Wendy Mulford 1941-2026
I first caught sight of her on the ferry from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire in April 1987. I was with old friends Allen Fisher and Paige Mitchell. Allen and I had been invited by another dear departed friend, Maurice Scully, to read at a poetry festival at the Winding Stair bookshop overlooking the Liffey in Dublin – and so had Wendy. We all got on fabulously. Fellow Brit poet Alan Halsey (now also deceased) joined us in Dublin. The hospitality shown us by Maurice and the Irish poetry crowd was brilliant.I found Wendy to be a wonderful conversationalist. She and I walked around Dublin together – “stooging” was her invented word for wandering aimlessly round a city, inspired by the activity of flâneurs but without the 19th century French decadence – and talked. We were in the midst of a heatwave – to this day, my memory of my only visit to Ireland is suffused with Mediterranean sunshine.
My diary tells me she and I did a reading with my old mentor Eric Mottram in Oxford a few weeks later. She and I experienced an intense, if brief, relationship that summer. In those pre-internet days it was mostly phone conversations and exchanges of postcards, but she visited me in my flat in Balfour Street, near the Elephant & Castle district in London, and I stayed in her house in St Philip’s Road, Cambridge. She took me to visit Jeremy Prynne in his rooms in Gonville & Caius College. We were served tea and biscuits. It was terribly English. I do remember having a distinct feeling of unreality at one point. I wrote at the time “The horizon invades my metabolism”. Of course, both Mottram and Prynne are also gone now.
We went abroad together, first to Luxembourg, where Wendy had been asked by Pierre Joris to read at the Festival International de Poèsie featuring 24 poets from eight countries: the Anglophone ones including Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver (an old Cambridge mate of Wendy’s), Alice Notley, Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg. And then later in the autumn of 1987 on holiday in El Chorro, a village in the mountains of Andalucia, together with her teenage daughter Rhiannon and boyfriend as well as other friends – where she wasn’t very well.
There’s a strong presence of all of this in my book Good Science (Roof Books, 1992).
Wendy was born in the Home Counties but raised in south Wales. I visited her childhood home with her and met her mum, a redoubtable lady then in her 80s who drove us on the motorway at terrifying speed. Her dad had died by then but her mother’s companion was a jovial old gent that Wendy called Uncle Dick. She had a sister I never met.
She went to Cambridge University in the early 1960s and was a contemporary of and collaborator with that celebrated group of poets who assembled around JH Prynne: John James, Peter Riley, Andrew Crozier, Tim Longville, John Hall and others, and later Douglas Oliver and Denise Riley. She married John James (Rhiannon’s father) in the 1970s and they organised poetry activities together. Her Wikipedia entry doesn’t mention her first husband Jeremy Mulford (nor her later marriage to Noel Bevan – I’ll come to that later).
Like so many of her poet contemporaries at the time, she started a small press. Street Editions published collections in the 1970s by Prynne, James, Crozier, Tom Raworth, Veronica Forrest-Thomson and her sometime protegée at Cambridge Denise Riley. Later, in the early 1990s, I helped her with the design and production of a further batch of books, starting with Catacoustics by Tom Raworth. Tom had specified a format for this book which I followed and then used as a template for further books by Sarah Kirsch, John James (from whom she had recently separated) and a triple-header of work by the American poet Stephen Rodefer and second-generation Cambridge poets Rod Mengham and John Wilkinson. Print production (Wendy never got to grips with the production side of publishing) was handled by Jeremy Mulford, who lived in Bristol. He was a lovely man, who later helped some of the early Reality Street titles into print.
My friendship with Wendy cooled somewhat between 1988 and 1991 – it was never quite the same after that odd Spanish holiday in September 1987. We saw less of each other. During that time, I had a two-year relationship with a former work colleague. I started writing what became my first published novel, Futures, finishing it during a six-week sojourn in Scotland as a Hawthornden fellow in April 1990.
Then somehow we seemed to go into a new phase, starting with my visit to Suffolk at Wendy’s invitation to attend the Aldeburgh Festival production of Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch & Judy in June 1991 at the Snape Maltings. Later that year, she rented a cottage near Snape for six weeks and I stayed there for a while working on my next novel while she did some writing of her own.
At this time, I had published the final volume of Reality Studios, the magazine I’d been editing for ten years, and I was now bringing out one-off books under the Reality Studios imprint: by Allen Fisher, John Seed, John Welch and Andrew Duncan. Wendy had previously showed me a 26-poem sequence she was working on, each poem based on a painting by Howard Hodgkin. It delighted me. I proposed that Reality Studios publish it, and that eventually became The Bay of Naples (1992). It was a beautiful little edition, 300 copies I think, of which 26 were signed and lettered A-Z, each accompanied by a small reproduction of one of the Hodgkin paintings (Wendy knew him, and got his permission). It’s long out of print – but see below. Jeremy Mulford handled the print production and delivered the books to my new Peckham flat. I had a nice talk with him in the Rye Hotel next door.
It was Wendy’s suggestion subsequently, I think, that we amalgamate our publishing operations.
We had had so many intense discussions about poetry and politics. The unthinking sexism of the avant-garde poetry scene bothered her immensely, and it did me too. In 1987 Carcanet published A Various Art, a significant anthology widely seen as the showcase for post-1960s “Cambridge poetry”, though it made no specific claims. It was edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville, her friends and former colleagues. But neither Wendy nor Denise Riley were included in the seventeen-strong roll-call. Neither raised the topic with me, but everybody knew. (The only woman in the roster was Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who was by then dead.)
I was strongly reminded of this ten years later when working with the great American poet Barbara Guest on her Reality Street book If So, Tell Me. She had honed her poetry in New York alongside John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch – she was their equal, I strongly believe – but when the definitive New York Poetry anthology was published her name was mysteriously absent.
Among her other activities – editing the Virago Book of Love Poetry and writing a biography of Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Valentine Ackland, for instance – Wendy was discovering and making connections with women poets in the UK and the US who were writing in new, open ways.
So I readily agreed to her merger suggestion. Reality Studios was my operation; Street Editions hers. The two inevitably became Reality Street Editions. We were pretty much agreed on what sort of poetry we were going to publish together. And that the operation would not be male-dominated. The golden rule, however, was that if one of us didn’t like a book we wouldn’t publish it.
Wendy and I put a bit of our own money into a joint bank account to start the press off – probably about a couple of hundred pounds each. We also paid her artist friend Julia Ball £25 to design the “RSE” logo.
By mutual consent, the first book under the new imprint was Lyric Lyric by Kelvin Corcoran. I had published him in Reality Studios magazine. And Wendy loved his work, having heard him read at CCCP in Cambridge in 1992. I did the design and typesetting on my Macintosh computer (acquired the previous year) and it was printed by The Book Factory in North London. The print run was a slightly ambitious 500 – although it did very well, there are still copies for sale in 2026!
It went on from there. Hard on its heels (all published in 1993) were: Taken Place by Susan Gevirtz (a US west coast writer Wendy had discovered and befriended, associated with How(ever), a magazine of adventurous writing by women); In the House of the Shaman by Maggie O’Sullivan (whose writing I introduced to Wendy); and Mop Mop Georgette by Denise Riley. This latter book turned out to be one of Reality Street’s enduring best sellers, and is I think Denise’s masterpiece.
By now Wendy was migrating from Cambridge to rural Suffolk. I spent several weekends at her holiday cottage in Benhall, near Saxmundham, a village with a church, a golf club but no pub or shop. She eventually sold her Cambridge house, bought a larger cottage in Benhall and became a full-time resident there.
The next couple of years brought Dispossession & Cure by Allen Fisher, T, a small pamphlet by Sarah Kirsch (translated from German by Wendy with Anthony Vivis), Distant Points by Peter Riley, and, most memorably, O’Clock by Fanny Howe. Wendy had urged me to read her work, and I was bowled over by it. I had previously met her sister Susan Howe at Wendy’s house in Cambridge, but for me Fanny was something else. I devoured her novels and poetry, and she became a good friend. Alas, she too is gone (died 2025).
The highlight of this phase of Reality Street Editions’ existence, however, would be the publication of the anthology Out of Everywhere in 1996.
The idea of an anthology of out-there writing by women was one that was in the air. It had occurred to more than one of us. Denise Riley was one who had mentioned the notion but was emphatically disinclined to edit such a thing herself. Wendy too was keen on the idea but likewise unwilling to act as editor. And so, with her consent, I agreed to commission Maggie O’Sullivan. It was as it turns out an inspired choice. Maggie had many useful contacts, including in Canada and the US, and she made a meticulous job of what turned into Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & the UK. A cumbersome title, and at 254 pages our biggest project yet, but what a humdinger of a book it was.
We launched it at the East-West Gallery in Portobello Road, London, a venue we had used before. The February launch was jam-packed. More than that: the audience spilled out onto the street! Ten readers! Whatever else Wendy and I achieved, that release put our joint project on the map.
It was poetry that brought Wendy and me together, but we shared other interests. I was invigorated by her conversation, inspired by her friendliness and kindness, impressed by her intellectual honesty. We shared a sense of humour. We went to galleries. She was probably more visually literate than I. We went to movies, to concerts at the Snape Maltings and in London, enjoying contemporary, classical and baroque pieces, though she didn’t share my passion for jazz and improvised music. I didn’t share her passion for mooching about old churches, but was happy to accompany her. Nor for living in the middle of the countryside either. Politically we were pretty much on the same page. But not completely. I think Wendy disapproved of Futures because I was a male author and it had a female protagonist – though she had agreed to include it in the Reality Street publishing schedule. We argued over cultural appropriation and authenticity.
We holidayed on the Amalfi coast in May 1993, and yes, saw the Bay of Naples. Wendy hosted an exhilarating but exhausting weekend at her cottage for myself and Eric Mottram, during which a discussion turned into an argument and she and I ended up shouting at each other with Eric trying to keep the peace.
And then she started distancing herself from me again. One weekend I was staying at the cottage and on Sunday morning while I was still in bed waking up she called up to me from downstairs that she was off to church and I should make myself breakfast if I liked. Off to church?
I started putting two and two together. The book she wrote with Sarah Maitland about women saints. Her keenness on the spiritual music of Sofia Gubaidulina. An increasing number of books lying around her house about early Christianity. The afterword she’d recently supplied for Out of Everywhere containing several references to God (I’d tried to get her to tone this down). Her discussions with Fanny Howe (temporarily resident in this country) about Fanny’s Catholic faith, which I as a very much lapsed (since my teenage years) Catholic couldn’t really countenance.
I think Wendy was constantly searching for something stable, something to hold on to. A club to belong to. (I’ve always fled from clubs.) With John James it was poetry and socialism, later it was radical feminism, latterly it was Christianity. She told me she was now going to church regularly. And after attending a reading by Jerome Rothenberg with me at the East-West Gallery (November 1994) she confessed to me she was seeking a formal divorce from John James (I didn’t know they were still legally married), as she had fallen in love with the rector of her parish, Noel Bevan, and wanted to marry him. I was thunderstruck. I was also worried for them both. It had shades of Middlemarch.
The wedding took place the following year in Benhall Church. Denise Riley offered to drive me there from London, along with her friend Ewan Smith. We were detained by rough weather and got there soon after the service had started. The rest of the congregation were local people. Noel turned out to be a sweet guy, quite reserved (unusually so for a parish priest) and I got on well with him in the following years on the rare occasions we met.
Wendy started losing interest in Reality Street Editions over the next two or three years. I remember her hosting a lively dinner with me for Cris Cheek and Sianed Jones at her cottage to discuss their upcoming RS book Songs From Navigation (published 1997), which was another new departure: a book incorporating a CD. As usual, I handled the production of the whole thing. She had more active involvement in Nicole Brossard’s Typhon Dru (1997, translated by Caroline Bergvall), which she had commissioned, and even organised a launch reading for it in Cambridge, at Anglia Polytechnic University, which neither Prynne nor any other of the Cambrdge poets attended, much to her annoyance.
Soon after this she declared that she was retiring from small press publishing, and bequeathed me the name of the press and all its belongings. Although her name remained on the literature for some time as “editorial consultant” (and I’d hoped she would continue to advise on and recommend future projects), in fact she took no further part and for the next 20 years I ran the press on my own.
By then my life had changed significantly. In 1997 I’d met Elaine, the love of my life (we are still very much together 30 years later). In January 1998 I took Elaine to meet Wendy and Noel and we all got on excellently. They were intending to come to our wedding in 1999 but Noel was unwell. In 2003 Wendy told me she had converted to Catholicism and she and Noel were now going to different churches on Sunday. A year or two after Elaine and I had migrated from London to Hastings Old Town in 2004 Wendy and Noel visited us there and stayed overnight.
In April 2008 Noel died after a long period of ill health. His funeral was on the same day as that of Andrew Crozier. Over the next few years Wendy stayed with us in Hastings a couple of times. In 2012 she was performing at Black Huts, a poetry and music festival organised by Nicholas Johnson, the publisher of and suddenly, supposing (2002), her beautful volume of Selected Poems. Nick was at that time, coincidentally, a Hastings resident. Also in that gig was none other than John James, and Wendy brought him over to our Old Town house for tea. The following year she returned as part of an Andrew Crozier tribute that Nick had organised.
Wendy’s new partner was Gordon Crosse, a composer of some repute (he is mentioned in the Wikipedia page). Together, they bought a holiday home in Orkney. I never met Gordon, but in July 2022 Wendy messaged me to say he had died. She was living in his Suffolk house (having sold hers) and contemplating having to move out.
She was never comfortable with electronic communications media, and became difficult to reach. In early 2025, having failed to get responses from her, I contacted Rhiannon, who told me her mother had suffered a stroke and had had to spend some time in a care home. She returned to a sheltered flat in Southwold soon after that, but was not able to use communication devices. Various people told me they had been trying to contact her, but I was unable to help them.
The end came in October 2026 when Wendy died after a short illness. I was never able to speak with her again. It was a sad ending but the memories remain.
The Bay of Naples is out of print, and so, it seems, is and suddenly, supposing. But thanks to Ira Lightman who put together a digital version with the Hodgkin paintings embedded next to each poem, you can now read the sequence as never before by downloading this file from her Reality Street page. It’s as beautiful a tribute to her as one could want.
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