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It is with deep sadness that I write of the death of lifelong poet, mental health activist, and dear friend, David Kessel, who passed away on 8th March, aged 74.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I feel privileged to have known David, a deeply compassionate man, and greatly gifted poet, whose sheer humility was an example to us all in the poetry community. David was much loved, as was evidenced in a 2012 anthology of poems, Ravaged Wonderful Earth \u2013 A Collection for David Kessel<\/em>, produced by Outsider Poets and Friends of East End Loonies (F.E.E.L.), two groups of which David was a prominent and\u2014up until this time\u2014active member. Indeed, he had penned a number of radical and thought-provoking pocket polemics on mental health and psychiatry which he used to distribute as small leaflets, often inserted in the folds of his spidery handwritten letters. These often read like speculative manifestoes.<\/p>\n The paranoid schizophrenia from which David suffered all his adult life, and for which he was heavily medicated (his speech became increasingly slurred as a result), never dimmed his empathic humanitarianism nor his ruminative mind which often expressed itself in aphorism. One that springs to mind is \u2018Schizophrenia could be a diabetes of the mind\u2019. David also strongly identified with the poets of both world wars, because he was a poet pitted in his own psychical war; for these reasons, and in terms of his poetic style, David most closely recalled Ivor Gurney. For example, David\u2019s \u2018Listening to the soft rain on the leaves\/ I hear the decency and realism\/ of friends\u2019 humour\u2019 has a similar cadence and comradely sentiment as Gurney\u2019s \u2018Who for his hours of life had chattered through\/ Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent\u2019.<\/p>\n But David also had similarities with Isaac Rosenberg: while Rosenberg was the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant who settled in London\u2019s East End, David was the grandson of a tailor of German-Jewish ancestry (\u2018kessel\u2019 is German for \u2018kettle\u2019) who emigrated from South Africa to North London. By bizarre contrast his distaff grandfather had been a \u2018Blackshirt\u2019 and poet. Indeed, David was open to the possibility that such a stark clash of ancestral qualities could have played some part in his schizophrenia. This poses an intriguing genetic theory on the illness, and David was ever the self-analyst (as in his essay The Utopianism of the Schizophrenic<\/em>). His mother, an Irish Catholic and Communist, presumably had some influence on David\u2019s politics and poetics.<\/em><\/p>\n I first met David when I was at Survivors\u2019 Poetry in 2004 working as mentoring coordinator and editor of the Survivors\u2019 imprint and magazine. He was sat outside the Diorama Arts Centre rolling a cigarette with liquorice papers, his gentle brown eyes gazing from under a beanie hat atop a stooped frame in crumpled wax jacket, immediately disarming. While sifting through books sent in for review, I\u2019d come upon his hefty chapbook, The Ivy \u2013 Collected Poems 1970-1994<\/em> (Aldgate Press, 1989), with its inside quotes from Edith S\u00f6dergran and Christopher Caudwell and introduction by Arthur Clegg with its emphasis on David as a \u2018poet of compassion\u2019. That he certainly was. I was immediately taken by his work\u2014lyrical, elegiac, visionary, but also gritty, angry, visceral and sometimes shocking\u2014and strongly identified with its themes of poverty, socialism and mental suffering, as well as its literary references (Lilburne, Winstanley, Emily Bront\u00eb, Hardy\u2019s Jude the Obscure<\/em>, Robert \u2018Tressel\u2019 (sic), Keith Douglas, Drummond Allison) often cropping up in poem titles, and quotes (Wilfred Owen: \u2018Poetry is a savage war\u2019 \u2013 as well as Joseph Conrad\u2019s Lord Jim<\/em>: \u2018In the destructive element immerse\u2019), so much of which chimed with my own sympathies. I felt I\u2019d not only found a poet more than deserving of being published through the Survivors\u2019 Press imprint, but also, on a personal level, a poet-soulmate. Suffice it to say, David\u2019s poetry has had more influence on my own than any other poet I have known personally. Whenever, over the years, I\u2019ve visited London to do poetry readings, I always invited David to read alongside me; I regarded him as a spiritual fixture to any events I was involved with. He\u2019d also invited me to read on occasions, once, memorably, at Toynbee Hall for a celebration of the legacy of the International Brigades. But when I last launched a book in London, at Housmans Bookshop, Kings Cross, in 2017, David had sadly been too ill to get to it.<\/p>\n What I most admired about David\u2019s poetry was its aphorismic quality, its eye and ear for the striking line or phrase, too many to quote (though one of my favourites is: \u2018I fear this mountain I must climb\/ More than I fear fascism in a loved-one\u2019s eyes\u2019), and that\u2019s from a fairly modest output of around 70 or so poems\u2014but in these senses David\u2019s oeuvre is an archetypal testament to quality over quantity: he wrote what he felt had to be written, no more, no less, though inescapably his illness and heavy medicating took their toll on his productivity (as they did on his physical health), as it had other schizophrenic poets before him, such as Nicholas Lafitte, and David\u2019s friend Howard Mingham (1952-84), whom he\u2019d first met at Ken Worpole\u2019s Centreprise Hackney Writers\u2019 Workshop in the late 1970s, and whose poems, devotedly kept for years by David, we published through my small imprint Caparison, which included Forewords from both David and Ken.<\/p>\n David was an indefatigable champion of Howard\u2019s work, to an almost apostolic extent. (Howard had died at just 32 apparently after having fallen from the top of a tower block in the Cambridge Heath Road area of East London). David believed implicitly that Howard was one of the most important poets of the twentieth century and would often rank his name alongside the likes of Charles Sorley, Drummond Allison, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas. Regarding Douglas, I\u2019ll never forget when David showed me a spine-cracked edition of his Collected Poems, replete with brittle mauve-and-nicotined dust-jacket, intricately inscribed with cramped notes framing each poem, when I visited him at his sheltered accommodation in Whitechapel. I also have enduring memories of David ruminating over vegetable curry in one of the many loud and bustling Bengali restaurants he habitually frequented. In his later years he was re-sheltered at Sue Starkey House in Stepney.<\/p>\n I wrote at length on David\u2019s poetry in a critical piece, \u2018Storming Heaven in a Book\u2019, which served as Foreword to his Collected Poems \u2013 O the Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken<\/em>, which I selected, edited and designed, and which became a Survivors\u2019 Poetry bestseller; I can remember at its launch at The Poetry Caf\u00e9 in 2006, following David\u2019s recitations\u2014which he howled from his soul and whole being\u2014how almost everyone present queued up to buy their signed copies of the book. That striking title was my choice from a phrase in one of David\u2019s poems but I recall it took me some time to convince him to go with it as he felt it sounded incendiary, though the concept was peaceful enough: to free the books and let them spill into the streets. A selection from this volume was later published in a bilingual German-English volume, Au\u00dfenseitergedichte<\/em> (Verlag Edition AV, 2007).<\/p>\n Most of the poems he wrote since publication of his Collected I have over the years published on The Recusant. <\/em>I have kept all the correspondence he sent me over eighteen years. One of my most treasured possessions is a tattered white and teal first edition of George Thomson\u2019s pamphlet Marxism and Poetry<\/em> that David gave me some years ago (hugely generous in spirit, he had a tendency to give away books to friends). David\u2019s bibliography stretches back to the late Seventies, some of his poems having previously appeared in some ground breaking anthologies of radical socialist poetry: Bricklight \u2013 Poems from the Labour Movement in East London<\/em> (Pluto Press, 1980),Where There’s Smoke <\/em>(Hackney Writers\u2019 Workshop, 1983), Outsider Poems, Under the Asylum Tree<\/em> and Orphans of Albion<\/em> (both Survivors\u2019 Press). Some of David\u2019s poems were also put to music by the EMFEB Symphony Orchestra in Owen Bourne\u2019s score Hackney Chambers<\/em>.<\/p>\n I have known very few people in my life who have truly deserved the epithets \u2018poet\u2019 and \u2018socialist\u2019: David was the embodiment, in all the best senses, of both those noble things.<\/p>\n Some poems by David Kessel<\/strong><\/p>\n David lived in the East End of London his entire adult life, and many of his poems reference places in that district, such as the following:<\/strong><\/p>\n New Cross<\/strong> We build our own slums. The wind 1984<\/em><\/p>\n Some of David\u2019s poems, as with his short essays or leaflets, read a little like a series of slightly dislocated thoughts or images, or they can be a series of declamatory statements, or a manifesto:<\/strong><\/p>\n Poetry and Poverty<\/strong> Poetry as witness. Poetry and otherness; the otherness of the common people. Cockney poetry is underground poetry expressed in Rock music; 1999<\/em><\/p>\n Living his life in the East End of London, the \u2018cockney\u2019 identity was something David often referenced in his work. As a leitmotif (recurring phrase or theme), \u2018cockney\u2019 has other associations: the great Romantic poet John Keats was from a cockney background and, indeed, the term had been used as a snub of his largely self-taught poetry by a notoriously snooty critic in a Tory-supporting literary journal of his time.<\/strong><\/p>\n In Memory of Jude<\/strong><\/p>\n You could still marvel at the blackbird singing Oxford, 1982<\/em><\/p>\n <\/em>This poem addresses the eponymous working-class stonemason and amateur scholar of Jude the Obscure<\/em> by Thomas Hardy. Jude moves to Oxford (called Christminster in the novel) in an attempt to get accepted at its university to study the Classics but is rejected purely because of his social station.<\/strong><\/p>\n Mike Mosley<\/strong><\/p>\n There is a conspiracy against the social democracy of the British common people<\/em><\/p>\n Grey, calloused, forgotten at fifty, Scorned, down for a bundle in bird, Driven by fury to this back ward, I start from here to make anew February 1991<\/em><\/p>\n It\u2019s not clear who Mike Mosley is but I assume it was someone David knew. Whoever he is, or was, this is a sharply descriptive poem-portrait, a detailed sketch in words, which renders its subject not simply visible but almost tangible.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0 O The Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken<\/em><\/strong> Other resources:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n http:\/\/studymore.org.uk\/donkeyda.htm<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n http:\/\/studymore.org.uk\/ravaged.htm<\/a>,\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
For John Van<\/em><\/p>\n
through the slums blows on the highest
hills. We are all slowly dying
of cold and loneliness, no fags,
no fruit juice, and neighbours with veg stew
and cups of tea. We live with uncertainty,
our giros and our dreams. Yet our aggression
is our frustrated love. In a billion painful
ways we make the little things of love;
a dustman\u2019s sweat, a cleaner\u2019s arthritis,
a streetlight\u2019s mined electricity,
a carpet-layer\u2019s emphysema,
a desperate clerk\u2019s angina,
a mate\u2019s slow moaned caresses.<\/p>\n
A Declaration<\/em><\/p>\n
All poetry is a poetry of hunger for the particular rather than the general.
The purpose of poetry is to create hope in desperate circumstances.
The poetry of the common people has been driven underground since 1660.<\/p>\n
When we cease to share, our language becomes a cipher,
the language of the despatch box and the popular press.
Towards a new lyricism we need to rediscover a deciduous
language, that of Gerrard Winstanley and Emily Bront\u00eb.<\/p>\n
downbeat, dissonant, demotic; e.g. The Clash, The Jam, The Free.
Celebration of the ordinary.
Nature of the city.
Metaphysics of poverty.
There can be no cockney power without cockney poetry.<\/p>\n
above the dusk college square with sombre bells
ringing beneath May sycamores.
At bookshops bleeding with mankind and the firmament.
Fancy youths with death in their hearts
pass up and down the seductive streets
and behind thick walls make words deadly
with expectation and fear, drunk with themselves.
Only in the cold churches they struggle
to win some divine life.
The desperate vagrant is more solid:
he remembers, as yourself, the rich flinty earth,
cuckoo calling, smell of wheat in rain on a down.
Your death\u2019s carved in stone in library windows.
Your tears angry, soulful music in a pub
by the bus-station. Beneath a bus
your sweetheart wrestles with uncertainty,
spanner in hand, her poems in her pocket.
You are the busman, bright-eyed, eager to know
your mother\u2019s dark land. Your children\u2019s children
may enter this city with nothing but strong
boots, good bread and hope to destroy
and create a strange people\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
he has given his all; his wiry heart,
his skilled locked fingers, his
chipped backbone, his broken welding
language, for this choking fag,
this dark blinding pint,
this scouring Irish lament.<\/p>\n
forsaken by wives and the DHSS,
shy of nothing \u2019cept himself,
to this bare room, phlegm and loneliness
between stubborn slums and useless sirens.<\/p>\n
wasted, ulcered, unforgiving.<\/p>\n
the happiness of children playing
beneath heeding enduring gulls
in a wooded tempered land.<\/p>\n![\"Kessel](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/Kessel_cover_copy.jpg\")
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David Kessel \u2013 Collected Poems 1970-2006<\/strong><\/em>
Survivors\u2019 Press, 2006<\/strong>
Edited and introduced by Alan Morrison<\/strong>
Cover design by Alan Morrison<\/strong><\/p>\n
![\"David](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/David_Kessel.jpg\")
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