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Works by Adrian Henri

Associated Works

Up the Junction (1963) — Introduction, some editions — 236 copies
British Poetry Since 1945 (1970) — Contributor, some editions — 166 copies
The Poetry of Snowdonia (1989) — Contributor — 7 copies

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Memorably described by his friend and fellow Liverpudlian George Melly as a ‘pear-shaped polymath’ Adrian Henri was one of the leading lights of the 1960s Liverpool poetry scene. The Liverpool poets took their inspiration from the American Beats but not their subject matter or style(s) which reflected their own lives, environments and preoccupations. They gave readings in pubs and coffee bars. They performed their poetry, but they were poets who wrote poetry people found entertaining, rather than performers who entertained through poetry. The distinction is subtle but important and distinguishes them from many of the ‘performance poets’ who emerged in their wake.

The Liverpool poets introduced new vocabulary and subject matter to poetry and a new and often young audience. Not that such innovation drew many plaudits from the English poetry establishment who tended to be dismissive - downright sniffy, in fact. You get the distinct impression that many of the Oxbridge educated literati felt the wrong sort of poetry was being written by the wrong sort of poets and appreciated by the wrong sort of readers. Not that it mattered. The poets themselves were largely indifferent to London literary opinion and, when Penguin published an anthology of work by Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten in 1967, it became an immediate bestseller. It’s still in print and has now sold over 500,000 copies. In some ways, though, it’s a shame these poets are always grouped together, as it tends to detract from the fact that each possessed a distinctive individual voice.

Adrian Henri was many things: painter, lecturer, organiser of happenings, art critic and curator, poet, rock star manque, playwright, bon viveur, disciple of Jarry, Breton, Apollinaire and T.S. Eliot. His love poems are often touching and sometimes funny. He was a painterly poet of landscapes both urban and bucolic. His poetry has many moods and forms. Sometimes short, direct, accessible and funny, but also epic, allusive, imagistic, fragmented and melancholic. The poems sometimes feel like notes in the margins of a crowded life, overflowing with experience, but they also transfigure and make universal that experience.

He was the only one of the famous three Liverpool poets who didn’t come from Liverpool, he was born in Birkenhead and grew up in Rhyl in North Wales, but also the only one who stayed there for the rest of his life. He once said that there was nowhere else he loved more. Not that there was anything remotely provincial about him. As reflected in many of the poems in this book he travelled widely. He was both a cosmopolitan and a modernist.

Liverpool features in many of these poems as muse, setting and subject matter. It is often a Liverpool made surreal and populated by Henri’s idols both historical and fictional. Pere Ubu walks across Lime Street and Marcel Proust dips Madeleine butties in his tea in a cafe. In ‘Mrs Albion, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’, written for Allen Ginsberg who Henri invited to Liverpool in 1965, the city becomes a young woman sitting on the banks of the Mersey ‘dangling her landing stage in the Water’. This wonderful poem captures a certain mid sixties moment - Merseybeat and English youth letting their collective hair down - with real warmth and wit.

Henri lived for many years in Liverpool 8, a then dilapidated inner city area composed of Georgian terraces and squares, and he mythologised it in his poetry. For Henri Liverpool 8 served as both an actual location and a poetic symbol of bohemianism. He observed Liverpool with the sharp eyes of the gifted painter he was, but it was always very much his Liverpool, reflecting his own preoccupations and life.

Henri’s poems are formally inventive and he frequently makes reference, direct or oblique, to his cultural idols or just anything that took his interest. His poem Me is a litany of people he would liked to have been and it’s startlingly eclectic - Rene Magritte, Bessie Smith, Bakunin and Blake are just a few of the names mentioned. He rewrites The Waste Land and composes poems in the form of talking blues. Poems are created through the collaging of found texts as Wordsworth collides with a car brochure. An apparently jokey piece about Batman, whose metre mimics the theme tune of the 1960s TV series, turns out to be an anti-Vietnam war poem.

The sensibility that emerges from his poetry is not populist but culturally omnivorous. Henri wanders cheerfully across the cultural landscape and finds much to love, inspire him and play with. He is indifferent to whether what interests him is categorised as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It’s all grist to his poetic mill. Such an approach is now commonplace and identified by the term ‘post-modern’, but in the sixties it was novel and, as we have seen, not universally welcomed.

Henri was a superb reader of his poetry, his warm and unhurried voice gently drawing the listener in. Some of his poems were set to music by guitarist Andy Roberts. Of the recordings by the Liverpool Scene, the poetry-rock group Henri founded in the late sixties, I particularly recommend their interpretations of his poems America and The Entry of Christ into Liverpool. Happily, plenty of this stuff can be found online.

This beautifully presented book features a large selection of Henri’s poems from 1965 until his death in 2000 and includes previously unpublished poems. There are also colour reproductions of many of his excellent paintings some of which relate directly to the poetry.

Adrian Henri was much more than just a passing phenomenon of the 1960s and I strongly recommend these open-hearted, funny, clever and moving poems.
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gpower61 | May 28, 2022 |
Inspects the artists and creations that represent contemporary performing and environmental art, stressing the movement's roots in the works of Surrealists, Constructivists, and Pop artists
 
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petervanbeveren | Jan 11, 2021 |
This was originally No.10 in the Penguin Modern Poets series, a very useful formula of the 60s and 70s where you got broad selections from three interesting contemporary poets in a 120-page book for the standard Penguin cover price of 2/6 (less than half the price of a typical single-poet collection from a specialist publisher like Faber). This was the only book in the series to have a title and an explicit theme, and it was the only one to become a cult classic and sell half-a-million copies...

Liverpool was, of course, where it was all happening in the 1960s. Or, at least, thanks to the Beatles it was a place where outsiders were paying attention to things that might otherwise have passed unnoticed in the big wide world. One of these things that suddenly started to seem important was that in the trendily run-down neighbourhood of Liverpool 8 there were a number of basement clubs where young people sat around drinking frothy foreign coffee and listening to homegrown poets reading (and even - alarmingly - improvising) their works, for all the world as though they were in New York or San Francisco.

The three young men (sorry: youngmen) who rose to fame as "the Liverpool Poets" (there were others, of course) were all from working-class, Catholic, Liverpool families, and they brought a particular Scouse flavour to their work, the instinct to make fun of themselves and everybody else, to fill their poems with earthy, everyday references, and at all costs to stay away from bombast and pomposity.

Adrian Henri was a surrealist painter and art-teacher, and his particular contribution to the group seems to have been his connection both with the visual arts and with the American Beats (it was he who arranged Allen Ginsberg's Papal Visit to Liverpool in 1965). He also brought Warhol-style art Happenings to Liverpool.

Roger McGough started out as a teacher as well, but he was also a musician, performing with Mike McGear (Paul McCartney's brother) and John Gorman in the group The Scaffold, who were responsible for some of the most persistent earworms of the sixties, notably "Lily the Pink". McGough later became a very familiar voice on BBC poetry programmes and a senior figure of the poetry "establishment" in the UK.

Brian Patten is now known especially for his writing for children, but in 1967 he was barely out of his teens himself. He had left school at 15 to become a reporter on the Bootle Times, and he was the editor of the little magazine in which McGough's and Henri's poetry first appeared in print.

Re-reading the poems after many years, my first reaction was that they had survived extraordinarily well. There are some little period bits of silliness that have gone a bit stale, like compounding words for noreason, but they are trivial, really. And there are some poems that would probably have worked better if they'd been cut by 30%, but what use is being young if you're not allowed to rant a bit? The main thing is that most of it is still funny and unexpected and shocking, just as they meant it to be. And it is full of lines like "She approaches breakfast as she would a lover", or "with littlefinger in the air / she ravishes her third eclair", or "I can hear the noise of the ice-floes breaking up on the bathroom floor", or even "I wanted your soft verges / but you gave me the hard shoulder".

Obviously some of the subject-matter has shifted a bit in the way we read it - bus-conductors and Woodbines and Mary Quant are no longer part of the register of everyday life. The politics, as far as it goes, looks a bit crude: war is a bad thing, nuclear war is worse, and most of the evils of the world are caused by an undifferentiated group of oldmen-in-power, who range from First World War generals to Kennedy, MacMillan and Wilson. Patten is the only one who talks about racism at all, satirising Enoch Powell's attempts to exploit the racism of voters in "I'm dreaming of a white Smethwick", a poem that is clearly heartfelt but just as clearly written to meet one specific set of events.

On sexism, they don't do any better than most of their male contemporaries. Women seem to appear in the poems only if they can be considered young and pretty enough to be potential sex-partners. I had to remember Muriel Spark's wry comment about the men who are poets and the women who type the poems and sleep with the poets. Henri's many lascivious references to schoolgirls, gymslips, navy-blue knickers, etc., are obviously meant to be read as provocative self-mockery, but there are an awful lot of them. The other two aren't quite as bad, and Patten in particular sometimes seems to be almost mature in the way he writes about women (cf. "Somewhere between Heaven and Woolworths").

So still worth a read for its own sake, quite apart from its importance as a cultural document. At least for British poets, this is the book that reassured them that it was allowable to write poetry if you hadn't been to university, that poetry and rock music do go together, that poems can have as many "rude words" in them as you like, and that subjects like bus-conductors and Woodbines and the East Lancs Road may even be a better use of the poet's time than writing about daffodils and Grantchester. Which was very liberating, but has also demonstrated that not everyone is as good at writing about the ordinary as these guys were...
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thorold | 5 other reviews | Sep 13, 2018 |

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