Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze · the Jamaican­ American poet died in August at the age of sixty-five. We will publish a celebration of her by SuAndi in PNR 262. Her British publisher, Bloodaxe, describe her in these terms: ‘Jean’s performances were so powerful that she was called “a one-woman festival”, a testament also to the way in which she fully embodied the characters she brought to life in her poems, male as well as female.’

Jaan Kaplinski · one of Estonia’s outstanding poets and cultural figures died in August at the age of eighty-one. Born in Tartu shortly after the Soviet Union annexed Estonia, to an Estonian mother and a Polish-Jewish father, he described the repression, fear and poverty in which he grew up. His father starved to death in a Soviet labour camp, having been a professor of philology at the University of Tartu. Jaan became a student and then a scholar of Romance languages and linguistics. He lectured on the History of Western Civilisation at Tartu and studied Mahayana Buddhism and philosophies of the Far East. He published collections of poetry and essays in Estonian, Finnish and English, and in more recent years he wrote Russian, also, producing a collection of poems in 2014. His work has been widely translated. Gary Snyder said, ‘he is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward, fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes scare you.’ His British publishers include Bloodaxe who in 2004 published Evening Brings Everything Back and Selected Poems (2011).

Esmail Khoi · the exiled Iranian poet who lived in the United Kingdom and upheld the tradition of the great Persian writers of the middle ages died in London in June at the age of eighty-two. He lived to regret his support for the Islamic Revolution (he had opposed the Shah and came to oppose the theocratic repression in Iran).

Givi Alkhazishvili · the celebrated Georgian poet died in August at the age of seventy-seven. He was known as an experimenter with different poetic forms and as a teacher of Georgian literature, writing about its traditions and about literature in translation. He also worked as an editor and publisher.

Michael Horovitz  . Colin Still writes: I first encountered Michael Horovitz when I was in my teens, at a reading at St Pancras Town Hall, when he read alongside Christopher Logue and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I was struck by his confident presence, his cultured accent, and (as I recall) his red velvet jacket. The poems were political, focused (again, as I recall) on issues like nuclear disarmament, though shot through with a Goon Show-like humour. As a souvenir of the event I bought a copy of a recently published issue of his magazine New Departures. This was the double issue, numbers 2/3, which featured the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Eugene Ionesco, but also names which were then unfamiliar to me, like John Cage, Raymond Queneau and Robert Creeley: signposts, as it turned out, to directions which I’d follow for the rest of my life.

Michael William (Yechiel Ha-Levi) Horovitz was born in Frankfurt in 1936, the tenth child of orthodox Jewish parents, who fled to England when Michael was two. He was brought up in strict orthodoxy, which, to the despair of his father, he found increasingly antipathetic. ‘I saw tears in his eyes,’ he told me when I was filming him. ‘He would say, in German, “You’ve got this quick understanding, you are so bright, and yet you’re squandering it away. You just make fun, you’re supposed to be serious”. He was just desolated that any son of his should be so frivolous and superficial and secular.’



At eighteen, Michael went up to Oxford to read English. It was there that he developed what was to be a lifelong passion for jazz and began seriously to write poetry (though ‘seriously’ is perhaps the wrong word when it comes to Michael’s writing). As a student he was particularly drawn to the work of William Blake, on which he had plans, which he later abandoned, to write a PhD. After Oxford he returned to London, beginning what was to be a lifelong, hand-to-mouth, existence as a man of letters, putting his seemingly limitless energies into New Departures, which he founded in 1959, managing from the start to get contributions from such major figures as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs. In tandem with the magazine he ran Live New Departures, a series of often haphazard events involving poets, comedians and jazz musicians, among them the pianist Stan Tracey and the blues singer/lyricist Pete Brown, both of whom would perform with him for decades. It was Michael’s delight to join the musicians on stage, playing his ‘anglo-saxophone’, a kazoo which he had modified with cardboard, cowhorn and gaffer tape to create an instrument reminiscent of the shofar, the ramshorn of Jewish ritual.

An event with which Michael was associated, and about which he was constantly being interviewed, was the International Poetry Incarnation, an all-star reading which took place at The Royal Albert Hall on 11 June 1965. Hastily organised, to take advantage of the presence in London of Allen Ginsberg, it proved to be a legendary event, attended by 7,000 people and featuring, among others, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Christopher Logue, Andrei Voznesensky and Adrian Mitchell. Mitchell read ‘To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam)’, and Michael a section of his anti-war poem ‘For Modern Man’. The event was recorded by the film-maker Peter Whitehead, and released under the title ‘Wholly Communion’.

In the years that followed Michael and Allen maintained a strong friendship. Something which they had in common was a love of William Blake, and each in his distinctive way began to sing Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Michael with an ensemble which he called The William Blake Klezmatrix Band, a group which had at its core trombonist Annie Whitehead and keyboard player Peter Lemer, with Michael himself singing and performing on kazoo, one of their first public performances being in the Raphael Court at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

One of Michael’s most attractive qualities was his almost infinite range of interests and his ability to recruit others, including in his endeavours the likes of Paul McCartney, Kylie Minogue, Lol Coxhill, Paul Weller, Damon Albarn, David Hockney, Peter Blake, John Hegley & the cellist Ayanna Witter-Johnson. Always one to promote the work of other people, Michael edited two important anthologies, Children of Albion, published by Penguin in 1969, and a second volume, Grandchildren of Albion. Though Michael liked to be regarded as a Beat writer and rejoiced in his links with Ginsberg, the scope of the anthologies, like that of Live New Departures, was remarkably catholic, featuring writers as diverse as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Edwin Morgan, Andrew Crozier, Sujata Bhatt, Billy Bragg and John Agard.

Whilst essentially a metropolitan figure – he spent most of his life in Notting Hill – he lived for some years in rural Gloucestershire, where he was married to the poet Frances Horovitz, mother of his son Adam, now an established poet. Recalling the years he spent with Frances, who died in 1983, Michael wrote an uncharacteristically lyrical rural elegy called A Midsummer Morning’s Jog Log.

At the approach of the Millennium Michael produced a 464-page volume called The New Wasteland: Timeship Earth at Nillennium, a diatribe against the effects of the Thatcher years, the mendacity of the press, the failure of New Labour, the military interventions in the Middle East and, as he put it, ‘the suicidal commercial triumphalism promoted by the arms, nuclear, advertising and war industries’. This passionately conceived volume, half of which was in the form of notes in support of its arguments, incorporated a great mass of artworks, political cartoons & newspaper articles, and was the result of an enormous amount of research. With good reason, Horovitz the Pacifist regarded this book, sprawling and uneven though it might seem, as his magnum opus.

Over the years he became increasingly recognised: he was awarded an OBE, in 2010 he contested the chair of Oxford Professor of Poetry, which he lost (perhaps as well) to Geoffrey Hill, and he was often to be heard on the radio, on programmes such as Private Passions and Great Lives, when he chose to discuss the life of Allen Ginsberg.

As he got older, Michael, never a conformist, became more and more eccentric. Dressed in ‘flower power’ shirts and wearing the floppy, rose-patterned peak cap that became his trademark, he could be seen at every event, dragging a pull-along case full of merchandise: his POP, POW, POM and POT anthologies, which he would as often as not give away free of charge. An inveterate hoarder, his flat became full of papers, not just his own archives, but old newspapers, magazines and flyers, stacked several feet high, with the result that to cross the room one had to negotiate a zigzag series of trench-like passages. Diabetic in later years, he nevertheless became the beneficiary of a local pastry cook who would supply him each day with unsold cream cakes, which for Michael became a kind of personal currency which he would pass on to his friends. A scarcely concealed secret was that it was Michael who, from time to time, contributed the appalling verses of E.J. Thribb (aged 17 ½) to Private Eye…

In 2012 his life took an unexpected turn when he formed a relationship with Vanessa Vie, a Spanish painter, singer and lyricist, almost forty years his junior. For a decade they performed together, with evident pleasure in each other’s company, singing a combination of Blake songs and Vanessa’s own playful words. This was a genuinely symbiotic relationship, on a personal as well as a musical level. Vanessa was a great source of support in Michael’s later years, as his health declined. He died on 7 July, aged eighty-six. His funeral was held, on a scorchingly hot day, in Kensal Green Cemetery, a part secular, part religious event, attended by more than a hundred friends and fellow artists and conducted by a rabbi. Following spoken tributes by Michael’s son Adam and by John Agard, Vanessa bade farewell to him, not with words, but with a protracted and achingly poignant lament, sounded, most appropriately, on Michael’s kazoo, his shofar.