Michael Horovitz (born 1935) is an English poet, artist and translator, educated at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Though initially associated with the British Poetry Revival, Horovitz became widely known on his appearance at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11 1965, alongside Allen Ginsberg and Alexander Trocchi. In 1959 he founded the New Departures anthologies whilst still an undergrad, publishing Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Stevie Smith, Kathleen Raine, Langston Hughes, John Cage, et al. In 1969 he edited Children of Albion Poetry of the Underground in Britain for Penguin Books. And some of his most popular poems – ‘For Modern Man’, ‘A Postcard From Ireland’, ’Sea’s Cape’ – brought him to more public prominence, as did his pioneering of Jazz Poetry SuperJams, alongside many of the then adventuresome early British Beboppers including Ronnie Scott, Annie Whitehead and Stan Tracey, & also producing the first European appearance by Ornette Coleman’s band in Fairfield Hall, Croydon.

In 1971 he published the flamboyant The Wolverhampton Wanderer (An Epic of Britannia, In Twelve Books’), dedicated ‘for Poetry United’!, with an original dustjacket by Peter Blake etc as beforeAn Epic of Britannia. In Twelve Books. With a Resurrection & a Life for Poetry United, with an original dustjacket by Peter Blake. The book is a quintessentially English collection of British artists of the period with illustrations and photographs by Michael Tyzack, Peter Blake, Adrian Henri,  Patrick Hughes, Gabi Nasemann, Michael Horovitz, Paul Kaplan, John Furnival, Bob Godfrey, Pete Morgan, Jeff Nuttall & David Hockney. . It is a visual and literary elegy to the culture surrounding association football up to the 1960s, celebrating not only Wolves and its supporters, but also Arsenal, Spurs, and legendary teams from the North.

Growing Up: Selected Poems and Pictures, 1951-’79 was published by Allison & Busby in 1979. He has run the Poetry Olympics at numerous venues including the Albert Hall and Westminster Abbey since 1980 and elsewhere the world over, and recently published A New Waste Land.

Horovitz is, alongside with that of Beat exemplar par excellence Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tom Pickard and Joyce Johnson, one of the last living links to the Beat poets and their milieu.

He was married to the English poet Frances Horovitz (1938-83); their son Adam (b. 1971) is also a poet.

Horovitz recently curated an event at the Portobello Film Festival 2009 entitled ‘The Beat Goes On’, the first of a two-part event. The second was curated by Lee Harris & River Styx .

In August 2010 Horovitz contributed to an eBook collection of political poems entitled Emergency Verse – Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State edited by Alan Morrison.

Horovitz stood for election for the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2010, but came second to Geoffrey Hill.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article “Michael Horovitz”, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0