VERY SAD NEWS: One of the greats of British poetry Michael Horovitz died this morning. He was 86.
He committed a whole life to promoting verse, particularly work of a personal and radical nature, and his energy in the UK writing community was inspirational.
His principal hero was William Blake, a fellow Londoner, but he was also driven by the new voices of the 1950s US: the Beat writers.
He became a close friend of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and was one of the British poets who appeared at the magnificent International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965 (see picture below).
He was also the founder of New Departures an important journal of literary and art expression at the maverick fringes – Beckett and Burroughs appeared in early issues – and took writers and musicians on the road in a live version of that project.
Later, he devised the Poetry Olympics, a wonderful moveable feast of spoken word and popular music styles – jazz, rock and folk – which appeared in multiple onstage incarnations.
In 2010, I was privileged to make a 75th birthday commemoration of the man for BBC Radio 4. He also appeared in the Ginsberg tribute, Still Howling, we staged in Manchester in 2015.
He spoke to me about his relationship to music of all kinds in an interview for my book Text and Drugs and Rock‘n’Roll: The Beats and Rock Culture, which appeared in 2013.
I last saw him in January 2020, just pre-pandemic, when his unique band the William Blake Klezmatrix appeared at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield.