(For Chris)

 

‘Brilliance is a category of exclusion as much as any other abnormality’ – Christopher Cornwell

 

I don’t complete poems very often – and never quickly –

So please forgive me for writing in haste

And for writing this kind of thing

The sort of blank heart-on-the-sleeve verse

That you hated

That you would hardly countenance

Writing yourself

‘If poetry relies on simple mainstream language,

It withers and diminishes’

You once wrote in this very magazine, before adding:

‘Language must become non-normative. Become extraordinary.’

 

Speaking of language, the penultimate time I messaged you

You said you weren’t sure if you would write poetry again

 

You seemed to lose some of your passion for composition

Not long after Ergasy was published

Did I contribute to that?

Did I hinder more than help, publishing your book?

I have worried about that but I know it to be a concern that says more about my own self-absorption than anything tangibly relating to your psyche

And yet

 

Yes

I think that after the initial sense of achievement you were left with a perfectly-realised document of your despair

I remember you saying that you had to remove sections from the book before you could give a copy to your grandmother and it was obvious that that wasn’t something to raise my eyebrows about, the way one might do fondly about an elderly relative too sensitive to deal with certain subject matter

No, it was a wound from long ago

A wound roughly re-opened

A wound such as would never heal

An attitude so foreign to your brilliance

That it shouldn’t have been able to hurt you

But beauty and truth aren’t the shield we both once thought they might be

And the ceremony of innocence, as we know, is daily drowned anew

 

You told me about those last minute excisions from Ergasy late at night in the summer of 2019

Greg was asleep beside you and Michou – in her third trimester with Aldous – long gone upstairs

We were talking more directly than usual and now I think of it I was in a strung out mood myself, anxious about impending fatherhood and stricken by my own father’s late-period dementia

As a result I was unusually direct with you, whereas I would usually demure, sensing you didn’t like to be cornered

I wish I had been that direct with you more often

I can’t remember exactly but it might be that you only removed the pages in the garden when you finally got to Frinton-on-Sea

Perhaps you had been in two minds

Faraway lonely Frinton where you walked your grandmother’s geriatric Alsatian along the clifftops and read book after book after book

A place my parents had visited once in the 70s before being asked to stop picnicking on the green

‘Well, that’s very Frinton,’ I remember you saying through pursed lips when I had expected to elicit a smile

 

That night in 2019 we embraced on the landing for what felt like a long time

It’s not how I’ll remember you the most

Because I’ll remember your kindness and wit

Your laughter and poetry and friendship best of all

But you were like a damaged building

Your integrity severely undermined

And I felt like I was holding you up

 

Maybe that was the closest I’d ever felt to understanding what is was to be you

Maybe there is a part of us that will always be innocent, that will always be a helpless child in a room full of adults

You kept that part of yourself well hidden – at least from me –

But I saw you then, faraway and lonely in some far distant past, and I didn’t know what to say

Except

‘Love you, Chris’

At least I think I said something to that effect

I hope I’m not misremembering that

 

I suppose it’s obvious upon reflection that Ergasy was such a summation of your being at that point in time that having to excise certain sections for someone whose opinion you valued so deeply was akin to an act of serious self-harm

When I messaged you about Issue Fourteen you said you had no new poems and you didn’t know if you’d write again

Perhaps because you had finally found happiness in a relationship you no longer felt the need and perhaps poetry felt too decadent, maybe it struck your burgeoning social conscience as something unnecessarily dilettantish in a world of terrible injustice

Nevertheless, I couldn’t understand it either then or now because you were as close to being a poetic genius as anyone I’ve ever met and maybe that’s because

Writing is so important to me

That I treat it like a God I’m not worthy of

 

You weren’t like that

You were like a poet from another age

You were completely uninterested in literary fashions and trends

Something which can be dull in others because it is either a deliberate untruth or a reflection of a closed worldview

But you were a genuine intellectual, one of the few literary ones I’ve ever met

You had it within you to forge the zeitgeist so why would you worry about people that pretend to

To be a true poet is to be the opposite of someone in search of relevance

To be the opposite of someone in search of a career

I won’t say the opposite of someone in search of acceptance

Because I think deep down you were always looking for that

And I think a true poet writes to be accepted on their own terms

 

And that was always you, always dear sweet you

Always asking to be accepted on your own terms

Photo of Christopher Cornwell by Jo Mazelis, taken at the Cardiff launch of Issue 2 of The Lonely Crowd, Autumn, 2015. Chris read ‘Omar Pasha’ from Issue One that night, alongside ‘The Three Great Silences of the Year’, which would later appear in Issue Three.