“Every night I left the earth and floated above the city in search of the perfect stranger. As I floated thru the damp clouds with my arms outstretched I let out a long piercing scream. All I ever wanted to do was just drift across the deep cruel mysterious blue sky forever…”
That was the Cory Harding fantasy, but it held a parallel truth. Harding, a familiar figure on the poetry circuit from the late seventies, drifted rapidly away in the early years of the eighties. Gone, but not forgotten; nor, for some, even 35 years later, forgiven. Whatever happened to Cory Harding?
For six or eight years, plenty of small press mags published his poems, and the short prose pieces suggestive of his revered Max Jacob, that were heavy on sleep, dreams and death. Always the suggestion that something more fulfilling, a satisfaction of yearnings, was to be had in an alternative consciousness; a kind of cathartic surrealism.
He was a publisher too, his backlist including titles by Robert Lax, Pierre Reverdy, Ken Smith, and John Welch, among others. The books were invariably run off on a spirit duplicator from hand-written or typewritten originals, with cut-out collage artworks, the pages untrimmed from A4 or A5 stock, roughly stapled. One had a screen-printed cover, product of a crafts class at a local social centre; another was bound in wallpaper. This rawness had a clear affinity with the punk and indie ethos of that time of self-published magazines and pressings of small edition singles, the currency of pent-up dole-queue energy.
Some of his work appeared in 1981 in Chocolate News magazine, edited by Colin Sackett, Mark Jarman and me, leading to a book, In Search of the Perfect Stranger. When I went to meet him at his flat in the Croydon suburbs, I was surprised by the very softly spoken, shuffling, obsequious man in cardigan and slippers who answered the door, ushering me in like a churchwarden into a vestry. The rooms were immaculately clean and tidy. He gave me a cup of tea, and presented me with a saucer of peanuts served on a folded paper napkin. I felt like mayoralty popping into a care home. His caution, timidity even, in speech was broken once on a while with a tangential observation, outspoken and almost barking, when a spring uncoiled and he became combative and original, visibly pleased to be found amusing. Then back to meek.
He didn’t speak much about himself, but I found out more of his back story in one of the books he gave me, Blue Yellow and Green (the one with the screenprinted cover). A detached childhood in his grandmother’s house, raised by mother and uncle. A suggestion that the uncle may have also been his father. The death of grandmother and mother, and unhappy farewell to the uncle. And then for sixteen years the round of casual jobs as teaboy, packer, waiter, washer-up, meter-reader, road-sweeper, cleaner. Bedsits and cheap rooms, summers hitch-hiking in Europe, “prison,” “repatriation,” “Salvation Army Hostel over Christmas”.
Hence, I suppose, the visionary texts in which the mundane morphs into something ecstatic. There was more objective poetry too; this from The Sadness of my Home-made Frock:
Put the night air into a bottle
And call it perfume
Put a white cloud into a bottle
And call it milk
Put the blue ocean into a bottle
And call it ink
But then came Peeping Tom. The magazine, which ran to 10 issues in the early eighties, was on the face of it one more part of the network, a compendium of poetry, prose and reviews, mailed out or given away. But the greater part of the content was something else: a coarse dissing of names (usually vulgarly distorted) from the poetry scene, in fictions of lewd innuendo, a schoolboy discharge of insults and obscenities, black humour and cruelty. It was not done in a spirit of revenge: everyone, including friends and some who had published Cory Harding, was fair game for shafting.
Paradoxically, I don’t think he had set out to offend. There were plenty of mags lampooning the political and social establishments. Why not subvert the poetry scene? But the poetry scene hated it. Less perhaps for the crudity; more for the perceived spite; most, I would think, for the lack of purpose, the absence of satire. And how could a serious poet show such a massive lack of care or of consequence? It shot his reputation, dissolved his audience, and left him with a handful of friends. But… wherever he is, I hope he’s still writing.