Contributor: Michael Horovitz

Bio Notes: > Poet, singer-songwriter, jazz and blues kazooist, visual artist, ed-publisher New Departures, torchbearer Poetry Olympics, William Blake Klezmatrix bandleader. >

Author and Work: See Below

Books and Writers who have inspired me:

The Children of Primrose Lane by Noel Streatfield; Alice in Wonderland; Thomas Mann’s novellas; From the Life of a Ne’er-Do-Well by Eichendorf; The Canterbury Tales; about half of Jack Kerouac; Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson; Novel on Yellow Paper by Stevie Smith; The Naked Lunch by W S Burroughs; early Alan Sillitoe; all of Colin MacInnes; most of Isherwood; all of Beckett’s prose; Ulysses by James Joyce; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and Another Country by James Baldwin (both amazing in the depth at which they portray so many characters within the frame of one mind-stilling book – in both cases brimful of compassion, generous insights and tragi-comic exhilarations);

Waiting for Godot; All That Fall; most of Synge; ditto O’Casey; ditto John Arden, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, Pirandello’s Six Characters, most of Brecht, Behan, John McGrath; Caryl Churchill; Tom Stoppard; Pinter; Jack Gelber; Chekhov; Tennessee Williams;

Most of Sir Gawain; Sir Orfeo; Psalms; Song of Solomon; Milton; Pope; Blake; German and English Romantics; Brownings; Christina Rossetti; Edward Thomas; Frost; Whitman; Dickinson; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Four Quartets, Prufrock, and Preludes; D H Lawrence; Kenneth Patchen; Woody Guthrie; Pete Seeger; Leadbelly; Langston Hughes; Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol; Linton Kwesi Johnson; Grace Nichols; John Cooper Clarke; John Hegley; Willy Mason; Ginsberg; Corso; Ferlinghetti; Denise Levertov; Voznesensky; Pasternak; Frances Horovitz; Bob Dylan; Lennon-McCartney; Liverpool Poets; Kathleen Raine; Ernst Jandl; Kurt Schwitters; Adrian Mitchell.

I could go on. Can’t go on…this could go on forever.

Maybe this should never have begun…