Conversation with Mikhail Horowitz

By Renee Samuels

Mikhail Horowitz is a fine person, a mensch, someone a mother could be proud of. On a par with that are his talent and intelligence, his energy and curiosity. Loving nature and digging the dark side, too, the decidedly centered Horowitz is beloved in this region as a performance poet. His published books include Big League Poets and The Opus of Everything in Nothing Flat; CDs: The Blues of the Birth and, with his frequent partner-in-verse-and-song, Gilles Malkine, Live, Jive & Over 45. He has performed at the Village Gate, Westbeth Theater and the Image Theater, all in New York City; Bumbershoot Festival, Seattle, WA, and Taos Poetry Circus, Taos, NM, to name a few. From 1986 through 1999, he was an editor at the Woodstock Times, where he worked with this writer. We had a lot of fun, for years. When Mikhail first started working 9-5 post-Woodstock Times, he e-mailed Parry Teasdale and me at the office at the corner of Zena and Van Dale roads: “He-e-e-l-l-l-lp-p-p-!!!” He assures us things have picked up since then.



Renee Samuels: I thought we could start with some facts.

Mikhail Horowitz: Do you want the true facts or the imaginative facts?

RS: At least some true ones, anyway.

MH: I was born in 1950, right in the middle of a dreadful century, in Brooklyn. I went to school at the State Educational Correctional Rehabilitational and Mental Health Facilities, otherwise known as Public School 131 in Brooklyn, then Pershing Junior High School and John Jay High School, where I used to get the shit kicked out of me until my parents moved so I could go to a different high school, which was Erasmus High School. Bobby Kennedy spoke at our graduation, but I didn’t go, because I hitchhiked with a friend to see Expo '67 in Montreal, and I wound up at SUNY New Paltz in 1967, and I dropped out in 1970 to help start an underground newspaper. It was the first alternative newspaper in the Hudson Valley, called Gargoyle. It came out from a secret hideaway on Springtown Road in New Paltz. This was all anti-war days, all that stuff swirling: guerilla theater, closing down the college, that kind of thing. I majored in theater, but I also took courses in literature.

RS: Were you a poet then?

MH: Well, I don’t even think I would call myself a poet now. The more I learn, and the older I get, and the more I read, and the more I do, the less inclined I am to label myself. It’s a little presumptuous to; I think I’d prefer if other people call me a poet. I don’t think I want to go there myself anymore, calling myself this, that or the other thing.

RS: Why?

MH: Well, it’s as I get older and as I discover more, I realize how little I know, and I realize what work, what discipline it really is to do any of this stuff, and I just would rather not hang that on myself. There’s enough of a millstone around my neck without me adding to it by giving myself any airs or giving myself any claim to something that I may not be the right person to judge whether that’s true or not. But I will say poetry is the most important thing in my life, baseball running a close second. Oh, so where was I? The first thing I ever performed on stage was “Casey at the Bat” for my sixth-grade talent show, and I won the talent show, so that kind of hooked me. I was suddenly at the center of this storm of attention, and it wasn’t because I had fucked up at anything, it was because they really liked what I did. Also there was a great sixth-grade drama group, especially for New York City at that time, because we had all the cast-off teachers who were 4F during the war and got tenure while everybody else was working on the war effort in the '40s. But we had a very good English teacher who had a little drama thing going, and we did selected scenes from Macbeth for a talent show one year, and I was one of the three witches. So three guys with mops over our heads were the three witches, and it came time to do the opening, and the other two male witches had such severe stage fright, I went out and did the whole scene by myself, changing my voice, with sound effects, owls, toads, etc., and I think that was where I really, really got hooked. I said, gee, this is fun. Then later, in '73, I hooked up with Francesco Patricolo in Null and Void, a metaphysical stand-up tragedy team. We were based on the West Coast, and we toured around for about five or six years, then came back here and kind of dissolved in '78. Since then I’ve been performing on my own, with various configurations of musicians, and since 1989, I’ve done more than 400 shows with Gilles Malkine.

RS: Tell me about working with Gilles. Aside from the fact that he’s a very accomplished musician, what is it about him that’s made him suitable as your partner all this time?

MH: Well, Gilles has a very similar sensibility to me in that he is irreverent to the bone, and he comes by it honestly. His father was one of the signers of the Surrealist manifesto in Paris in 1924, and was one of the wackiest of the Surrealist painters, and his mom is a marvelous folk singer, she was also raised by anarchists. Emma Goldman’s lover taught Sonya Malkine how to swim when she was a girl in Brittany, okay? So he really comes by this stuff honestly. He’s got that wonderfully anarchic, broadly comic sensibility, and it just suffuses everything he does. He just has just that perspective on the world, what is it? Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd. That’s Gilles to a T. And at the same time he’s incredibly bright and he’s incredibly fluid and facile on just about anything with strings. He’s a very accomplished musician who has set very high standards for himself, which he lowers every time he appears with me, for which I thank him, and the audiences thank him, and he’s just very easy to work with. There’s a real nice give-and-take between us. I don’t always agree with his ideas; he doesn’t always agree with mine, but we trust each other enough, if we fuck up, we fuck up in interesting ways. We fail in interesting ways when we fail.

RS: And no one else knows you’re failing except you, maybe.

MH: Maybe, but I know, and it hurts [laughs].

RS: What else is going on for you at the live shows?

MH: There’s a lot of things going on. Of course there’s the approbation that comes back at you, and you feel you’re doing your part, you’re part of the community, and this is what you do, this is what you’re giving. It’s also a self-exploration, too. It’s not the same as the poetry written for the page, but it comes from the same place, and it’s a different part of that. You know there’s art work I do, also, all these little ways of trying to get at what it is, whatever that reality is, and to work it out. I don’t know, the work just goes on, I just try to get to places that I haven’t been to before in what I’m doing. I’m considering the audience on one hand, but I’m also considering myself, where do I want to go with this? And it provides me with a forum where I can take risks, number one. I can go out on a limb, and I’m going to get instant feedback. You make a painting, and it’s hanging on your wall, and until somebody comes in and says something, you don’t get any feedback. You write a poem, it’s in your binder, it may be in there for 50 years, I mean it was good for you, whatever the process is for you, it’s important for you to do that, but if you want to get it out into the world, if there’s going to be any kind of reciprocity between you and the people, between you and the community…. For me, performing is the best way to do it, because I know instantly whether something’s working or not. And if it’s not working, then I have choices: I can make a choice right then and there to start improvising and playing with it, going in that direction with it, or just killing it, or going back to the drawing board and working on it again. Sometimes you perform a piece 50 times before you realize how it’s supposed to be. And sometimes you perform it twice, and you say, this ain’t ever going to be it, so you get rid of it. And sometimes you just perform it once, and you know right away it’s perfect the way it is.

RS: Do you think being an artist holds a certain amount of responsibility? Do you call yourself an artist?

MH: I don’t have a label for myself other than human being. I would like to be a poet. That’s what I’d like most to be is a poet. But, yeah, anyone who calls themselves an artist… But it’s the same as anyone who calls themselves a human being. If you really call yourself a human being, then all these responsibilities accrue. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” said Delmore Schwartz. But, yeah, you have a responsibility to be honest; you have a responsibility to do good work, to be disciplined to your craft, to realize your vision, no matter what else was in the way of it. I believe it goes further than that; besides the responsibilities you have to yourself and to your muse, you have a responsibility to your community to be an active member of your community, somebody who brings something to the community that the community wouldn’t have without you. So those are all your responsibilities as an artist. And to the muse, you must honor, obey, ‘til death do you part, you know.

RS: When did you discover you had a muse?

MH: When she threw something back in my face; when she crumpled something and threw it in the garbage and said, “This is a piece of shit. You’re not paying any attention to me, are you, you shmoiger?” No, I don’t know. There’s nothing dramatic like that, there was no sudden flash of insight, there was no drum roll in the heavens. It was a long, cumulative process of ripening and deepening into oneself, and that’s how it comes about. You gradually come to know a little bit more about yourself, and understand a little more, and see where your fault lines are, see where your roots are tapping, you see what birds are on the branches, and you just gradually become aware of that environment that you bring with you wherever you go, whatever that inner environment is and what it needs, what it needs to be watered and nurtured, and one day you wake up, and it’s not an issue anymore. That’s who you are. And ideally the making of any kind of art work should be as natural as breathing and walking and eating. It’s something you do every day which is essential to your survival—to your survival as a person, to your survival as a mind, as a spirit. And it’s not anything to make a big fuss about, it’s just there, and you’re serious, and that sacred space is always there. I always have trouble with people who separate sacred from everything else. That’s not my way of doing it. If the sacred isn’t everywhere, then it’s nowhere. There’s no special place for it. It’s got to be in everything that you do. Just like the poetry has to be in the way you prepare food, it has to be in the way you drive, it has to be in the way you relate to other people. Of course that’s a pretty tall order. Nobody is that good that they can do that all the time. But as an ideal it’s worth aspiring to—and at the same time understanding that poetry is not any of those things, it’s a very specific act. It’s a specific act, and it’s a specific thing as well. And it’s a craft. It’s also a vision. It’s also a way of being in the world. And when I say it’s a craft, in the same way that a musician has to know music, has to know the notes, a poet has to know language. Language is what your raw material is; it’s what your tools are, and you have to know how to use those tools. Once you learn how to use them, you can have a lot of fun and explore and break rules and make up your own languages. At base, that’s what you’re dealing with as a poet. You’re not dealing with feelings, which is the way it’s usually taught. The feelings come in in and of themselves. You’re dealing with language. I mean if you can’t play an instrument, it doesn’t matter how much feeling you have; if you pick up the instrument, it’s just going to make noise. You might project frustration that you can’t play the instrument. But to get to those feelings, to evoke those feelings, or to understand what those feelings are, you need to have a sense of what language is and what your language is, how you use language.

RS: Contemporary American society: Where does poetry fit in?

MH: People still read, there will always be books, but as far as a literary culture, the literary culture is over, it ended when we were in our teens. You know, there’ll still be people writing literature, but it doesn’t have the primacy, it doesn’t have the same place in the society that it once did. I don’t think it’s ever going to go away, but it’s not a common reference for anybody, for someone who’s intelligent or sophisticated, to know all these references anymore. And the new references, what’s replacing them, they’re not literary references. They’re film references, they’re music references, they’re other references. But anyway, that’s just the way it is, that’s the way it goes. Whaddya gonna do?

RS: So that brings up two questions, one of which is about working with humor and joy in the face of what obviously is the downturn intellectually of American mainstream culture, and to tie that in with politics, how did it happen and why did it happen and who’s in charge here?

MH: I can’t answer that question. All I can answer is politics cannot not be part of your life. Even if you say it’s not part of your life, it is part of your life, whether you acknowledge it or not. And it’s how you navigate that, and you can be very politically active and involved in a real grassroots, even activist sense of becoming engaged in your community, or you do what you do with a political consciousness. With me, it’s really easy, especially in recent years. I just see myself as performing for the troops. It’s like Bob Hope used to go on his USO tours to entertain the soldiers. I go out there and I know in my audience are going to be people who are organizing peace marches, and fighting to change voting laws for campaign financing, and fighting to have clean air and clean water, and that’s a large part of not only my audience but my community, my overlapping communities and my friends, and it’s what I believe in, so what I’m doing is I’m taking a lot of that stuff, and I’m casting it in a form that allows you to step back and have a good laugh, or a rueful, bitter laugh, if that’s the case, or just blow-it-all-out laugh, a fuck-you laugh, that’s what I can do. That’s how I can contribute. So this year we did dozens of political… We did stuff for Kucinich, for Kerry, for Dean, for True Majority in New York, we opened a couple of shows for Jim Hightower, and we’re going to keep doing that. Like everybody else I know after the election, I wanted to crawl under a rock for four years and just die. Then that quickly dissipated after 24 hours of feeling sorry for myself, and I said, fuck, no, man, they can have my country when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers! I’m not going to give it up! I don’t want to go anywhere else. Let’s be 10, 20, 100, 10,000 thorns in George Bush’s side. We’ve got to keep fighting. We don’t have any choice, I mean, if we want our democracy to become a theocracy, then we can just sit back and do nothing and put our heads in the sand, but we’ve got to get involved, now more than ever, whatever we can do that makes a difference. I never have been able to see working on a national front, or something that big; it’s too abstract. I can see change happening in my community, I can see myself having an effect in my community, and my community is the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and that’s where I am, and that’s what I love… !



Mikhail starts singing “La Marseillaise.”

RS: Any new influences lately, things that have really excited you?

MH: Oh, yes, yes, yes, there is one thing that’s exciting me that I’ve been doing lately. About three years ago, I was asked to become a member of Actors & Writers in Olivebridge, and that’s been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, in terms of my own stuff, too. Once a year we do a short play festival, and it’s plays that are 10 minutes or under, and I never tried the form before, and I didn’t have any preconceptions, I didn’t have any ego invested in it. And it just started pouring forth. And before I knew it, I had written about a dozen 10-minute plays, you know, mostly under 10 minutes. And a couple of them were really good, and they did a couple of them out at the Odd Fellows Hall out in Olivebridge, and I just had a great time doing it, and plus being with a company, being with a group of people who write professionally and perform professionally, you know, all the swapping that goes on with that stuff and the energy that’s exchanged and recirculated, and acting in other people’s plays, which I’ve been doing, so I’ve been getting back into acting and not doing my own stuff, which for me is a gas, because I’m nervous as hell when I perform my own stuff, but I’m not nervous when I perform other people’s stuff. I just relax and have a good time with it. And the short play thing has led to a couple of nice things, like they picked one of them for a short play festival in New York, that was in the 92nd Street Y, and they did it a couple of months ago, Carol and I went down, we met my mother and father, and we watched it, got to sit in the audience and see somebody do my stuff, and it was a gas, man, yeah. So that’s been the most exciting new thing for me, getting into this forum, and now, starting to incorporate the short plays into the show I do with Gilles, occasionally doing ones that don’t require too many people, but doing like a five- or a seven-minute staged reading in the middle of one of our performances. So we’re going to be doing more of that.



RS: A lot of your work is social critique couched in humorous terms.

MH: Oh, yeah, a lot of my stuff. Well, satire is critique. Parody is critique. Comedy is critique. When you’re holding up the mores of society to laughter, you’re critiquing society. You’re just not doing in a dry, pedantic, textbook kind of way. You’re doing it in a way that gives people pleasure.

RS: And you’re helping them to be able to exist with it, like the world has these terrible things in it, but you can still laugh and share things.

MH: Well, it’s not even a matter of we can still; we have to. We don’t have a choice. If we’re going to survive as human beings, we have to laugh. There’s nothing more powerful. There’s nothing unserious about comedy. Comedy is, to me it’s the most serious thing, much more serious than tragedy [laughs]. Because comedy is a corrective, really, to tragedy.



RS: Gigs coming up?

MH: We always take a hiatus in January and February, because it doesn’t pay to put a week into rehearsing something and then getting it canceled because of a snowstorm. We emerge from our cocoon on Saturday, March 19, at the Stone Ridge Center for the Arts. That’s the first gig we have booked for 2005. And there’s only one or two others that are booked this far ahead. In January and February we talk to a lot of places, do a lot of grants, so we’ll get a lot of stuff booked in those months. Anyway, Stone Ridge Center, March 19.