One year gone: Poet death leaves verse void

Michael Horovitz was a British writer proud to be associated with Beat, but last summer the pulse of a long and fruitful life was sadly stilled. R&BG remembers a words and music wizard

IT IS TWELVE months today since the sad news that poet Michael Horovitz had passed on, a man who had reached the ripe old age of 86 but someone who had retained a tenacious commitment to his art, his cultural mission, deep into his ninth decade.

He sometimes struck me as a British Ginsberg, his Jewish antecedents mingling with an Anglo-European, indeed global, sensibility. But he also came across as a latter-day Blake. Both shared a London base, of course. And he had no qualms at all about being called a British Beat.

I first met Michael back in 1988, when I went to see him read at the Gateway Theatre in Chester with that fine jazz pianist Stan Tracey, a wonderful instrumentalist who had been part of the poet’s magnificent Live New Departures music and verse tours of the 1960s.

Pictured above: Horovitz by David Hockney

Michael, the artistic director of the Gateway Phil Partridge and my partner Jayne Sheridan took off to a modest Indian restaurant but had a fine old time over poppadoms and beer deep into that late Friday night.

After that, I ran into him at various times: at a very early Tate Modern event commemorating Kenneth Patchen, he kindly introduced me to spoken word giant Adrian Mitchell whom I might have seen many times but never really engaged with directly until then.

In late 2008, we both spoke at the launch evening when Kerouac’s incredible On the Road Scroll was unveiled in the UK, at the University of Birmingham, for the very first time. Carolyn Cassady, novelist David Lodge, Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris and poet Libby Houston were also present.

Pictured above: Simon Warner, Michael Horovitz and Jim Canary, curator of the Kerouac On the Road Scroll, at the Birmingham, UK, exhibition launch in 2008

Two years later, I had the challenge of making The Poetry Olympian, a 75th anniversary tribute to the poet for BBC Radio 4. In the bitter cold of mid-winter, in Michael’s always chaotic Notting Hill flat, we taped a long interview with the writer. He could be a little cantankerous, a somewhat obdurate at times, and that was such an evening.

Five years on, we attended Michael’s 80th birthday commemoration in the Soho branch of Pizza Express with its legendary jazz performance space. Bobby Wellins, the acclaimed Scots saxophonist (and another Live New Departures player) with whom Jayne and I had worked on his northern gigs in the 1990s, was a standout contributor.

A few months on, Michael read at an event in Manchester I had co-organised with artist Roger Bygott to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the premiere reading of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. Still Howling was also attended by the US poet’s guitarist Steven Taylor, the celebrated Beat historian Barry Miles and Peter Hale of the New York Ginsberg Project.

I last had a chance to see and talk with Michael when he brought his William Blake Klezmatrix Band to the wonderful Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield very early in 2020. He was in fine fettle, engaging with his highly capable group and particularly Vanessa Vie, his partner in later days.

One thing was always the case with Michael Horovitz – he was an ardent propagandist for the crossover of sound and words, music and literature. His live Poetry Olympics production ran for decades and he befriended McCartney and Weller and Albarn, Elisa Carthy and Linton Kwesi Johnson, as part of his lifelong aim to blend rock and jazz and reggae and folk with rhymes snd stanzas.

His declining weeks after a fall in spring 2021 led to its inevitable outcome. But his wiry frailty, which he carried off with committed panache, possessed hidden power and never denied his energy and verve nor his constant determination to break down the petrified pillars of the artistic establishment and bring into play voices of all styles and creeds, classes and colours, in his free ranging panoply of poetical activism. His influence on and presence in the capital’s alternative arts community will be long missed. Truly a Beat indeed.

Note: See also various articles in Rock and the Beat Generation – ‘Farewell child of Albion’, July 8th, 2021; ‘Tributes to Michael Horovitz’, July 16th, 2021; and ‘Horovitz recalled as songbird flies’, November 18th, 2021. Plus my obituary in the New European, July 10th, 2021.