IT IS with deep sadness that I write of the death of lifelong poet and mental health activist David Kessel who passed away earlier this month aged 74.

I feel privileged to have known David, a deeply compassionate 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 — A Collection for David Kessel, produced by Outsider Poets and Friends of East End Loonies (F.E.E.L.), two groups of which David was a promiment 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.

The paranoid schizophrenia from which David suffered all his adult life, and for which he was heavily medicated, never dimmed his deeply empathic humanitarianism nor his ruminative mind which often expressed itself in aphorism.

One that springs to mind is “Schizophrenia might be a diabetes of the mind.”

David had originally trained to be a medical doctor, and there was a diagnostic tendency in his insights.

He also strongly identified with the poets of both world wars, because he was a poet pitted in his own internal psychical war; for these reasons, and in terms of his poetic style, he most closely recalled Ivor Gurney.

He also had similarities with Isaac Rosenberg: while Rosenberg was the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant who settled in London’s East End, David was the grandson of a tailor of German-Jewish ancestry (“kessel” is German for “kettle”) who emigrated from South Africa to north London.

By bizarre contrast, his distaff grandfather had been a poet and “Blackshirt.”

Indeed, David was open to the possibility that such a stark clash of ancestral qualities could have played some part in his schizophrenia.

His mother, an Irish Catholic and communist, had some influence on David’s politics and poetics.

I first met David when I was at Survivors’ Poetry in 2004 working as editor of its magazine Poetry Express and of the Survivors’ Press imprint.

I was immediately struck by his work — lyrical, elegiac, visionary, but also gritty, angry, visceral and sometimes shocking — and identified with its themes of poverty, socialism and mental suffering, as well as its literary references (Lilburne, Winstanley, Emily Bronte, Jude the Obscure, Robert “Tressel” (sic), Caudwell, Drummond Allison), and quotes he collected like mottoes (eg “In the destructive element immerse” from Conrad’s Lord Jim), so much of which chimed with my own sympathies.

I felt I’d not only found a poet more than deserving of a full volume, but also a poet-soulmate. David’s poetry has had more influence on my own than any other poet I have known personally.

What I most admired about David’s poetry was its aphorismic quality, its striking phrases, too many to quote, and that’s from a modest output of around 80 poems.

But David’s oeuvre is 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’s friend Howard Mingham (1952-84), whom he’d first met at Ken Worpole’s Centreprise Hackney Writers’ Workshop in the late 1970s, and whose poems, devotedly kept by David, we published through my small imprint Caparison.

David was an indefatigable champion of Howard’s work, to an almost apostolic extent. He believed Howard was one of the most important poets of the 20th century and ranked his name alongside the likes of Charles Sorley, Drummond Allison, Sidney Keyes and Keith Douglas.

I remember David showing me his spine-cracked edition of Douglas’s Collected Poems, replete with brittle mauve-and-nicotined dust-jacket, cramped handwritten notes framing each poem, when I visited him at his sheltered accommodation in Whitechapel.

One of my most treasured possessions is a tattered white and teal first edition of George Thomson’s pamphlet Marxism and Poetry that David gave me some years ago (hugely generous in spirit, he had a tendency to give books away).

I wrote at length on David’s poetry in Storming Heaven in a Book, my foreword to his Collected Poems — O the Windows of the Bookshop Must Be Broken, which I selected, edited and designed, and which became a Survivors’ Press bestseller.

That striking title was my choice from a phrase in one of David’s poems but it took some time to convince him to go with it as he felt it sounded incendiary, though the concept was peaceful enough: to let the books spill into the streets.

A selection from this volume was later published in a bilingual German-English volume, Aussenseitergedichte (Verlag Edition AV, 2007).

Some of David’s poems previously appeared in ground breaking anthologies including Bricklight — Poems from the Labour Movement in East London (Pluto Press, 1980) and Where There’s Smoke (Hackney Writers’ Workshop, 1983). Some were put to music by the EMFEB Symphony Orchestra in Owen Bourne’s score Hackney Chambers.

At readings, David would howl his poems from his soul and whole being. Whenever, over the years, I’ve 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.

Sadly when I last launched a book in London, at Housman’s Bookshop in 2017, David had sadly been too ill to get to it.

I have known very few people in my life who have truly deserved the epithets “poet” and “socialist”: David was the embodiment, in all the best senses, of both those noble things.  

David Kessel was born at Central Middlesex Hospital, Harlesden, London, in April 1947. He suffered a breakdown at 17 prior to medical school where he spent the next six years untreated. With diplomas from the Royal Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians, he went on to practise as a GP in east London until his second breakdown put a halt to his medical career with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. David spent his entire adult life battling this
debilitating and harrowing condition while simultaneously writing and publishing beautiful and sublime poetry, and intermittent essays. He became a much-loved stalwart of many London-based radical arts community organisations including Hackney Writers, Outsider Poets, the Jewish Socialist Group, News from Nowhere, F.E.E.L., and Survivors’ Poetry. He will be sorely missed and never forgotten by all who knew and loved him.
David is survived by a son and a grandson.

New Cross
For John Van

We build our own slums. The wind
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’s sweat, a cleaner’s arthritis,
a streetlight’s mined electricity,
a carpet-layer’s emphysema,
a desperate clerk’s angina,
a mate’s slow moaned caresses.

1984

For Drummond Allison

The rain is falling within, bitter rain.
Bitterness is our food, rusted iron,
And the savage cries of geese over a grey river.
The bullet that stopped you turned your rusted words
Into crying songs for these icy dissonant years;
Heathland across our corrupt splintered cities.
The corruption of the flesh and the purity of a race
Long-since guilty of rape and double-dealing
In desperate high-streets and iron fields,
Lives of crass expectation and bloody illusions
In emblemed homes fenced against the planetary wind
And the sighing earth. The rain is falling
On chipshop and battlefield, and the estuary
Of your pain flows worldly into the gulled ocean.

1987

Poetry and Poverty
A Declaration

Poetry as witness.
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.

Poetry and otherness; the otherness of the common people.
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 Bronte.

Cockney poetry is underground poetry expressed in Rock music;
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.

1999