strong and necessary part of life itself, and the sharing of a dram its most blessed sacrament!

The contents of the book announces only fourteen poems, but neglects to indicate the range they cover, the way the inner and the outer worlds are so deftly handled. Does not indicate the promise that in so many lines will be found the memorable idea, the magic phrase that persists upon the tongue, and haunts the memory.

As an ordered collection it begins with two poems of connections that illustrate that reading really matters, and that everything connects to everything else, then tackles the same thing in Monuments, which depicts his honeymoon in Ireland. Here love calls above the estuaries of history and nature, which ostensibly are the monuments in the poem, so by the end he’s home, behind his own high windows, if still surrounded by the ghostly menace of the past and its scurrying rats.

Then he’s waking, in New Year 1970, from a restless sleep on a New Year’s Eve – the three of them are there – wife, daughter and himself, and he is caught up in a storm of confusion, where the tokens of his twenty eight years are banished by a world of triviality, and he is (first choice of memorable phrase) ‘pacing vanity’s iron zoo’

It is a world of punishing inequalities, and of imperial echoes which are glimpsed with satiric affection in Old West Africa Man, and then in New Heroes, the new imperialism of space conquest propels the newly dominant Americans to occupy the moon as pointless conquest, mere expense – as futile a because-it-was-there adventure to match Scott’s in the last poem of the collection. New Heroes also contrasts the three astronauts with their ‘monstrous crepe soles’ scouring the Moon’s surface with the earth-bound Selzer family, staring out over the fading facades of commerce, and the wider human achievements of Auschwitz and the industrial revolutions whose advances led to all of it, and to our prosperity and present inequalities.

This intensifies in The Chimney, where the wastes from a nearby oil refinery present the worrying menace of polluted fields and gardens. Here is a poem well rooted in its era, where questions about those processes which once signalled, and brought, the wealth of nations were making challenges to our too easy progress.

And then, The Zoo. Each zoo homes species whom contemporary Noahs have endowed to save, while presenting their infinite variety for us to marvel at. David’s zoo presents them for the strangeness they often possess – whether striped, copulating, or swivelling their monstrous eyes. Somewhere in the background stalks Ted Hughes’ poem The Jaguar, which was then a proud centrepiece for English teachers, but Hughes sought to make the cat the subject. The true inmates of David’s poem are the people whose habits and behaviours are equally alarming. He shares the amusement and delight of inmates looking out at their human captors. There’s genuine horror in observed human behaviour – witness the visitors who today would be described as having special needs, but the poem identifies, using the cruelty of the age, as ‘mental defectives’.

David’s zoo is rich, engaging and eternal – zoos have both moved on, and stayed compellingly the same. There is a touch of Brueghel in the splendid grotesques on view, either side of the cages. Also, a whiff of proud English amateurism in the conduct of the keepers, especially as they seek to feed or placate their elusive gibbon. Three years ago my daughter and I visited Delhi Zoo, there being nothing else to do on Monday in India, and here was David’s poem, stalking the cages.

Babel’s Villa is partly a homage to a Selzer home. These have been their lair and refuge for as long as ELSEWHERE has been abroad. This one, bomb-damaged in the war, and repaired with sea-sand, both reflects its history and menaces its inmates. On this night, wind and rain are threatening tumult and destruction, and both David and Sylvia are showered in plaster dust from the raging storm. They lie side by side, covered in grey dust, like the couple in Larkins’ Arundel Tomb. And this poem too proves to be about love, and it ends with a kiss, and happiness.

Jacob is steeped in so many stories and European myths and you can invent countless narratives to provide a key. As soon as you think it’s a personal story, its slips away into allusion and mystery. We are tripping though the same worlds as Eliot’s Waste Land, but with a theme that repeatedly echoes Jewish histories. These echoes draw you back repeatedly, as do delightful lines like ‘Old crow, I think, kissing her beak’, and the crow performs a central and repeated role in the narrative – much maligned of birds, but watchful mourners, hungry for our remains.

Times Countries alludes to many times and places where they do things differently. Living near to Berwick and the Scottish lowlands I’m straight way immersed in the authenticity of the local detail, but this presented childhood memory runs on through references to many things that make our present history. Wars, empires, sports, the dance, all there. A novella in verse, skilfully and uniquely, rhymed throughout, it is Tolstoy striving to get out.

And in Suicides there is a hint of Ariel’s description of the drowned man in The Tempest, and her death is indeed made beautiful and strange – as nature claims her body back again. The poem creates narrative that entirely plausibly accounts for her life and death.

At the centre of ELSEWHERE is the line ‘Elsewhere is metaphor’. It’s a pivotal moment in the volume’s title poem, for, from then on, it becomes a hallmark poetic journal through experience and his family’s visit to North Wales. Before the quoted line, the poem is the typical meditation on history that David does so well, and how it impinges on the visitor if they are alert to read the landscape and the back story. ELSEWHERE is therefore both in the present and forward looking to the writer David has become. We can only be thankful that he’s there to bear witness and continues to report on what he sees and knows.

And so to Scott of the Antarctic in Scott’s Last Expedition. These are the kinds of heroes David cares to celebrate. Not any VC or a boy upon a burning deck – three men who freeze to death for nothing, and whose sacrifice became a fitting comment on the English and their love of futility. Imperial echoes resonate, and all is capped with the inadequate values of the public school which spawned them. This is summed up in the powerful symbol of the tent – providing shelter in no way equal to the task ahead. Although there is much to mock in the values that impelled the mad dash to the Pole, for the men themselves there is a deep respect. ‘O brave, recumbent boys in sliding ice!’  There is always the satiric edge to David’s view of those whose vanity and values he finds wanting, but he never misses the humanity, and sometimes the grandeur of the human condition, in its folly.

And now, for fifty years these poems have lain here, alive like the memory of Scott’s men.  They have been doing their work, inspiring others who have met them, and can summon up their lines. How good to see them re-published in a new online version, where their inventive insights can kindle a new generation of readers.

So ELSEWHERE is here, and now, at last. Of course, where else?

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'ELSEWHERE': 1973-2023

‘ELSEWHERE’: 1973 & 2023 – PART 1

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments9 min read2.7K views

In 1973 a book of my poems entitled ELSEWHERE appeared in the first Peterloo Poets Series edited by Harry Chambers and published by E.J. Morten (Manchester).

Elsewhere – Poems by David Selzer Peterloo Poets Series

Edited by Harry Chambers © 1973 by David Selzer ISBN 0 901598 85 2

2023 being the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication I have decided to re-publish the volume on my website as a flipbook and as a pdf. Each has been painstakingly produced by Sam Hutchinson, who designed my website and maintains it.

Each is a facsimile of the original book and not just a copy of the poems.  Readers need to bear this in mind when searching for a particular piece. For example, the first poem Connections 1 is on page 15 of the pdf but listed in the Contents as being on page 11 of the actual book.

 

View the pdf page turner:

 

View / download original .pdf:

The ELSEWHERE 1973 & 2023 project will be published in four parts, currently scheduled to appear in April, June, August and October 2023 respectively. The flipbook and the pdf will be included in each part, accompanied by an article about the work. Alan Horne – editor of Between Rivers and one of the original contributors to Other People’s Flowers – has kindly agreed to write the first article.

 

ELSEWHERE Poems by David Selzer: A personal review by Alan Horne.

By the spring of 1973 David Selzer had been my English teacher for more than four years, including a year as my form teacher. That spring was an odd time. I and others had taken A-levels a year early, with the idea that in the final year we could concentrate on Oxbridge entrance. But that was all over by Christmas, and we emerged into a temporary Elysium in which we took a few lessons to give the impression of continued schooling, and hung about waiting to go to university, making various stabs at adult life, and trying to impress each other: I still possess a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra purchased at the time, carefully battered to indicate the vigour of my reading.

It was while occupying this glorified waiting-room that we discovered that Selzer had published a book of poems. Of course, this was great fun. I recall a plot to harass him, causing him to encounter someone engrossed in reading the book wherever he went, exclaiming and pointing out important lines to their friends; it did not come off. But at the same time it struck me, and, I suspect, others, that this was a serious event; the real business. We did not have any old English teacher, some kindly gent who rattled on about the work of others. Our teacher was an actual poet himself. Someone thought it plausible to publish his book. Now, David was not the first of our teachers to emerge in print. My history master had been very worked up when one of his colleagues had produced what you might call a speculative book about King Arthur. But this was different. Anyone who opened ELSEWHERE could see that this was real literature. Selzer had told us about the work of Hopkins, Eliot and the Thomases; now he was adding to it.

I think that, at the age of eighteen, I found these poems rather gripping, and that impression has not gone away. Plainly, some of that is because I knew the author, and the poems revealed a personal side to someone with whom I then had a highly formal relationship.

But if the personal connection was a factor, I think it was in the main because the book illuminated the attitude that David had conveyed in the classroom. I recall a contemporary sneer that everything had to be ‘relevant’: song lyrics, TV programmes, poems were all good if they were ‘relevant’ to the issue of the moment. But the engagement with the world which David brought to the classroom could hardly invite so shallow a summary. I recall us studying The Rape Of The Lock, and arguing, in an era and setting far away from the public discussion of violence towards women that is current now, about what would have happened then, in 1971, if someone forcibly cut off a piece of a woman’s hair.

This engagement is the first striking thing about ELSEWHERE. By the time we have got to the end of the first sequence, Connections 1 (pp.15-19: N.B. page numbers throughout refer to pages of the pdfs, not the actual book), we have learned of Ovid in exile, King Edward VII with the Tsar and the Kaiser, a People’s Republic, the nature of truth, T.S. Eliot, Hitler, Oswald Moseley, religious advertising and the Bermuda Triangle. This may be a headlong grab at one thing after another, and we might complain that there is too much content and too little focus – indeed, I believe that this was the main criticism made of the poems at the time – but personally I find the urgency breathtaking. One of the pleasures of reading David’s more recent poems is to find many examples, like The Rabbi and the Emperor of 2019, in which the same sweeping view of history can be found; more focused, but boldly asserted.

In some ways, this is to say that ELSEWHERE is the work of a young man, and for me, while it has the faults we might expect in terms of impetuosity and lack of discipline, its virtues are not easy to separate from those faults.

One example might be section 6 of Connection 1 (p.17), which I think of as The Sandwiches of Truth, perhaps with an eye to Allen Ginsburg’s Reality Sandwiches. It is a favourite section which always brings a smile to my face. A tougher editor would surely have cut it. We can argue about whether the philosophizing here is mock-pretentious or just pretentious. What is not in doubt is the author is prepared to risk being called an intellectual; or even just a clever-clogs. There is a fine unwillingness to be ingratiating.

Another example is The Chimney (pp.25-27). This is probably quite overwritten, full of exclamations. But the exclamations also create a novel duality of voices. The poem has an impersonal narrative voice which relates the implacable, god-like activity of a polluting industrial chimney. But there is also an ‘I’ in the poem with a different voice: exclamatory, angry, ineffectual. Eventually the exclamations die away, the impersonal, god-like voice prevails and is in the middle of delivering the poem’s coda when there is a final sudden cry of complaint: Do I sacrifice my daughter/for a harvest of convenience? It is an uncanny effect, as if an irascible Beckettian character, thought to be dead or asleep, has suddenly roused itself in a final sally.

We might also look at New Heroes (pp.27-28), the poem from ELSEWHERE about the Apollo moon landing which David later reworked, in 2019, as Same Old Same Old. The latter is a fine poem, and clearly edits out some overwritten sections from the original. But I must advocate for New Heroes. There is a vitality in the imagery – like Cottonwool moon in a flimsy sky, and Aldrin’s lumpy suit – which does not carry over into the later poem. More significantly, the greater expansiveness of New Heroes allows for a kind of spiral development which, for me, ties the familial aspect of the poem – a walk to the Observatory – much more effectively in with the images of the moon-shot, and gives proper prominence to the central line, eerie and grammatically curious, sung by the poet’s child: Moon has the face like a clock on the wall.

Closely allied to the expansive energy of these poems is a tone which is often sharp, angry and unsatisfied. For me this tone links closely with my memory of David as a teacher. I recall him having very little problem with discipline. In part this was because he seemed to be genuinely undisturbed by misbehaviour which would provoke some of his colleagues into a paroxysm of rage. He records a good example in his poem Fifteen Minutes written in 2015.

But it was also because we sensed an undercurrent of fury completely unlike the default authoritarianism of some of his colleagues. Righteous fury, I am inclined to say. He rarely expressed annoyance in class, but when he did, I recall no-one ever trying to take him on. I think we knew that he would turn out to be more articulate, clever, and cutting than we could be. Nor, while he was an attentive teacher of the less able, did he suffer fools gladly. As a teenager who was obsessed with Tolkien, I once had the opportunity to present the man’s masterwork to the class. At the end, I must have looked more pleased with myself than I should. David’s tone was exasperated: “But why does he call it The Lord of the Rings?”

While this sharpness is patent in The Chimney, it is more often present as a fine sardonic irony. This gives the book some of its most memorable phrases. Connections 1 Section 7 (p.17) tells us of …the silencing of Isaac Babel/(in the twentieth century, even babel is silenced). In The Zoo (pp.28-32), omnipresent is …The Motorway/which simplifies/death, having no right turns. The Zoo is a markedly angry poem, and a twenty-first century editor would probably not have allowed the use of the phrase mental defectives even in bitter irony. But in general, I think the tone even more useful today, in an age saturated with propaganda about wellbeing and positivity. Humans have a very limited capacity for being either good or sensible, especially in the mass. ELSEWHERE faces that head on.

This sharp and engaged tendency of the young Selzer’s writing reaches its apogee in Connections 2 (pp.20-21), which links the murder of Trotsky with the destruction of the Aztecs, and in Scott’s Last Expedition (pp.59-61). Both have greater focus and economy, while retaining the rhetoric, bite and historical sweep of some of the other bravura poems. I found them enthralling at the age of eighteen, and still do now. When it came to writing poems in class, David advised us to forget about form, and concentrate on what we wanted to express. Not a complete recipe for successful poems, but one can see how it lays a foundation for the free verse found here. The excellent Private Eye magazine regularly denounces writers of free verse as people who simply arrange prose with line-breaks, giving only the appearance of poetry. These examples achieve the opposite effect. Try to read them as prose. They just keep turning into verse.

Much of the above is about a youthful enthusiasm not to be dismissed for being youthful. At the same time, I find that other poems in the collection have come into focus for me as time has passed. Most have similar qualities to the foregoing but are less rhetorical and more reflective. Monuments (pp.22-23) with its Time stationary like dust in jars…; Babel’s Villa (pp.37-38); Jacob (pp.39-40); Suicides (p.45). All move the same concerns into a more personal sphere. The best parts of the long title sequence Elsewhere (pp.46-58) do so too.  As a native of the Wirral, the notion of North Wales as a prototypical elsewhere, right there but endlessly other, made immediate sense to me, and as in Elsewhere Section 4 (pp.48-49) I have not a few times looked …ruefully/down the giddiness/of what, from the road,/was grassed slope/with stream and stones/but now, finding clumsy,/slithery feetfall/on the strewn rock/of a water-falling torrent,/is sheer/madness… But no such personal link is needed to feel the impact of Sections 10 and 11 (pp.55-56) which work marine images into poems of love and the fear of loss. I am sure that it can be argued that some of these are better poems than those I took to when I first read them: it has taken me longer to read and understand them adequately.

I was an undergraduate when I bumped into David in the street in Chester. He indicated my change in status by suggesting that we go to a pub, where we spent a pleasant hour. After that, I had no contact with him for forty years. I am not a hoarder of books, but I hung onto ELSEWHERE. Now and then I would pick it up, surprise myself again with the vividness of the language, and look at the photo on the dust jacket of the young poet who had set off my lifelong interest in verse. But the internet changes everything. I retired, looked on the web at what was going on in Cheshire as regards poetry; and there he was, still writing like mad.

 

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