One of the thousands of people who were at the Albert Hall in 1965 for the International Poetry Incarnation was poet and Write Out Loud gig guide editor David Andrew. He recalls: “I was 26, and had been interested in poetry for getting on 10 years. I’d already come across the Beat poets, and still have a copy of the City Lights edition of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Gregory Corso’s Gasoline at home. No wonder I went to it; these people you’d read, you were seeing them in the flesh.

“It took place in the round, rather than on the stage. It was like when they staged boxing matches there – but it was poetry. The feeling wasn’t competitive, it was collaborative. There were no props, no platform. It was an astonishing one-off; I remember Ginsberg and Corso reading, Michael Horovitz wearing one of those Breton, French onion seller’s shirts, and Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Tell Me Lies about Vietnam.’ There was a tremendous buzz and sense of occasion. It wasn’t a slam, there were no winners or losers; if there was a winner, the winner was poetry.”