It's only poetry, rant and roll

THE 20th Poetry Olympics takes place tomorrow on the 65th birthday of its organiser Michael Horovitz.

Among others, Hanif Kureishi, Beryl Bainbridge, Adrian Mitchell and John Cooper Clarke will be appearing. "We'll probably lose a lot of money," says Horovitz in a neutral tone. Does that bother him? "Not really. We've been losing money ever since we began."

Horovitz - poet, performance poetry ringmaster, painter and kazooist - has been starving in a garret for over 40 years now, ever since he came down from Oxford. Well, not exactly starving, and not exactly in a garret.

His flat in Notting Hill is suspiciously grand for one to whom commercial is a dirty word.

But Horovitz says that his achievement may not lie so much in his wild poetry, replete with experimental typography and frequent stabs of beauty, as in his role as a living antidote to the idea that everyone must become "a cog in a computerised machine designed to make money".

Someone I spoke to, who's known him for 20 years, puts the same thing more prosaically: Horovitz, he recalls with exasperated affection, was a person who "was always coming in to other people's offices to use the photocopier".

Horovitz started the poetry olympics as an antidote to Margaret Thatcher's campaign for a boycott of the Moscow Olympics, which he found "not very sporting". "So we thought to try and restore the Olympic spirit of Ancient Greece, working towards a healing of the spirit, rising above the sort of commercial and political polarities introduced to the Olympics by Margaret Thatcher and Adolf Hitler."

This kind of drawled, high-minded-ness is typical of Horovitz, who can veer from talking about his slippers to Armageddon in a fraction of a second; so, too, is the casual elision of Thatcher and Hitler. Having long been your standard sort of hippy, Horovitz is currently espousing a harder-edged radicalism, arising out of a disenchantment with Mr Blair, who he now dismisses as being part of "the whole Vladimir

Putin-Hussein-Milosovic-Clinton-Blair thing".

HOROVITZ began his career on the margins of literary celebrity in the mid-Fifties at Oxford. Here he practised jazz poetry, speaking verse over a background of improvised music. He's not a musician himself, although he styles himself an "Anglo-Saxophonist", meaning that he plays the kazoo in between bouts of poetry, in homage to the Anglo-Saxon alliterative chanting of poetry. In those days, among his comrades was Dudley Moore, on whose subsequent career Horovitz rather frowns. "He's done some entertaining roles," says Horovitz loftily. "It is just a pity he became a citizen of Hollywood."

After university, Horovitz set up New Departures, the umbrella beneath which he has operated ever since. He founded a consistently impoverished poetry magazine of that name, which was once approvingly reviewed as being "a classic literary quarterly in that it comes out about once every three years".

In the late Fifties, Horovitz also assembled a network of poets such as Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue, who went out and read their work, in reaction to the Movement poets of the Fifties like Larkin and Kingsley Amis who, Horovitz says, "didn't really move". (These declaiming poets - including Horovitz's late wife Frances - were collected by Horovitz in a dynamic volume of 1969 called The Children of Albion).

The live culmination of Horovitz's new democratic strain of poetry came with The First International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in 1965, where the big draw was Alan Ginsberg, cavorting naked at parties beforehand, strewing rose petals afterwards. "It was a beautiful summer's evening," recalls Horovitz.

"We'd been giving flowers out in Portobello Road There was this great upsurge of consciousness. It was the Sixties, well, we were young."

He stops for a short, poignant moment but it really is very short.

"People have a lot of derision now for slogans like "Make Love Not War", but we neglect them at our peril, because if it had not been for people who marched or burnt their draft cards, quite a lot of us might not be here today." He goes off into another room to get some eye drops, or something, but he continues talking, going in and out of earshot. "Global warming You want to shout out to world leaders to stop all the " I interrupt by calling out a question about the late Ian Dury, who was going to feature in this year's poetry olympics. Horovitz reenters and immediately does a good impression of Dury, lurching menacingly. "He could be quite fierce, but he was the salt of the earth, and if he thought you looked a bit hungry, or something, he might slip you 50 quid."

Naturally, Horovitz approved of the punk movement that spawned Dury, and he became a patron to performing poets such as John Cooper Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Seething Wells.

After punk, Horovitz seemed to go quiet for a while, but now he's embraced the slam scene - slam being a forceful kind of quasi rap.

Bearing in mind the recent Poetry Society scheme whereby poets were put in the workplace (Marks and Spencer had an in-house poet for a while), it could be argued that his brand of poetry evangelism has come of age. At any rate, he is buttressed in his relative old age by a network of admiring celebrities.

Actually, despite his egalitarian bent, Horovitz is a big-league namedropper. But there is one name - a huge star who might turn up tomorrow - that he's refusing to divulge.

With a come-on like that, maybe he won't lose so much money after all.

lThe Poetry Olympics takes place tomorrow at the Royal Festival Hall (020 7960 4242), 7.15pm. The New Departures exhibition remains in the RFH poetry library until 30 April.

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