By Amy Fleming
From Issue 20, November 2016
Not far from Stroud, a few miles beyond Slad, is a relatively remote nook, known as The Scrubs. One Guy Fawkes’ Night in the late 1970s, the ground thick with sodden leaves, five bards stood here in the dark, huddled around the back end of their hired van.
Tom Pickard, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were due at a poetry reading in town, but had got stuck in the steep valley where their hosts - fellow poets Frances and Michael Horovitz - lived. Orlovsky was Ginsberg's long-term partner, often referred to as "Ginsberg's wife, or husband," recalls Michael Horovitz. "A solid, heavyweight chap," he continues, "which came in handy when we had trouble getting the van to go up the hill again".
Horovitz had started publishing works by Beat poets, also including Jack Kerouac, William Boroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, after launching the periodical New Departures in 1959 - his final year as a literature student at Oxford. During the 1970s, he toured the US often, where he and Ginsberg used to sing William Blake poems together. Horovitz has also been a driving force behind performance poetry for over 50 years, from his role in helping to gather an audience of 8000 to the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 (Ginsberg headlined), to over 35 years of Poetry Olympics events, up and down the country. Notable Olympians include John Hegley, John Cooper Clarke, Benjamin Zephaniah and Damon Albarn.
Musical collaborations have been many, including a recording in 2013 of his poem Ballade of the Nocturnal Commune, accompanied by Albarn, Graham Coxon and Paul Weller, which sold out on Record Store Day that year. The ballade was a rural rhapsody he had written many years before, at the family cottage in The Scrubs.
The Horovitzes moved to, what Michael describes as their "wild offshoot of the Slad valley," when their son Adam (who still lives and writes in Stroud) was a baby. The cottage was an idyllic antidote to the congestion of London, with stunning views. "On a clear day," he says, "the postman used to say, 'I can see them having breakfast in Slad today'." The first decade of living there, he says, was "Frances' happiest, but more or less her last decade."
When it came to poetry, he says Frances was "kind of a purist," whereas he was "very much a jazz poet and performance poet. We were creative counterweights to each other." She died of cancer in 1983. "We had so much joy and then so much misery and despair, missing her," he says.
Phase two, in the cottage, saw Horovitz, "trying to be a good dad and make up for Fran's absence and get Adam through GSCEs and A levels." In spite of their loss, they managed to have quite a good time, he recalls, discussing books, going for walks and "playing hand tennis across the dry stone wall."
Michael Horovitz at the Royal Albert Hall, 1965
Horovitz lives in London, now, but he will return to perform in November at the Stroud Book Festival. "There were always a lot of artists and poets around Stroud, as there still are," he says. "We did a lot of gigs that drew big audiences around here, so I'm hoping this book festival will do the same." He and Frances, he says, "pioneered literary festivals and particularly sundry overlaps between different art media." However, he is distressed that most "so-called art and literature festivals" these days, seem mainly to be concerned with booking best-selling stars, and making money, rendering them "pretty predictable and often downright boring."
That's not to say that some of the stars aren't authentic, but the scene has become too commercial. "My whole stance on society and art is very much with William Blake," says Horovitz. "Ignore commerce and hype and corruption, and instead stick to what we know matters, which is doing the best work we can and moving society away from greed, bad behaviour, intolerance and violence. As Blake put it, 'where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on.'"
2007 saw the publication of a 500-page book by Horovitz, called A New Wasteland: Timeship Earth at Nillennium (the title, a reference to T S Eliot's The Waste Land), bemoaning, he says, “ruthless mega-marketing, the degradation of arms manufacture, trading and wielding on the part of political bleeders such as Bush, Clinton, Blair, Putin and Trump, sucking up to corporations and plutocrats, and telling everyone they've got to compete like mad to get to the top of the pile – which ignores everybody except those at the top of the pyramid, which of course crushes the majority." A sad state of affairs, but on the other hand, he says, "it seems to me that Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott and Caroline Lucas and other such idealists keep the faith, and many poets and artists worldwide are concerned with continuing the resistance movement against these monstrous extremes of homo rapiens."
At his upcoming Stroud performance, Horovitz will read from his 1986 poem, Midsummer Morning Jog Log. "It's ostensibly a memoir of jogging round the valley," he says. All 679 lines of it were published in a hand-printed booklet, with delicate nature drawings by Peter Blake and a posthumous dedication at the front to Frances.
Horovitz will perform, as he often does now, with his partner of the last four years, the singer-songwriter-guitarist Vanessa Vie. "She grew up in Northern Spain," he says, "but she's been in England the last 15 years. We are doing a lot together as a duo." A CD is in the works. "We'll be performing our settings of some Blake songs, including ones where we get audiences to join in. Blake's Laughing Song, for instance, which has refrains where everyone chants Ha Ha Hee, to lighten things up.”
Michael will be appearing with Vanessa Vie at the Subscription Rooms on Saturday 19th Nov for an evening of music, song poems and other word sounds. Visit stroudartsfestival.org for tickets and further info.
Amy Fleming is a writer and editor for the Guardian, who also contributes to Intelligent Life, the FT, Vogue, Newsweek, New Scientist and more.
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