‘Fake Haiku for Michael Horovitz’
Jewish chronicles/The shifting bands/Let’s face the poetry and dance
SW
FOLLOWING poet Michael Horovitz’s very recent death, I was using voice recognition to search for the Albert Hall International Poetry Incarnation of 1965. My mobile device helpfully heard my voice as ‘International Pipedream Coronation’. Horovitz, a British Beat if there ever was one, would have liked that and Allen Ginsberg, his good friend, too.
Horovitz, who was 86, took particular pleasure in bringing poetry to music and music to poetry. He appeared with many jazz players, perhaps most famously the band he forged with pianist Stan Tracey and saxophonist Bobby Wellins in the 1960s.
In fact, I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that Horovitz would have liked to have been a horn player. After all, he invented his own musical device, the anglo-saxophone, a kind of bebop kazoo. He played it to accompany his poetry; he also drew on the improvised instrument in his live sessions with the William Blake Klezmatrix Band.
These extemporised trills and thrills, colours and cadences, he brought to his verse and his group were amusing but also charming in their deliberately naive way. They reminded us that Horovitz was very much in the performance poetry tradition. Words were great; sounds amplified and extended the experience full the performer and the listener.
Poetry and performance ran through the Horovitz clan. His wife Frances, who died in 1983, was a published writer, and their son Adam has maintained the tradition. His partner in later years Vanessa Vie used verse and song on stage, too.
I used to think of Michael Horovitz as being something akin to the English Allen Ginsberg: Jewish, poet, energetic organiser and rallying point for his artistic community. But I am now beginning to wonder if Horovitz was actually a latterday Blake: versifier, painter, philosopher and Londoner.
In the days since the poet passed on, I’ve been inviting tributes from those who knew him or have written about him or just liked his work and style. We include a selection below…
Roger Bygott, artist and co-producer of Still Howling, 2015:
Poetry Reincarnation at the Roundhouse, May 2015
‘In the bar, after the show, I join Michael Horovitz, Vanessa Vie and Gwyneth Herbert. Vanessa is speaking about her love of the pagan roots of Britain, Blake, the bardic tradition. She has a circle of fresh flowers in her hair. She says Michael is her mentor and inspiration. It's getting towards 1.30am, people are drifting away. Suddenly, Gwyneth launches into an incredible improvised rejoicing of Michael. It flows out with spontaneous joy and passion. Michael is beaming, smiling and taking it all in. He looks so happy. We laugh and I find myself with tears trickling from the corners of my eyes, not just the joy of the occasion but through being moved by such a heartfelt waterfall of love. It seems like she continues for five minutes, but time has melted really, in a bubble of condensed poetic heart-pouring. A pause. I lean on Michael's shoulder and say to Gwyneth ‘You are breaking my heart open’. She takes me in and continues her improvised appreciation including me in the flow, 'I don’t even know who you are, and it doesn’t even matter….' Michael stands, radiant. Just a hand full of people left, maybe 10 or so. The security man asks us to leave, again. Gwyneth says she is ‘violently happy’. One final time we are urged into the night. Michael checks where I’m staying. Hugs all round. I float back up Chalk Farm road to lie in bed. Unable to sleep.’
Jayne Sheridan, writer and arts publicist:
‘Michael Horovitz was rather a socialite to his surprise! He knew he was probably a Socialist. Both he and that other great fun, mid-20th century wit, writer and bon viveur, George Melly, were both brilliantly amusing and full of empathy. I’d known them, before being part of the Dean Clough 80s/90s Arts set, when I met them again with Ernest Hall, Simon Warner, Doug Binder, et al. Happy days, indeed.’
A. Robert ‘Bob’ Lee, Beat Generation academic:
‘Through the literary-countercultural Sixties and into the present century Michael Horovitz was nothing if not a player. Was he not the UK’s own Beat luminary, lauded by Ginsberg as “Cockney, Albionic, New Jerusalem, Jazz Generation. Sensitive, Bard”? Snapshots come readily to mind. The German-Jewish roots. Oxford. His lifelong obsession with Blake. Editorship of the journal New Departures and the pioneer Penguin anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969). Collections like Bank Holiday (1967) and Wordsounds and Sightlines (1994). The poetry and jazz sessions with Stan Tracey and others. That is not to overlook the painter and broadcaster. Nor the CND veteran. Hid death is a genuine loss, that of a singular creative presence.
I should add a personal note. Towards the end of my university teaching in Japan, fourteen years in all, a letter came from Michael asking about gigs, readings, a possible tour. Inevitably, and as Oliver Harris mentions, he asked about payment – fondly imagining, I have to think, that he would be showered with yen. He mentioned Anne Waldman, a shared friend, as one connection, plus his remembrance that Ginsberg had been in and out of Japan on a number of occasions. I couldn’t get funds for his travel but took soundings with writers like Kazuko Shiraishi (“the Allen Ginsberg of Japan” in a well-known phrase) for this or that platform. These I passed his way but then heard no more from him. Illness or maybe a closed door from the British Council had intervened. A pity in all ways as Poetry-and-Jazz remains a staple in Japanese art circles especially Tokyo and Yokohama. Maybe the memory of his part in the Royal Albert Hall “Wholly Communion” occasion in 1965 will have to suffice. I’m old enough, such the clock, to have been there.’
Peter Everett, BBC radio producer, poetry programmes:
‘Michael must have been quite young when I first read some of his work in a little Penguin paperback called (I think) Jazz Poetry. I remember that it also had poems by Ferlinghetti, Corso and Adrian Mitchell. It lived in my pocket (the title facing outwards in the vain hope that it would intrigue an available girl) for many weeks. I can now find no trace of it on the internet, but it was in itself my mid-sixties equivalent of the internet – a thirst-quenching well of hitherto unimagined voices that were not the voices of pop singers, broadcasters, teachers, relatives, neighbours or schoolmates. It belonged with my Woody Guthrie records and my books by Paul Oliver, Nat Hentoff and Aldous Huxley. Many decades later I phoned Michael to ask him whether he’d like to talk on the radio about William Blake. It was a lively conversation involving some tricky footwork - a bit like talking to Spike Milligan, I remember thinking. In the end the interview didn’t happen, so I never met Horovitz face to face. I do regret that.’
Jim Burns, poet, editor and essayist:
‘My first sighting of Michael Horovitz was in the early-1960s when I watched a performance by the New Departures group – Horovitz and Pete Brown with jazz backing – at the Students’ Union, Manchester University. I have to admit that one of the reasons I’d gone along to the concert was because of the presence of Laurie Morgan, the drummer with the jazz group. He was something of a legendary figure who had been one of the early British beboppers in the late-1940s. But I was also interested in what the poets were doing. A newspaper cutting I kept dates the concert as Wednesday, May 22nd, 1963.
I knew about Horovitz before that. I’d seen his poems here and there in little magazines and picked up copies of the early issues of New Departures. A little later, I was in the audience at the Albert Hall event in 1965 when Horovitz was on stage with Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Coro, and others. And I got to meet him in person in the same year when I took part in a reading at the ICA in London to launch the “New British Poetry” issue of Poetmeat, edited by Dave Cunliffe who also died earlier in 2021.
Our paths crossed in bookshops, at readings, and in pubs, though I don’t recall him as much of a drinker, unlike other poets I knew. I reviewed his books in Tribune and Ambit, and we corresponded when he used some poems of mine in the 1969 Children of Albion anthology. We also met when I gave a talk, and he read some of Kenneth Patchen’s poems, at a celebration of the work of the American poet at Tate Modern in July, 2000.
He would get in touch over the years whenever he had a new publication to promote. And I would hear about him on the poetry grapevine. He was a livewire, to be sure, and did a lot to publicise poetry, particularly of the performance type he favoured.’
Steven Taylor, writer, educator and Allen Ginsberg’s guitarist:
‘Michael was among the last of a transatlantic crew of indefatigable poet scholar artists for whom poetry was an all-consuming mission. Now that Moloch is finally triumphant, it is hard to imagine that for a few decades in the 20th century, barding was a viable if under-compensated profession. I met him in London in 1978 on the first of many European tours with Allen Ginsberg. Whenever we were in England, we had the pleasure of his company. I last saw him in 2015 at the Still Howling event at the Wonder Inn in Manchester celebrating the 60th anniversary of the first reading of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, organised by Simon Warner. Michael was 80 years old and as energetic as ever. A bright light has gone from the planet. Sing on in the starry vast, o bard.’
Oliver Harris, author, lecturer and William Burroughs specialist:
RSVP promptissimo!
‘I had the great good fortune to run into Michael a few times over the past two decades – at events in Birmingham, London and Manchester – and to savour his warmth in person and his high energy writing in lively email exchanges. Almost always he was “infernally busy” when he wrote and would almost always ask for two things: a rapid reply (“RSVP promptissimo”!) and a paying gig. The money hustle was so up front it never once rankled, and of course it was in service of his passion for spreading his passion for poetry – which he did on a grand scale for years. His only regret, he once told me, was that “I did not live a healthier life over the preceding 7-8 decades” so that he could do more for longer.
Michael’s artistic output and involvement in poetry and music scenes was enormous and varied and my own point of intersection with him was the exact opposite. My interest was in the minutiae of how he came to publish early pieces of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in the particular form they took in his magazine, New Departures back in 1959. I insist on this not because of its unexpected importance – or at least, its importance for me, in my quest to map the genesis of Burroughs’ work – but because it revealed a side of Michael that may be overlooked beneath the headlines: he was a Blakean visionary, a passionate radical, a noisy promoter, an inspirational phenomenon, but he was also interested in the details and in patiently getting them right. He wanted it now, but he wanted it done properly. RSVP promptissimo!’
Dearest Michael friend of my heart since the mid 1960’s - I don’t know how our friendship began . Probably while I was staying with John Michel in Powis Terrace .I do remember when Ginsberg ,Orlovsky and Corso came to London / you arranged readings for them everywhere , including London University . I ended up going with them to Amsterdam. Then the Royal Court readings you and Heathcote Williams upstairs , packed . Later you invited me to come photograph your readings with Stan Stacey at the Riverside Theatre . Always so joyful. Is there any poet of your own or younger generations that you did not first publish first in New Departures ? How devoted you were to all poets in your orbit . All those years always encouraging everyone . Art shows too .Gatherings at The Chelsea Arts Club . Sharing everything . Living Blake’s vision . Your searing vision , your great kindness .