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In this article, written in his signature style, Michael Horovitz reflects on his longstanding fascination with William Blake. He recalls how the spirit of Blake loomed large at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in the summer of 1965, where his fellow travellers, among them Adrian Mitchell, were driven by the nineteenth-century poet. Horovitz recounts the ways that Blake has continued to inform his artistic practices, which cut across from poetry to music and visual art.
This article considers the use made of William Blake by a range of writers associated with the ‘countercultural’ milieu of the 1960s, particularly those linked to its London-based literary context. Iain Sinclair is offered as a writer who, in his appreciation of Blake, stands apart from the poets linked to the anthology, Children of Albion (1969). The article unpacks this distinction, analysing Sinclair’s ‘topographic’ take in comparison to the ‘visionary’ mode of his contemporaries. Having established this dualism, the argument then questions the nature of the visionary poetics assumed to apply to the likes of key poets from the era. The work of Michael Horovitz is brought into view, as is that of Harry Fainlight. In essence, these multiple discourses point to the plurality of Blake as a figure of influence and the variation underpinning his literary utility in post-1960s poetry.
This article, originally published in 1958, was written to commemorate William Blake’s bicentenary. In it, the author observes that Blake has been claimed or dismissed by successive generations since his death in 1827: for the Romantics, he was a ‘weird crank’, while the Victorians enveloped him in ‘their own damp sentimentalism’. The author argues that Blake ‘evades appraisal because he was always working for a synthesis of creation far beyond outward forms and genres’, which meant ‘he had to invent his own methods to express himself adequately’. He notes that the recent bicentenary was marked by ‘floods of exhibitions, magazine supplements, radio features, new books from all sides devoted to him’. This clearly anticipates the Blakean explosion of the 1960s, in which the author himself would play a major role. This article can therefore be seen as marking the beginning of Sixties Blake in Britain.
The Arab–Israeli conflict has been at the centre of international affairs for decades. Despite repeated political efforts, the confrontation and casualties continue, especially in fighting between Israelis and Palestinians. This new assessment emphasizes the role that military force plays in blocking a diplomatic resolution. Many Arabs and Israelis believe that the only way to survive or to be secure is through the development, threat, and use of military force and violence. This idea is deeply flawed and results in missed diplomatic opportunities and growing insecurity. Coercion cannot force rivals to sign a peace agreement to end a long-running conflict. Sometimes negotiations and mutual concessions are the key to improving the fate of a country or national movement. Using short historical case studies from the 1950s through to today, the book explores and pushes back against the dominant belief that military force leads to triumph while negotiations and concessions lead to defeat and further unwelcome challenges. In The sword is not enough, we learn both what makes this idea so compelling to Arab and Israeli leaders and how it eventually may get dislodged.
viewing of Whitehead’s film, ‘came from Ginsberg, from Ferlinghetti, from [Christopher] Logue – the old pros’. 2 Michael Horovitz, the British beat who also read that night, somewhat disparages the Wholly Communion film, stating that ‘an event which was at least three-dimensional is reduced to a (literally) framed photo-reduction’. 3 Horovitz gives a rather more ecstatic version in the ‘Afterwords’ to his key edited collection, Children of Albion (1969): What did happen – for whoever suspended disbelief – is that poem after poem resonated
hall, the bar, nightclub or theatre. In this enthusiasm to make manifest the ways in which post-millennial poetry is being transformed by new venues and new sciences of transmission it is, however, easy to forget that Britain’s counterculture has been here before. Poets associated with the British poetry revival, such as Michael Horovitz or Adrian Henri, preferred the same sorts of venues, and shared many of the same values, as those now associated with contemporary slam poetry. Recognizing this is also important in that it helps us avoid viewing the devolved poetic
Stables’ production of Israel Horovitz’s It’s Called the Sugar Plum , which had been worked up as a late-night theatre piece by Maureen Lipman and John Shrapnel. Stanley Reynolds described the television version of Sugar Plum as ‘a marvellous two-hander’, and there was critical praise for performances across this group of broadcast dramas (Reynolds 1969 ). But a reading
, which John McGrath produced. McGrath also directed Mo (BBC 2, 25 July 1966), featuring Maureen Kennedy Martin, Troy’s sister, for a follow-up series to Six called Five More (although the films were not transmitted under this series title). Mo was a cinema verite-style documentary in which Maureen Kennedy Martin featured as a mother and folk-singer, along with friends and relatives including Troy, her husband Ken Wlaschen, the poets Michael Horovitz and Adrian Mitchell, folk-singer John Renbourne, and Diane Aubrey, an actress who Troy married in 1967. In 1964 Kennedy
annulled two years later, however, after the RUF had broken with the truce agreed on in Lomé. In 2002, the Sierra Leonean President Kabbah asked the UN to install a Special Court for Sierra Leone, in order to try the persons ‘bearing the greatest responsibility for international crimes and certain domestic crimes committed within the country since November 30, 1996’ (Horovitz, 2006 : 43
’, stating that despite the publicity generated by the re-publication of his works in the early 1990s and the production of the film ‘his name still means little or nothing outside The many authors of Young Adam 111 of the world of the counter-culture anorak’ (Burnside, 2002). While Anna Burnside’s comments overstate the case somewhat (there had been a retrospective of Trocchi’s life and work, A Life in Pieces [Campbell and Niel, 1997], published in 1997 and reviewed in The Sunday Times [Horovitz, 1997] and other mainstream publications) ‘obscure’ was nonetheless