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POETRY

THE LITHOGRAPH

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read503 views

The pandemic was daily news last year,

often from someone’s kitchen or study.

Once, behind a British virologist’s

talking head, was a black and white lithograph

from the same series of a hundred

as one we have: ‘Berezy’, ‘Birches’,

ours bought in Moscow’s Izmailovsky Market –

the May Putin was first crowned – from the artist’s

son, the father an emigré in New York.

 

Uncle Vanya and the Three Sisters

might stray into the etching’s romantic

melancholy, its stillness, its almost

ominous quietude, its imminent

sense of loss – as if the hawser taut

across the quarry in ‘The Cherry Orchard’

were about to snap at any moment.

Through a tangled thicket of leafless birch trees

a stretch of water gleams: beyond, a low rise

with a pale fence, and a wooden dacha small

against an alabaster sky.

 

 

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OTHER PEOPLES' FLOWERS

OTHER PEOPLE’S FLOWERS Mary Clark: Writer

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read902 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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SCREENPLAYS

FOUR SCREEN PLAYS

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments3 min read893 views

I wrote the screenplays between 2001 and 2008. They are presented below in the order in which they were written. Each is set against the background of armed conflict.

I was inspired to learn how to write screenplays as a result of a number of conversations in New York in August 2001 with Annabel Honor-Lissi, a fellow creative, and digital tutorials with her which followed.

 

THE MEMORIAL

The Memorial is about redemption through kindness, compassion and love.  Set in the immediate aftermath of the 1st World War, it is a love story that explores class, religion and anti-war issues through the eyes of Captain Edward Standish VC.  Much of the action takes place at Standish’s country seat, in a Midlands village dominated by a colliery, as well as in London where the Captain meets and commissions artist Clara Zeligman.  The Memorial also takes us to the battlefields on the French/Belgian border where Standish had faced the toughest moment of his military career – an event that haunts him throughout the story.

Download The Memorial by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

 

LOYALTIES

Loyalties begins in 1936, when Kathy, sixteen, beautiful, a film fan and fascinated by Elizabeth, last Empress of Austria, about whom she secretly writes romantic fiction, leaves Llandudno to train as a nurse in London. In 1940, she goes to the Isle of Man to nurse refugees from Nazi Germany interned as enemy aliens and falls in love with Peter, an Irish barman, whom, she discovers, is an IRA Bomber whose real name is Pearse. He renounces violence, though not the cause, for her – until she is the victim of an attempted rape. Pearse murders the likely suspect (who is an undercover Special Branch officer). In despair, she rejects Pearse. She returns home pregnant – and tells her mother that she was married in the Isle of Man but that her husband has been killed in action. In 1946, Pearse – now prosperous and married but still active in the struggle – finds her (and their daughter). She rejects him again.

Download Loyalties by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

ALTOGETHER ELSEWHERE

Altogether Elsewhere is a tragi-comedy of errors, driven by character, coincidence and circumstance. Both of the main protagonists were born on the same day in 1953 in Liverpool and Daytona respectively. One becomes an acclaimed documentary and fashion photographer, the other a Vietnam Veteran selling oranges by the roadside in Portugal. The story – set against a background of the decline and fall of empires – focuses on key episodes in their lives from 1961 to 2002.

Download Altogether Elsewhere by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

IN THE LION’S MOUTH

In The Lion’s Mouth is set in 1865, in a Venice under Austrian occupation, and against the background of the Risorgimento, the revolutionary movement to unify Italy. The story describes a love affair which, bedevilled by jealousy, possessiveness, intrigue and racial and religious prejudice, comes to a tragic and violent end. Though set in the past, the story portrays contemporary issues – particularly those of mixed race and of terrorism. The two main protagonists are a Liverpool sugar heiress of mixed Afro-Caribbean and European origin, who is in her early thirties, and a Austrian Jewish doctor in his forties, a widower, who is attached to the Austrian occupation forces but an active though covert supporter of the Risorgimento.

Download In The Lion's Mouth by David Selzer (Copyright David Selzer)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

A NEW YORK TALE

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read811 views

Though they lived for decades no more than a block

from each other in Greenwich Village – one

in Washington Square, the other Patchin Place –

there is no record they ever met,

Hopper the painter, Cummings the poet.

 

They would have thought that they had nothing

in common – the real, the lyrical.

But, hey, what do geniuses know?

 

They may have passed each other on some sidewalk,

on Sixth Avenue or Bleecker Street,

or in the subway on 9th, or eaten,

unaware, in the Grand Central Oyster Bar.

Though for different reasons, they would have

admired the colour co-ordination

of the pink elastic bands which restrain

the claws of the live lobsters brought to tables

on metal platters for diners to select.

 

***

 

In ‘Automat’ a pretty young woman

in a beige cloche hat and a dark green

fur trimmed coat sits alone. Behind her

the two rows of the vast automat’s

overhead lights are bleak in the night-filled

plate glass window. Her silk stockinged legs

are crossed beneath the table.  Her dress –

which we can glimpse through her open coat – is tan.

She has removed the black glove from her right hand

to eat whatever was on the small plate

in front of her and to drink her coffee.

 

Maybe she is thinking about the poem

her lover read to her this afternoon:

‘somewhere i have never travelled…your eyes

have their silence… your slightest look easily

will unclose me…nobody, not even

the rain, has such small hands.’

 

 

 

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