text: Michael Horowitz and Vanessa Vie – Curious Arts Festival
  Michael Horowitz and Vanessa Vie
  New River Press will be curating two days of music, spoken word and performance on Saturday 21st July and Sunday 22nd in the New River Tent. Book tickets here.
  Michael Horovitz has been at the forefront of British counter cultural poetry since the 1950s. In 1959 he founded New Departures, for a generation the key left-field poetry magazine. After being a key organiser of the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965 featuring himself, Allen Ginsberg, Alexander Trocci, and William Burroughs, Horovitz edited Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, a seminal text of British underground poetry. He has published a number of original books of poetry, including Midsummer Morning Job Log(with Peter Blake), A New Waste Land: Timeship Earth at Nillennium, The Wolverhampton Wanderer, and Wordsounds and Sightlines: New and Selected Poems. Ginsberg characterized him as a "popular, experienced, experimental, New Jerusalem, Jazz Generation, Sensitive Bard".
  Vanessa Vie is a visual artist, singer-songsmith, guitarist, harmonica player, and lyricist-poet. Born in Asturias, North Spain, she moved to London in 2000. In 2005 she co-formed the London based alternative rock band Rockatron, which dissolved in 2009. Since then, she has been on the road as a solo troubadour, also performing with various musicians, artists, and poets, most recently accompanying and being accompanied by Michael Horovitz.
  Michael Horovitz and Vanessa Vie together perform ecstatic, bizarre, and entirely wonderful songs. Renditions of Blake songs as well as their own radical Haikus, the pair are a tour de force of Albion mysticism. Last winter they played a sold out performance at Pentameter's Theatre last winter, and they are currently working on a record.