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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Mary Clark: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read2.1K 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

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

DOWN THE LINE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.6K views

For Kira Somach

 

I have regular readers – some I have known

for years, others I will never meet –

on every continent except

Antarctica: a wonder not a boast!

One, an actual friend from long ago,

tells me, via email, that she often reads

some of my poems over the phone

to her father – she in Missouri,

he in Florida: to remind them

of his years working in England,

and her years here becoming a woman.

Sometimes she rehearses the reading

before she makes the call. I like to imagine

the words spoken down a telephone wire:

under the Mississipi, over

the Appalachians, around the Everglades –

but I guess the sounds are bounced from the sky,

across longitudes and latitudes

and a multiplicity of time zones,

which is no less extraordinary,

no less amazing, no less humbling – my words

sounding through the ether.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

COINCIDENCE…

David Selzer By David Selzer4 Comments2 min read2K views

the storyteller’s trapdoor: ‘And it so

happened…’ But it does sometimes. Aristotle

called them ‘accidents’ – and here’s a pile-up!

 

It is a Thursday night – and bell ringing

practice at the parish church we can see

from the long window on the half landing.

Our house was here years before the church

or the houses behind us or in our street.

The Shoulder of Mutton Field was bought

at auction and the first built was ours

more than a hundred and sixty years ago.

From the window, uninterrupted,

there would have been Cheshire countryside.

The first tenants were the Caldecotts,

one of whose sons was the illustrator

Randolph Caldecott. I attended

the same school he had done. The first grown up

poem my mother read me was Cowper’s

‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’.

How I loved the drumming of the metre,

the slam-dunk of the rhymes and Caldecott’s

gaudy, storytelling illustrations!

 

A city infant, he was certain

the hedgerows, pasture, dew ponds of his boyhood

had inspired his art. He died, not quite forty,

in an unseasonably damp and cold

St Augustine, Florida, where, of course,

he had gone for his health. The cause of death

was the heart disease he had developed as

a child. I imagine him descend,

say on some early summer morning,

the wide, sunlit stairs, one hand carefully

on the banister, the other gripping

a pencil and sketch book; edge through the back door

kept ajar for the air, cross, as quickly

as he is able, the swept, cobbled yard,

lift the latch of the door in the high wall

and step through into the brightness of the fields…

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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