Undoing the folded lie

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When you buy this book (and buy you should for reasons that follow), try reading the notes to A New Waste Land before the poem itself. This is not because the poem is ‘difficult’ or in any sense obscure. On the contrary, Horowitz is an oral poet, a performer: veteran of his own Poetry Olympics and countless gigs over half a century in coffee bars or at the Albert Hall. A founder of late 1950s poetry-and-jazz occasions, he makes use of repetition, catch-phrases, comic-awful puns, message-hammering riffs. These give way to long lyric passages of seeming improvisation, in the manner of Coltrane or Rollins. The beautiful kite-flying sequence in the present work is one such example; a little lamenting passage for his late wife another.

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At 72, Horowitz’s technique is closer to young rap artists, therefore, than to his contemporaries.