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I remember him reading his elusive poems under a gnarled sycamore at the far end of a field on my mother’s Hampshire farm – Purdies Farm – that lovely summer when we held an arts festival there in the mid-seventies I guess. The horses cropping grass as they listened nearby. Amikam Toren did a ballet for cars. Susan Hiller and Susan Bonvin squabbled over encroachment of Susan Bonvin’s string piece into Susan Hiller’s dream field. The fledgling Theatre of Mistakes did a free session among the horses. David Coxhead philosophised under the corrugated awning attached to the barn as the sun set over the wooded heath. John was very much part of this mixed group of artists, which included Anthony McCall and Andrew Eden – all editors of Wallpaper magazine, which we found wallpaper covers for, from the ends of rolls, and it wasn’t a magazine with articles, it was a magazine with art-works and poems and musical scores and concepts, and each editor had a slot (there were twelve editors and John was one) – and other contributors could only get into the magazine if an editor gave up a slot to that contributor. We were all committed to a somewhat French notion of a café society, where visual artists exchanged ideas with poets and composers and this was in reaction to the over-rigorous demarcations of London culture, where poetry was remorselessly meaningful and poets like John and myself and Tom Lowenstein and Alan Fuchs all reacted to this, and joined forces with the French group Siècle a mains – writers living in exile from Paris in London at the time and championed by Anthony Rudolf. We had set up a writer’s workshop which took place in my wife Signe’s Hampstead flat where we were ruthless about our own poems and we talked enthusiastically about the New York Scene and John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge and Jimmy Schuyler. And this was because we wanted to engage with abstraction, as we saw the visual arts were doing, and at the time I took up a way of writing which was extremely abstract and systemic while John’s writing mediated between abstraction and meaning in a way which I was sometimes dismissive of back then; but John’s ineffable hovering has definitely stood the test of time, whereas I have moved on or away from my purist abstract outlook. So it was that we became writers. John went on to found Vanessa magazine, and also he started the Many Press. I feel that Winter’s Not Gone – the pamphlet of mine that he published – with design and wonderful cover illustration by Peter Tingey is the most handsome of any chap-book that has been done of my poetry. Most memorably, John also published Near Calvary by the immensely gifted poet Nick Lafitte, who committed suicide in his twenties, a collection I edited and wrote an introduction for. John has written poetry which will last, and I will also always appreciate his fine work as an editor and a publisher.

HIS BOOKS

When the poet died

What happened to his collection of books?

There were four or five shelves of poetry.

The dealer who came took only a few

The collectable ones with signatures, greetings.

Now the poet’s widow is baffled.

She surveys them spread out all over the floor.

‘I don’t want the shelves

Completely bare’ she had said

‘But look, there are far too many’.

I imagine the poet’s final moments. He’s thinking

‘Why is there suddenly all this space inside me?’

As he finds himself slipping away

Sideways then up, high into the air.

Perhaps he looked back down

And saw the books still safe in their shelves

And then they were trying to rise up

On only one wing, to join him

But being held back by the substance of paper

Here they are now, all over the floor

In their awkward, toppling piles.

John Welch