The “Looney” is dead

"Ivan Martin Jirous, fierce eccentric and tender poet, is gone," [writes Lidové noviny](http:// http://www.lidovky.cz/zemrel-basnik-ivan-martin-jirous-legenda-ceskeho-undergroundu-p7z-/lide.asp?c=A111110_134416_lide_nev) the day after the death, at age 67, of the legendary Czech dissident who inspired the Velvet Revolution of 1989 alongside Vaclav Havel. Host of the underground art scene, art historian, cultural critic, poet and artistic director of the rock band The Plastic People of the Universe, "Magor”, (“Looney”), as he was known, “hauled people out of their tranquillity, disturbed them, upset them,” writes the Prague daily. For his freewheeling talk and his battles against the Communist regime he spent nearly ten years in prison. In 1985 he was awarded the Tom Stoppard Prize for Literature for his collection of poems The Songs of the Swans of the Looney, written in prison and first published abroad, and in the Czech Republic after 1989. In 2006 he won the Jaroslav Seifert National Book Award for the body of his work. Rest in peace, “Magor, who art in heaven,” concludes LN.