Christopher Cornwell’s dazzling debut collection, Ergasy, was published by The Lonely Crowd. Here, his fellow writers pay tribute to an exceptional talent who will be sorely missed by all who knew him. 

 

James Aust

Anyone who knew Chris, who had the fortune and the pleasure of being in his company, would know he would do nothing by halves.

As a friend he was completely devoted, attentive, loving, wonderful.

If he cooked a meal for you, from the best Thai Curry imaginable to impossibly well buttered toast, it would be made with love and panache.

As a writer, and thinker, he was the same. There was no intellectual stone left unturned. Chris’ writings demonstrate this, a complete devotion to bringing out something interesting and new and original, either in himself or his peers.

Uninterested in the banal and blandly beautiful, he wanted to take poetry and find something new in the most ancient form of writing, and anyone who has read his work, particularly his wonderful collection Ergasy, will see that.

I miss him, I will always miss him, but I’m grateful he leaves behind so much, and I’ll hear him in my head whenever I read his work, always.

 

Michou Burckett St. Laurent

I met you on North Road outside the Shapla. Your green boots were a misaligned wholeness of gaffa and willpower, the soles flapping, laces undone. You didn’t notice. Your pocket was torn on the inside and you were swinging from side to side as we walked, looking at me, then to the road and the sky, fishing in your coat lining for rizla and lighter, hopping on one leg and pausing the conversation only to laugh with me as I offered encouragement. Eventually after thrusting in both hands and wildly shaking the whole coat by its pockets, you accepted a cigarette, postponing the coat fight to after hours. Typical of someone who refused to take their seriousness too seriously.

What a gift it was to find you in that place. I loved your curiosity. It all interested you. Nothing was left out, and we could talk, really talk. Absolute drunken nonsense, short quippy arguments, spats that I would concede by swiping at you playfully, long deep conversations whilst everyone was asleep, exasperated outbursts, Poldark inspired insults. We talked about philosophy and language, chickens, sucking stones, eating turnips and hiding out on a bigger quest of escape and exile. We talked about how painful things could be, how cruel we could be to ourselves and how much we saw in one another. We talked the people we loved, Essex, Cambridge, your friends, your cousins, your father and your mother, about loss and grief. I remember you told me that an absence was a presence. We talked about religion, Gold, Frankenstein and Grrrrrr, politics interspersed with diatribes about the rise of Fascist Chestnut hair. We talked about how we see ourselves the least, and we only really talked about you when it was hard. These times we would sit far apart and it felt very still. We tried to talk about darts but that was a non-starter, we gave up on snooker except to indulge your John Virgo obsession. We found our things, and in time you found your things. I was happy for you.

With everyone you shared a part of yourself, a little piece for each of us, leaving aside what didn’t fit, the whole saved. And in doing so you had a life full of people, good people, and books and reading, through which you made friends of strangers and introduced so many.

So in words, your words, is how I will remember you. Bringing you in close and away again, freeform like the ink drops around your poetry. Shaking the coat, looking at me, laughing. And your dark dark eyes.

 

 

Greg PB Chatterton

‘It is friends that love each other as each deserves who continue friends and whose friendship is lasting’.

Aristotle

 

It has taken me the longest time trying to work out how to write this tribute; this remembrance of Christopher Cornwell, a young man (five years my junior, sixteen years a comrade) whose existence was as necessary to so many as air is to all. How can one hope to convey the life of a Being so brilliant with only words? – To a man of myriad talents; someone with an epistemological prowess (the desire to know), a linguistic-drive towards Words and the entirety of Idea they convey (in actualities and potentialities). (And negating the dull language used in the mundanity of quotidian economic utility – the teleological economy of words, the bare minimum required by the mere factotum of the mass marketing graffiti, of town centre capital). Because language is thought (consciousness); language is freedom because “thought is free”. But language is always also a cage – rule-based, regimented, censored and servile – as capable of harm, duplicity and injustice as it is of love, empathy and joy in its intention. Therein lies the objective: of the endeavour against ignorance – ‘the fear of truth is the fear of freedom’ – Chris’s essence – that of truth, goodness, and beauty – was a breeze of authenticity as refreshing as unpolluted air (and just as rare!). Such were these attributes, and more, immediately and increasingly recognizable in him since we first met studying philosophy at Lampeter. Christopher Cornwell was, undoubtedly, a beautiful genius (and I’m sure that he would have despised the cliché).

∞

Firstly, I cannot profess to having any real expertise in poetry, but Chris was in many ways my mentor, through his open willingness to share the plenum of ideas – the very idea of Ideas – that manifested and propagated in his mind, I feel I understood at least some of his intentions. And it is in Chris’s first collection of poetry, Ergasy, that this and more is evinced: coded and queer (_strange_ fruits, ‘onions’, anyone?), dark and awe; sometimes Joycean, a tone not dissimilar to something of Edwin Morgan (‘The Uninvited’), and fellow philosophizing poet, T.S. Eliot, obviously inspiring my friend, Full of high sentences, but a bit obtuse: the line, … and JOHNNY smears some liniment on his bleeding frenulum of prepuce’ (‘Unwrapping Johnny’) which makes the thesaurus appear quite against Mary Whitehouse’s scruples. In other places one is left wondering if it is all ‘simply’ inkhorn that never quite dips to the ever-dreaded accusation of ‘jargon’, or is it actually gibberish (‘What is your name? Is it Smith?’) (A similar feeling occurred after one evening when Chris had open-tuned my guitar, which, by the next time I decided to play, I had forgotten all about. The result being that in playing a standard E chord, I thought that I was having some sort of an ‘episode’.)

There are the recurring themes of the Cambridgeshire Fens; of temporality; of grey meeting decay; clay returning to clay; history (the two Omar Pasha poems), historicity (‘Nicholas Culpeper, Spitalfields Freeheal’) and archaeology (‘The Pug Mill: Clay Poetry’); of place and nonplace that now (maybe only ever) exist in nostalgia (‘Bagnio’): placelessness; the eternal flux and return on this personified ‘pessimistic earth’ upon which we toil and ‘[t]ill to gravel’ (‘The Three Silences of a Year’). Yet there is humour – because wit, both ‘high-’ and ‘low-brow’, was freely available to his sentiments – however subtle (the thesaurus-necessitating innuendo for a pain in the neck – also found in ‘The Three Silences of a Year’) or unsubtle (the final stanza of ‘Pot Valiant’) as the case may be, as the situation dictates.

It is the case that Chris could wax lyrical in almost any society, about almost any subject, as succinctly as he could express his pure ideas on the page, towards something tangible, through the metaphysical into the physical: from ontology to the oche (see ‘Pot Valiant’); big-P/small-p politics; pottery and Polari; snooker (to this day I can still hear the commentator/former player John Virgo’s voice only in memories of Chris’s impression of him: ‘Where’s the cueball going!?’) and Sappho, satire and semiotics. Such interest in things, from laity onward, being interesting in-itself – and that we are fragile whatever: ‘But even after Jubilee, the crown is the bregma of kings / it sits in the soft spot above their minds’. (‘Bregma Rex’)

∞

Chris was the nucleus of a synecdoche of numerous otherwise-strangers. How many people’s circle of friends has now been squared with his loss in its structure? What might be lost to temporality. Chris asks the question himself as to What do we do now?: undecided whether / to breathe in deeply and silently live on / or cry out for a man, in a poem that is now all-too acute, all-too real. ‘Matter, the spirit’s great antagonist’, as Primo Levi describes our dualistic predicament, that of cogito and contingency. Now we must rely on memory. Empirical scenes of moments captured. Situations, trivial and momentous. Now fading, memories of memories, dulling scene-by-scene. Fractured; unrepeatable. The irreplaceable:

The Impeccable You.

Despite the chaos of all existence, we who were lucky enough to have fallen into Chris’s orbit, to have experienced him, his mind, his nature, his love and care, means that it remains Chris’s destiny to be forever loved as he will be forever missed; and inasmuch as every existent is its own eternity, from Burwell and Brynmill, and the rhizomatic multitude of roads he traversed between, Christopher Cornwell will not be forgotten.

∞

Forthwith the knowing Gods evoke our tears.

Sappho

 

 

Chris Hall

I did not know Christopher Cornwall for very long before his tragically premature recent demise, yet, such was his significance to me, both creatively and intellectually, that I feel nevertheless desperately bereaved as a result.

I first encountered him when he accepted two of my poems when he was guest editor of Issue 7 of The Lonely Crowd. I was particularly pleased with this recognition, not only because it was so unexpected, given the length of the chosen poems, one of which was the size of a decent pamphlet, and both being expressed in a somewhat idiosyncratic, not to say obscure, register and lexis. but also because the letter of acceptance went into considerable detail as to why he wished to include them, and involved a  careful and insightful explanation as to what had impressed him about the work. I must say, I cannot remember being taken so seriously by someone who did not know me for some years.

Since then, we met up whenever I was in Swansea, and spent some hours together discussing a wide spectrum of matters, not all of them literary or specifically cultural, our conversations inevitably including the philosophical and political dimensions, undercurrents and implications of our concerns. I found this invaluable, especially as I was then in my early seventies, having been involved only occasionally in the poetry world over the previous couple of decades, and, I must admit, finding myself more than a little alien to the current creative milieu, emerging as I had from in the anti-establishment atmosphere of the late 1960s, and rather bemused by the academizing of the whole phenomenon of ‘creative writing’.

Chris’s astonishing range of knowledge and perception, given his tremendous argumentative rigour and genuinely dialectically analytic capacity was truly inspiring, and these meetings were instrumental in convincing me to abandon my lifelong antipathy to the  ‘slim volume’, deeply ingrained since the anarchic ethos of the 1960s scene, and anything that smacked of bourgeois solipsism and vanity. The publication of his own virtuoso and uncompromising  collection Ergosy, consistently thrilling and illuminating throughout, confirmed the authenticity of his urging me to produce a retrospective selection of my own, which led me to agree when invited by my publisher so to do.

It was an absolute, and perhaps incongruous, privilege to have someone a generation or so below my own, to consider themselves my mentor, and a real joy to have the opportunity to spend all-too-little time in his inspirational and challenging company.

An appalling loss, but a persistent and lingering presence.

 

Jo Mazelis

Regarding the Pain of Others

In the time I knew him, Chris Cornwall metamorphosised from burly bear and bearded Ginsberg-lookalike into a clean shaven and slinky, cool cat. I first met him years ago at a party given by the poet, John Goodby. Chris was there with two other post-grad students. Later, Chris launched his own literary magazine The Gull and I sent him a story that appeared in the first one. There were just two issues of The Gull – I really don’t know why he didn’t continue, or why he didn’t shout about it. I suspect that Chris was just too modest, thoughtful and sensitive to push himself or his achievements. Later we both contributed to John Lavin’s The Lonely Crowd and gave readings at launches in Cardiff and Swansea. I photographed Chris at these events but somehow, I don’t remember having a meaningful conversation with him; too much going on I suppose.

Later, when I bumped into the new version of Chris at Swansea Central Library, where he was working. I didn’t recognise him. I was taken aback – who the heck was this handsome young man smiling down at me so warmly, who seemed to know me? Once I got over the surprise it was fine. Last winter I was teaching some free classes at the library and I had a chat with Chris about trying to set up some sort of regular poetry workshop in the future. I emailed him about that and other matters but there was no reply.

I had no idea he was ill. No idea he was troubled. My impression was that he was a healthy young man with his whole life before him. If I had known about his pain, could I have done anything? I doubt it. I am left mourning the friendship that never quite got there, the poems as yet unwritten, the promise not quite fulfilled, a sadness unhealed. The poetry he did produce deserves a broader audience and greater acknowledgement.

 

 

Amy McCauley

(Taken from Amy’s 2018 review of Ergasy for the New Welsh Review)

Ergasy is Christopher Cornwell’s first collection of poetry, and what a joyful collection this is. Cornwell’s unironic and stately poetic gait swells with sonic echoes and allusive associations, provoking a cumulative effect of jouissance among the floating terrors of linguistic experiment. Yet his exuberant diction displays no cheap largesse. Rather, capacious phonological play exhibits a real generosity, as though the poet is so beguiled by language’s tendency towards profligacy that he cannot help but submit to exuberant excess.

The echoes of influence are deep, reaching down to William Blake, Thomas Wyatt and John Donne, while the presence of Bunting, Prynne, W.S. Graham and Denise Riley can be felt loitering in the shadows of the shorter poems. But Cornwell’s wrestling with his influences enables the achievement of a musical energy distinctively his own. The expansion of vocabulary is a form of generous play, while the book as a whole is both difficult and intensely pleasurable.

‘Pot Valiant’, a marvellous polyvocal poem which balances on the cusp of long-form dramatic narrative, hosts perennial barfly ‘Pepperpot’ – a ‘frown over paunch, gut slung on belt, over-hung, gross & / horseshoe.’ Pepperpot’s close-to-the-bone banter is offset by his companion’s steely observations so that by the poem’s end, Pepperpot is ‘puffin’ through his grog-blossom nose, ranting’, and the narrator anticipates ‘purgatory breath / the next gum-rotten morning.’

‘Last Night Down Whetstone Road’ is another fine polyvocal work, in which a cat walks the walls, ‘riding the lubricious and fleet and stair-rod rhythm of the rain.’ At number forty-four, a man is ;aching in his bashful bones’ and watches ‘passion blister up under brawling blankets / in a hot, dead bedroom’; while number fifty-five is a ‘boiled ham household / with pendulous chins.’ The sense of panoramic sweep is shot through with tenderness and a deeply felt attention to people and place. Ergasy is populated by a cast of characters whose private miseries are offset by gritty inner fortitude. Yet Cornwell delivers their stories with a near-devotional care, ensuring these docu-operettas rarely fall into ersatz sentimentalism or mushy caricature.

The sequence of anti-illustrational inks works wonderfully. The undecidability of their material state – are these forms organic or mechanical? intentional or accidental? waste product or sculptural artefact? – creates a pleasing and fruitful dialogue with Cornwell’s poetry. Just like Constantinos Andronis’ indeterminate inks, Cornwell’s poems offer both pleasure and difficulty, and the language cavorts spiritedly, apparently hovering between reckless unrestraint and measured control.

As such, Ergasy provokes a state of alertness in the reader and a heighted sensitivity to the shapes of diction and syntax. Cornwell’s insistence on the poem as a vehicle for asking questions – and his refusal to offer answers – along with his attention to language as a fickle and duplicitous medium is enjoyable, challenging and necessary for the life of poetry.

 

Adrian Osbourne

Chris was a wonderful person, who happened to also be a wonderful poet. I first met what I came to consider as Chris Mk1 in 2016, while we were both students at Swansea University. Mk1 was the huge-haired and bushy-bearded Chris, a wanderer in the ways of words, invariably carrying a leather-bound notebook in the pocket of some large, dark overcoat, ready at any moment to lay down some lines.

Chris loved words, particularly the obscure, the forgotten, and the foreign. But his use of them in his poetry was no linguistic peacockery; Chris never sought to use language to baffle, to intimidate, or to conceal. Words were to be celebrated, shared like a good wine with friends.

Or a pint. For Chris was of the people, the underlying epithet of which he would have gladly embraced, being equally at home discoursing with professors or talking with his fellow regulars at the Rhyddings pub. Like Chris, the Rhyddings is no longer with us, but thanks to Chris it lives on for me – ‘Pot Valiant’, in his debut collection Ergasy, vividly and viscerally captures its sights, sounds, and smells, with an unforgettable and undeniable ending:

But of course you have to leave a pub,

really,

when you’re sick

in the Landlady’s lap.

A few years later came what I think of as Chris Mk2. The thatch of hair, the beard, the monotone clothes were all cast off, and this beautiful butterfly emerged suddenly and stunningly. What had been a repressive disguise was replaced with Chris’s true self. Colour, from sparkly boots to pink-framed glasses, was everywhere, and with it came a renewed zest for life. And this is the saddest part of Chris’s death – he was so young, with so much life ahead of him (I am reduced to cliché; I trust Chris would forgive me in the circumstances). But I am so glad that he found love, happiness, and himself in the final years of his too-short life. He leaves behind a Chris-shaped hole in the lives of his partner, his family, and all his many friends, which cannot be filled. But its outline will remind us that we were lucky enough to have him in our lives, and to treasure and celebrate his memory.

I would like to leave the last words to Chris, taken from ‘A Hidden Orchard’, the opening poem of Ergasy, a collection that stands as both a remarkable achievement in its own right, and as a tantalising sign of what might have followed:

What is it that resides in fruit

that makes them want to come to be;

that despite the cyanide in their seeds,

they recite the psalms of birth again?

 

 

Rhys Owain Williams

The news that Christopher Cornwell had passed away reached me late at night on the day it happened. Just before midnight I was absent-mindedly scrolling through Instagram while feeding my son, when The Lonely Crowd’s post announcing his death appeared on my screen. It felt unreal, and as my son woke for more feeds across the night I kept returning to the post just to check I had really seen it. Chris was so young, and his death so unexpected. Eventually the morning’s cold light appeared and, as more people began to comment on the post offering their condolences, the reality that Chris had left us began to sink in.

Though I considered him to be a friend, unfortunately I hadn’t seen Chris in person for a while and didn’t know that he was ill. The Covid years shrunk many a social life – I seem to see less people now than I did before March 2020. But social media can still offer the illusion of physical connection, and I loved to see Chris’s Facebook updates about his life with his partner Darian. He seemed so happy. Before Covid I would see Chris mostly at poetry evenings, first meeting him at a Poetry Wales launch at Noah’s Yard in Swansea. On the open mic he read one of the poems that would eventually make its way into his first collection Ergasy, published by The Lonely Press in 2017. I was immediately struck by his command of language – the way that he sent rare words out into the room so effortlessly. So many poets fall into the trap of seeming as if they have accidentally swallowed a thesaurus, but Chris’s employment of his extensive vocabulary was so purposeful and unpretentious. He simply loved words, and it was a joy to listen to him use them.

After that first meeting, he encouraged me to submit some poems to a new magazine he was starting up called The Gull, and I invited him to be a guest on The Crunch: a poetry podcast that some friends and I were running at the time. On the podcast recording, he told us that his love of words came from becoming interested in his father’s eclectic personal library at a young age, where he found solace in words being so ‘joyfully different’ and how this gave him an eloquence beyond his years. This ‘extensive lexical palette’ (as Chris so wonderfully put it) was perhaps one of the reasons why, for a while after I first met him, I presumed that he was older than he actually was. He spoke so confidently about a whole host of subjects, but was at his most free-wheeling and animated (at least in my company) when he was discussing poetry. Another reason he seemed older than his years was because he had already not so much dipped his toes but rather a whole leg into the world of literary magazine editing – as a guest editor of The Lampeter Review and The Lonely Crowd and as chief editor of his new venture The Gull. Through his editorship of these publications we saw how he was an unwavering champion of other writers, both impressive in his ability to attract established names such as Gillian Clarke and Rhys Trimble to feature in the first issue of The Gull, and generous in his willingness to still shout the names of lesser-known writers the loudest.

If you are lucky, then sometimes life can give you the rare gift of a person that feels like an old friend from the moment you meet them. Chris was that person for me, and I know that others who met him felt the same way. His generosity was accompanied by an endless warmth, a genuine desire to know about you and your life while also being open about his own. He was also unafraid to offer biting criticism where he felt it was needed – in the context of the arts as a respected reviewer and critic, but also in response to the too-often-abhorrent politics of this island we live on.

Of course, I will remember Chris first as a friend, but I feel it’s important to remember him as a poet too. Because he was such a wonderful poet – one who loved to test the boundaries of form in his constellation-like poems. However, although their form (and deep themes – he studied philosophy as well as creative writing) may conjure up thoughts of the cosmos, the subjects of his poems are more grounded than that: real places and real people. He wrote of the less-celebrated environs he lived in, of rain-slickened backstreets, fading public houses and pock-marked farms. And experiencing his work is like entering an open field, seeing how each blade-like word relates to the whole. While many of us mourn the tragic passing of a friend, Wales has also lost one of its most exciting poetic voices.

When we interviewed him for the podcast, Chris spoke of his belief that all poetry seeks to ‘release itself from temporality, to leave lasting images that sit like an imprint.’ Whether it was through his warmth as a person, his generosity as an editor or his sparkling talent as a writer, Christopher Cornwell left an imprint on so many. He will be so missed.

 

Read John Goodby’s poem in tribute to Christopher Cornwell here.

Read John Lavin’s poem in tribute to Christopher Cornwell here.

Banner photo of Chris Cornwell reading at the Cardiff launch of Issue 2 of The Lonely Crowd by Jo Mazelis, October, 2015.