a field student of counter-cultural saxophonics

Michael Horovitz (with 'Anglosaxophone') at News from Nowhere Club

The Epicentre, Leytonstone

Saturday 12th March 2011

For me, the highlight of the evening with Michael Horovitz, at News from Nowhere Club, was his solo rendition of Kurt Schwitters’ sound poem, ‘The Furore of Sneezing’; performed 46 years on from a wholly communal sneeze at, ‘The First Great International Poetry Reading’, at the Royal Albert Hall. Horovitz, a renowned transcultural revolutionary Olympian beat poet convenor, was in the less grand surroundings of Leytonstone’s 'Epicentre', to talk, perform, and generate discussion about counter-cultural connection. ‘The Furore...’ was one of the poems Horovitz performed from amidst a wealth of anecdotes drawn from his creative counter-cultural life.

It was fitting that the assembled fellows community announcements from the floor, prior to the talk, included clarion (perhaps ‘Anglosaxophonic’) calls to our hearts and minds to protest about draconian public spending cuts. How can and will the belligerence of a governmental alliance, purporting to big society, be countered culturally?

With hope, energy and poetry?

The poet, Horovitz, with his ‘Anglosaxophone’, appeared to transcend the frailties of his age as he sprang about, animated by the ecstasies of poetic language and primal communication; only to return to an apparently nervous (if not highly strung) awkwardness, while standing, his hands restlessly fiddling with his hair. In contrast to the sonority of his performance poetry, his voice flattened, talking sometimes gloomily, as he reflected on the darker side of his experiences, be it historical, contemporary, familial, political and personal.

He recalled his unsettled childhood as a German Jewish refugee in Britain during World War II. This experience marked the beginnings of his resistance to doctrines of faith and ideology made bellicose and internecine. The young Horovitz grew up defiantly counter-cultural, inventing resorts of skies painted green and trees painted blue, to express his Utopian and poetic interconnectedness. This was sometimes, he recounted, much to his mother’s consternation.

Horovitz’s 76 years have formed a long, wide, and sometimes turbulent, stream of consciousness which, for the purposes of understanding, requires an extensive array of anecdotal stepping stones, or bridges, by which to reach and encounter his fellows, his counter-cultural accomplices, including, Allen Ginsberg, Stevie Smith and Cornelius Cardew. One and a half hours was a very short time to explore the interconnectedness of their visionary and often troubled contumacies.

So how potent is the counter-culturalism of such Dada infused exclamations as, ‘The Furore of Sneezing’? The various connections between history and context reveal the potency as being in a state of flux. That poem, performed to what was likely to have been a highly educated, liberal, middle class audience, possibly did little to counter that presiding culture in temporary residence, in situ, with its educated taste and social capital. At its most contrarian, the performance may have been novel, eccentric, zany or silly. The poem’s originator, Kurt Schwitters, was one of the artists derogatorily featured in the Nazi curated,  'Degenerate Art (entarte Kunst) Exhibition'; a show which toured Germany extensively in 1937. Six months prior to the opening of that show, Schwitters fled Germany, finding temporary exile, first in Norway, and then Scotland and Britain. He was interned as 'an enemy alien' at the Douglas Camp, Isle of Man, for a year and a half. Schwitters and Horovitz are/were both refugees and share an artistic consciousness born of rupture, survival, and adaptation.

In the communal discussion following Horovitz’s talk and performance poetry, a member of the audience told how they had discovered that those World War II ‘enemy aliens’ had created a university at the Douglas (Internment) Camp. This is an account of counter-culture at work, adapting to circumstances and resisting dehumanising forces - defiantly and hopefully. Schwitters may have been a student and/or teacher at the university and Michael Horovitz’s spirited performance of one of Schwitters' sound poems represents a playful testament to the full, wide-but-not-free-ranging, liberating power of art, and the capacity to learn by making art, and anti-art, in the most difficult of circumstances, even if that learning is (only?) a sneeze "a-tissued" and "fu-roareed" out of and into thin air. 

We might wonder about the various types and forms of phonics and linguistic learning games that were practiced in the Allied internment camps of World War II, and how they persist and function, culturally, in the present. Perhaps the "furore" (furor/furore) of the title, as a spoken word in accented and dialectical English, was in itself, a counter-cultural and inter-cultural wordplay, with "furore" as a homophone and a taboo deformation. The performance of the poem was not an iteration or explanation of the title to the poem - the performance sneezed for itself, however it was elicited by an ominous "f" / "fu" speech sound; an English(?) phoneme formed when air is blown through the top teeth touching the bottom lip, which involves a baring of the teeth and what that can signify non-verbally depending on the culture in which the gesture and utterance is made.

In his furious and furtive fits of playful sneezing Michael Horovitz represents a spirit of defiant International Utopianism, a furioso and born of the catastrophic and furuncular wars of the 20th Century, continuing into the 21st.