Ivor Cutler

The poet, composer and perfomer Ivor Cutler has died at the age of 83. As The Times obituary notes:

Throughout his career Cutler remained the grit in the oyster of respectability. He did not dispute the description once given to him that he was a rather stupid genius. Such genius derived from his ability to view life from the opposite direction to that taken by society, and his ability to empathise with the implications of that viewpoint, as in his one-sentence poem: “A fly crouching in a sandwich cannot comprehend why it has become more than ordinarily vulnerable.”

There are also obituaries in The Guardian and Daily Telegraph. If you've never experienced Cutler's weirdly funny and sometimes unsettling poems, you can listen to some on his website.