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Venice

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CITY OF ART

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments1 min read2.3K views

There are the Biennale’s Big Beasts, of course –

this year David Hockney’s ’82 Portraits

and 1 Still Life’ at the Ca’ Pesaro (each

painted in three days) and, at Palazzo

Grassi and Punta Della Dogana,

Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck

of the Unbelievable’, which took ten years –

the pavilions in the Giardini

and the Arsenale; the freebies

in rented palaces and tenements.

 

And there are the abiding grand masters,

the Titians, Tinterettos, Tiepolos,

displayed in salons and basilicas;

the Bible transubstantiated into

oils and canvas, Latin verses made flesh.

 

And poor, visiting geniuses opting

for elsewhere – like Modigliani, who stayed

five years near the Accademia

then chose the avant-garde Montmartre,

and whose ‘La Femme en Blouse Marine’

hangs in the Guggenheim Gallery

on the Grand Canal, worth seven figures.

 

This is a city of stratagems, opulence,

dissembling – each turn of a corner,

each slap of water on bricks in a canal;

no place for penniless innocents,

no place for those without reputations;

mercantile, mercenary, magnificent;

an improbable, floating metropolis.

 

 

 

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POETRY

FRUITS OF THE SEA

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read2K views

On the island of Burano, where women,

sitting at their front doors for the light, make lace

and men fish in the lagoon, and houses

are painted the profound colours of sun and sea,

there is a family owned restaurant

Da Romano (opposite the headquarters

of the Communist Party) whose first owner

encouraged those painters rejected

for the first Biennale to hang their work

on his walls – since when artists of all kinds

have come: Miro, for example, Matisse,

Pound, Pirandello, Kubrick, De Niro;

most leaving (in addition, one hopes

to a good tip) at least their signature

in the visitors’ book. I sit where Callas

may have sat or Chaplin and eat, with awe,

a modest plate of fritto misto de mare

– octopus and prawns and scallops and squid

and whitebait dipped in semolina flour,

deep fried in olive oil.

 

 

 

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POETRY

LA FENICE

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

At Punta Della Dogana, a cellist

seated under the arcade, is playing

melodies from operatic arias.

It is early evening. A fog horn sounds.

A cruise ship is sailing for Dubrovnik.

With a tug at the bows to pull, one to steer

at the stern, The Queen Elizabeth –

its superstructure higher than St Mark’s

Campanile, moves slowly toward us

through the Giudecca canal. Passengers,

silhouettes on the top deck, look down

on the packed, diverse crowds jostling along

the Riva Degli Schiavoni,

the embankment near the Doge’s palace,

where the traders from Dalmatia docked.

I think of the theatre – true to its name

refurbished from its rococo ashes –

the five tiers of boxes, the gold leaf,

the papier maché, the trompe d’oeil

in a city of commerce and sea water.

The ship is tugged past us. The cellist plays ‘La

donna è mobile’.

 

 

Note: The poem was first published on Facebook in 2016.

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POETRY

O BRAVE NEW WORLD!

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.8K views

On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –

where gondoliers slept when the palazzo

was let to the song writer Cole Porter –

is Egidio Martini’s collection

of five centuries of Venetian art.

Three of the floors’ small windows survive,

each an intentional belvedere.

Two view the Grand Canal, the third south west.

The eye follows the perspective below:

a canal and its quay with inevitable

eclectic craft, stone bridges and turisti;

then tenements and the terracotta tiles –

but not the anticipated skyline,

on the mainland, of the Euganean Hills,

distant and pale as if the background to

a nativity or crucifixion

instead seven, multi-storey cruise liners.

 

On the floor below are the city’s masters:

Canal, Guardi, Longhi, and Tiepolo

whose son’s fresco, Il Mundo Novo, depicts

the backs of a late eighteenth century

Venetian crowd of all clans and classes

queuing to see a huckster’s peep show

of America – the crassness

of the machine observed in profile

only by the artist and his late father.

When the son died La Serenissima

had ended. Bonaparte had arrived.

 

From the ballroom below there is music.

‘You’re the tops…You’re Napoleon Brandy…

You’re a painting by Botticelli…

You’re the smile on the Mona Lisa…the moon

over Mae West’s shoulder.’

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE FISH MARKET

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read2.6K views

‘ The hand holds so much power – the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy.’ SUPPORT, Lorenzo Quinn

 

The resin and fibreglass installation

of one of the sculptor’s small children’s

hands and wrists emerges from the Grand Canal

many times life size and startlingly white

to brace the rose Ca’ Sagredo Hotel –

once a palace where Galileo stayed –

as if to prevent its imminent collapse.

 

When we arrive on the opposite bank

so you can take photographs the market

has closed, all the fishmongers gone but one

gutting and beheading – his right arm tattooed

with a shoal of fish, his left a death’s head.

The otherwise empty arcades echo

with shouting and barking of seagulls,

herring and black-headed, scrapping and flapping

over discarded fish heads and entrails

among the scattered polystyrene boxes

and the plastic wrapping.

 

 

 

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POETRY

THE GHETTO

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read1.7K views

We came here more than twenty five years ago

but know when we reach the Trei Archi bridge

we have gone too far and turn. (Distracted by

a young black man begging with a baseball cap

we had walked passed the sottoporto

where the curfew gates had been). We see

a man in a keppel show the entrance

to his children. Inside the Old Ghetto now

are information points, and a café

and a restaurant with kosher options.

In the New Ghetto’s spacious campo

are more eateries, and an accordionist

panhandling alfresco customers.

Stone benches have been placed, shade trees planted.

A patrol of three armed soldiers passes.

 

There is a generic memorial

to the Holocaust, and one to the transports

from the ghetto, the last including the sick

and the dying. Though the Doge et al

chose to believe Jews were as one there were

many languages and five synagogues

– three Ashkenazi, two Sephardi.

All waterways led to Venice, all winds

were fortunate for this cosmopolis.

Distant cousins of mine might have crossed

these pavings, disappeared into the fire.

 

A waitress blows a kiss to one of the soldiers,

the youngest, as they patrol again.

I think of the Prague Ghetto, its graveyard,

its leaning grave markers dotted with small stones.

Though we are never far from the sea

there are no pebbles here.

 

 

 

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