John Cotton

Poet preoccupied with the traffic between past and present

John Arthur William Cotton, poet and teacher: born London 7 March 1925; married 1948 Peggy Midson (two sons); died Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire 20 March 2003.

John Cotton, poet for adults and children, printer, editor, ex-headmaster, member of several committees and genial impresario of local events, has died suddenly at the age of 78, although to his numerous friends it seemed that many of his projects, including a new book of poems already at press, Out There in Rows, were only just beginning.

Affected by, but philosophical about, the vagaries of poetic fortune, he published two collections with Chatto and Windus, the first of which, Old Movies and Other Poems (1971) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation, and the second, Kilroy Was Here (1975), the society's choice, but he was then dropped from the list. In a characteristically self-deprecating poem which appeared in his next full collection, from the small Merseyside press Headland, The Storyville Portraits (1984), he consults the oracle at Delphi which abruptly informs him that the big game is up: " 'Push off Cotton', it said, / 'You've had your future.' "

On this occasion, however, the oracle got it seriously wrong and, although he was never again to be taken up by a major publisher, Cotton pushed off energetically into a varied and productive future packed with real achievement. His retirement from teaching in 1985 was followed immediately by another collection, Oh Those Happy Feet (1986) from the Poet and Printer press and then, four years later, by a further collection from Headland, Here's Looking at You Kid. His great love of jazz and the cinema, reflected in those two titles, made him popular with anthologists, and in The Faber Book of Movie Verse (1993) he was represented by six poems, including "Casablanca" which, as well as containing the famous line that gave him a title, touches on one of his abiding themes; "the present is all we have / No matter how often we rerun the film."

It would be a mistake to pigeon-hole Cotton as a poet of nostalgia, despite the affectionate detail with which he records a very English world of custom and ceremony. His preoccupation is with the two-way traffic between past and present, how each informs the other, often with "a fine feeling for the ephemeral". In an eloquent statement about his work, he once observed that "my pursuit of the art constitutes an exploration of that area, that border line, between our wish to make things last forever and our consciousness that they never can", and in a poem from his sequence Day Book (1983), a sustained meditation on the quotidian, he writes, "Take out the people and you take out art."

Populated by family and friends, several of Cotton's most affecting poems are occasioned by an old photograph, but rather than dwelling on memories they celebrate the image a precious instant of discovery and loss, as in "The Film" (from Here's Looking at You Kid):

Clearing the house we found

Your old box camera,

Put away long before

You left for hospital,

And in it an exposed film.

A red roll on a black spool,

What could chemistry's kiss

Awaken from that chrysalis

Of time?

It unrolled to a back garden,

A son and daughter's visit,

A grandchild skipping on the grass,

And you sitting, content, in the last

Sunshine of your last Summer,

So close, so intimate,

So special as to be

Without point to others, yet

In its very ordinariness

Saying everything.

John Cotton's gift was the ability to make that "very ordinariness" seem supremely valuable and important, and it was of a piece with his personal generosity. A tireless supporter of numerous literary ventures, the list of his achievements is truly impressive, many of them accomplished while in full-time employment as headmaster of Highfield School in Hertfordshire and engaged in union activity.

With the poet Ted Walker, Cotton founded the poetry magazine Priapus (run off on a duplicator and stapled, but carefully produced with regular artwork by Rigby Graham) which he edited between 1962 and 1972, publishing the early work of many poets who went on to establish national reputations. When the magazine closed he continued to run the Priapus Press, teaching himself to print and setting all the type himself. In 1969 he became editor of The Private Library and continued in the post until 1979.

He was, in turn, chairman, treasurer and council member of the National Poetry Society and an active president of two local societies, the Ver Poets in St Albans and the Toddington Poetry Society. He was the recipient of an Arts Council Award in 1971, and in 1989 he was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Hertfordshire in recognition of his services to the community.

All this was carried out without fuss, always with the bonus of laughter, and always with the support of his wife, Peggy. To be in their company was to be at the heart of good fellowship. John Cotton was also much in demand as a poet who wrote for children, represented in numerous anthologies and popular as a visitor to schools.

Only a fortnight ago he spent his 78th birthday taking part in a children's writing course, and when asked how he had marked the occasion replied that he had done so by attending the celebrations for the 11th birthday of a course member. Perhaps, though, behind all the bonhomie and energy lay what he felt to be the monitory presence of his father, a survivor of the Somme, remembered in several poems and always with a mixture of love, admiration and a nagging sense of filial inadequacy, as in The Day Book:

Even now I court exhaustion and shrug off

Extremes in an effort to match my

father

And ease the guilt of having it too soft.

Yet it still keeps coming to the surface

Like the pieces of metal in your legs.

John Cotton had served in the Second World War as an officer in the Royal Navy Commando, seeing action in the Far East. This was hardly having it soft, but the need to shrug off praise for his achievements remained to the end. As for the poetry, should anyone find him talking too earnestly about it, "in mitigation I would quickly add that while I take the art seriously, I do not take myself so."

John Mole