Without Contraries, There is No Progression

Michael Horovitz, 1935-2021

“Indoor skip it may seem to you, but compared to Francis Bacon’s studio, my pad here is Versailles.”

This is an expanded and updated version of a post I wrote in my blog Baroque in Hackney on 16 June, 2010.

The big daddy of the British Beat movement, co-organiser of 1965's legendary Poetry Internationale at the Albert Hall and founder of the Poetry Olympics is making the scene. He is the editor of Children of Albion, the influential Sixties underground verse collection, publisher of New Departures anthologies since 1959, husband of the late, renowned poetry reader Frances, father of another poet, Adam, and friend of every cat from Damon Albarn and Samuel Beckett to Patti and Stevie Smith. Now he is knocking on donsville's door.

So: here we are on Bloomsday, with two days to go before the Oxford Poetry Professorship is announced. Today’s the big vote. (Are you eligible? Have you registered?) And this time, Michael Horovitz is in town. The Evening Standard, of all places, has a wonderful article about Horovitz (quoted above) on its website. This article does more than anything has done so far to convince me (not that I needed convincing) that his candidacy is a great thing.

First of all, yes, Geoffrey Hill has ‘Oxford Professor’ written all over him. He is clearly the favourite, the rightful heir, the man for whom even the idea of the post might have been invented. He has an important body of work which has, in some cases, helped to stretch and define current poetry. He has the considerable personal gravitas he was no doubt born with, and then some; he is academic and erudite and serious and politically, historically, linguistically irrefutable. He takes the long view. He has had, and maybe even has now, a Poetry Beard. He will give serious lectures which we will all have to read when they come out.

But poetry. Poetry itself. POETRY. What is it? What’s it for? I mean, why do we LOVE it so?

There’s the question of the old slow-dying Poetry Wars, when we could have peace, or, as they currently say in America, a ‘post-division era’. (What fun that sounds.) There’s a general regard of tediousness these days given the Beats (mostly the idea of them; everybody still reads Bukowski): their arrogance, what would now be called privilege, and casual sexism, the tiredness of the trope; but then there’s a kind of freshness creeping back into it, as we move further and further into a terrfyingly smooth, corporatised world of targets, ‘readers’ choices’, and what Horovitz himself calls ‘the Enter-Prize culture’; and (I’m editing in, now) now, in 2021, they do seem to be enjoying a revival. There’s the gigantic corpse of the sixties — now known as The Boomers — that we all have to step around the whole time, as it’s taking up most of our living room floor. Though Michael was a pre-boomer. In fact, he was a refugee from Hitler, aged 5, and had to get through primary school in wartime as not only a German, but as a Jew, and accordingly developed the nickname Michael Horrorfists. Yes.

And then — because poetry like everything else follows fashions — there’s the big question of the meaning of it all. When I was growing up in the US, where The Movement of the 1940s and 50s wasn’t really such a big thing, grownups around me were reading these books, and books by people like Kenneth Patchen and so on. One of the first things I ever knew about Allen Ginsberg was about Blake, and about his love of the Metaphysicals. The snobbery at play in the Oxford Professorship hoohah is essentially about who gets to own poetry, what is regarded as ‘knowledge’, and even ‘what is a poet’. It’s not about what you know, or how much you know, or have to say, about poetry.

Let’s take the long view. If we look at poetry as a centuries-old, millennia-old art form, there’s no reason why any of it should ever be the same, or even attempt to fulfil the same purpose, as any other bit of it. Horovitz wrote in the Guardian, citing a spectacularly non-hippy advocate: ‘I only hope that, should I become Professor, I will live up to the confidence my spontaneous extra-mural nominators have volunteered – as for instance A N Wilson’s belief that I am “…someone who will thrill audiences and reawaken them to what poetry actually IS, why it has always been of central importance to us collectively as human beings and how it can go on being important even in the present philistine broken-up society”.’

Re-awaken! Thrill! There’s the real thrill (yes) of watching Peter Whitehead’s film about the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965, Wholly Communion, which has been reissued by the good old BFI… N.b., it is also on Youtube as I write. Here:

I don’t care what you say. I LOVE this film. Adrian Mitchell is also just tremendous; actually, they all are. Michael beautiful, Harry Fainlight troubling and beautiful, Christopher Logue wonderful, and even Allen Ginsberg, at the beginning… The whole thing, youthful male arrogance, cigarette smoke, sexual politics and all, is just humbling: we should be so superior to a generation that could fill the Royal Albert Hall, for poetry! Seven thousand people! )

Back to our candidate. He is correct to question our current obsession with the ‘Enter-Prize’ culture. He is correct to question hierarchies — ‘there might be a mute and inglorious Milton living next door, so how can we say what’s best?’ He is correct to hark back to another role poets used to play, outside the academy, and before poetry was even academicised. Finally, there is tremendous seriousness and dignity in his reason for joining the fray:

I was persuaded after a couple of candidates seemed to be almost boasting that they weren’t poets, and as I’m a different sort of poet and communicator from Hill, I thought it would be in the public interest to have a dialogue — because, to quote Blake, ‘Without contraries, there is no progression’

Well. There we are. Not many contemporary poets these days quote Blake. No, really. You don’t hear that very often. The often don’t quote anyone much from before the twentieth century, except maybe the Romantics, or else Donne. Reading is generally a bit narrow, it seems to me. In a piece in the Guardian, Horovitz made a plain manifesto, & radically based it on the wider meanings what we think ‘poetry’ is.

If ‘by a fluke’ he were elected, Horovitz said he would look to open discussions about poetry up to everything which is ‘broadly poetic’, from pop music to rap and rock'n'roll, showing the overlap between poetry and music as well as the visual arts, with plans to work with Oxford's Ruskin art school and to ‘bring the people of the town and gown together at events and exhibitions and manifestations’. ‘I want to show the arts are deadly serious but also tremendous fun’, he said. ‘I would hope to shake things up – not in a negative, destructive way but in a truly Shakespearean way, restoring the authority of poetry in one of the great centres of culture ... My hope with everything I do is to try and bring audiences and poetry together.

He never was the Oxford Professor, of course. In the next round of ‘elections’, Oxford University changed the rules and implemented an upper age limit of 69 for the role just days after Michael announced his intention to stand again; it was almost universally understood in the poetry world that it more or less deliberately thwarted another Horovitzian attempt on its dreaming ramparts. He wrote an elegant and extremely dignified letter to the Guardian:

Having recently put myself forward as a potential candidate for the forthcoming Oxford poetry professorship election, I am gobsmacked to discover that this venerable university has pulled a drawbridge up against anyone older than 69 qualifying for such a long-memoried position. […]

Poets tend to resist institutionalisation and rarely if ever retire. Good poetry itself is, as Ezra Pound declared, “news that stays news”. To rule out the potential contributions of numerous older poets who may want to apply in years to come, at a point in life when they will be likely to have achieved a considerable knowledge of poetic arts and crafts, seems not just unfair, but wilfully to defy administrative logic. […]

Let us revive due practical esteem for the likes of Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford, for “… al that he myghte of his freendes hente, / On bookes and on lernynge he it spente … / Sownynge in moral vertue was his speche / And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche”.

I would have looked forward to those lectures. They would have been rambling, and cranky, and they would no doubt have included performances on his anglo-saxophone, and they might have introduced a new generation of scholars to the work of Kenneth Patchen, for example, and some of those long, mad bits of Blake that nobody really reads. They’d have had a lot of joy in them.

They might have included the old anecdote about Leigh Hunt, editor of the London Magazine and gentleman-about-town of letters, who tramped the fields of Hampstead and down into Poland St, Soho, to visit Mr Blake. Arriving at about 2pm, he climbed the stairs, knocked, waited; just as he was turning to go, the poet finally came to the door wearing a filthy, reeking, stained dressing gown, delivered a barrage of abuse — his wife Catherine clearly visible in the bed behind him, also swearing at Leigh Hunt — and threw him out.

Another poet, Stephen Dunn (who died only last month), in his essay ‘Art & Sincerity’, quotes Schiller: ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense a human being, and he is only a human being when he plays’. Michael Horovitz never stopped playing, in that utterly serious way children play. His always-to-the-point word play. His refusal to see things the way you were ‘supposed to’. His anglo-saxophone and the William Blake Klezmatrix Band. His poetic tirades and pastoral dreams, his visual artworks, his outfits, his restless energy. And he had the most dazzling, beautiful smile.

A few years ago, my friend the poet Robert Archambeau reported something his own artist dad, in hospital at an advanced age, had said (I’m quoting from memory): ‘There is no situation so terrible that once cannot turn from it and make art’. This comes back to me often, especially in times like this past year when I can barely write. And it typifies Michael Horovitz, too — his energy was incredible, even in recent years as he grew older and frankly quite frail. Still going out gigging until the pandemic hit. Here’s a YouTube video he recorded during the first lockdown.

Dunn also says: ‘Serious poets must be magicians’. And this magic, which came through play, and is the most serious thing in the world to any artist, was what drove Michael Horovitz. It’s everywhere if you can see it. If someone had gone to Michael and told them that, Blake-like, they had seen an angel in a tree, he would have believed them and taken it seriously.

In fact, speaking of angels in trees, for several years I had an annual gig, staying in a 300-year-old farmhouse in the Slad Valley, in Laurie Lee country, where I’d spend a week doing creative writing workshops with pupils from a secondary school in Gloucester. One perk of this adventure was that the house is a four-minute walk down a path from another cottage nestled into the hillside, in which Michael’s son Adam, also a poet and a good friend of mine, grew up and now lives. The house where I stayed is now a holiday home, and it has a little gazebo outside; in the mornings I’d sit out there with my coffee before the kids arrived, in the dewy mist, listening to the birds waking up. I began to notice that I was also hearing a persistent tap-tap-tap sound. It was the sound of someone typing, up in the attic of the house. This wasn’t very comfortable, because the house has a reputation for being very haunted. Eventually, in the second or third year, I mentioned it to Adam. ‘Oh’, he said. ‘That’s the blackbirds. They learned to do it from Michael, when he used to sit in our attic writing for hours on his typewriter. They’ve passed it on, down the years — it’s a distinctive Slad Valley blackbird sound’.

Those weeks ended when the headteacher retired, and one of the things I miss most is those blackbirds, that even now will still copy Michael Horovitz typing. It must be over a century in blackbird time.

For the past several days I keep getting a recurring image. It’s from another annual event, the Free Verse Poetry Book Fair in London, a few years ago. The New Departures stand was just to the right of the main door as you went in, and Michael was manning it with Adam. I had just arrived and went to say hello, and Michael was talking to someone else; I had a chat with Adam and then said I’d go circulate, and come back in a bit. Michael broke off his conversation to offer me an apple out of a plastic bag on the table: a perfect, shiny, red apple, like the one in Snow White, or the Garden of Eden. Either way, it was the perfect apple, the one everyone wants. But it was a book fair, and I demurred. Michael held it out, he just had to give you something: ‘No, take it, you can always do with an apple!’

At the time of writing there’s a long and comprehensive obituary in the Telegraph, containing all the kinds of information I’ve left out.

This is a free post. Events of the week have postponed the second half of the personal essay I started last week, but it’ll be up soon. If you’d like to be able to read the rest of that, and other exclusive content, please consider taking out a paid subscription.