My obituary of the Beat poet Harold Norse appears in today's Independent, you can find it here. I probably should have found a better way to describe Naked Lunch, which is one of the great American novels, but I've written an essay on its 50th anniversary, and that will appear here soon.It's difficult to trace Norse's life without making him sound like a literary Zelig, but if you look at haroldnorse.com you'll find a series of photos which suggest that he was an object of desire for generations of poets. My experience of Norse's writing was less intimate, but I recall that Penguin poets volume, which I picked up when I first visited England in 1972, and it was one of my favourites; I carried it around with me while hitching through the Highlands in a very cold January 1973--Norse indeed.
