HENRI, Adrian (Maurice)

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Nationality: British. Born: Birkenhead, Cheshire, 10 April 1932. Education: St. Asaph Grammar School, North Wales, 1945–51; King's College, Newcastle, 1951–55, B.A. (honors) in fine arts 1955. Family: Married Joyce Wilson in 1957 (divorced; died 1987). Career: Worked as a fairground worker, teacher, and scenic artist, 1955–61. Lecturer, Manchester College of Art and Design, 1961–64, and Liverpool College of Art, 1964–67. Member of the Liverpool Scene, poetry-rock group, 1967–70, American tour, 1969. Painter: individual shows—Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1968; Art Net, London, 1975; Williamson Art Gallery, Birkenhead, 1975; retrospective, Wolverhampton, 1976; Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh, 1978; retrospective, South Hill Park, Bracknell, 1986; Hanover Gallery, Liverpool, 1987; Library Centre, Skelmersdale, 1989; Poetry Society, London, 1990; Orrell Arts Centre, 1992; Acorn Gallery, Liverpool, 1992; Southport Arts Centre, 1993; The Storey Institute, Lancaster, 1994; Merkmal Gallery, Liverpool, 1994. Since 1970 full-time writer and painter, with occasional work with Grimms, Henri and Friends, and The Lawnmower groups; visiting lecturer, Bradford College, Yorkshire, 1973–76; writer-in-residence, Tattenhall Centre, Cheshire, 1980–82, and University of Liverpool, 1989; visiting lecturer, Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, 1989. President, Liverpool Academy of Arts, 1972–81, and Merseyside Arts Association, 1978–80. Awards: Arts Council of Northern Ireland prize, for painting, 1964; John Moores Exhibition prize, 1972; D.Litt.: Liverpool Polytechnic, 1990. Agent: Rogers Coleridge and White, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. Address: 21 Mount Street, Liverpool L1 9HD, England.

Publications

Poetry

The Mersey Sound: Penguin Modern Poets 10, with Roger McGough and Brian Patten. London, Penguin, 1967; revised edition, 1974,1983.

Tonight at Noon. London, Rapp and Whiting, 1968; New York, McKay, 1969.

City. London, Rapp and Whiting, 1969.

Talking after Christmas Blues, music by Wallace Southam. London, Turret, 1969.

Poems for Wales and Six Landscapes for Susan. Gillingham, Kent, ARC, 1970.

Autobiography. London, Cape, 1971.

America. London, Turret, 1972.

The Best of Henri: Selected Poems 1960–70. London, Cape, 1975.

One Year. Todmorden, Lancashire, ARC, 1976.

City Hedges: Poems 1970–76. London, Cape, 1977.

Beauty and the Beast, with Carol Ann Duffy. Liverpool, Glasshouse Press, 1977.

Words Without a Story. Liverpool, Glasshouse Press, 1979.

From the Loveless Motel: Poems 1976–1979. London, Cape, 1980.

Harbour. London, Ambit, 1982.

Penny Arcade: Poems 1978–1982. London, Cape, 1983.

New Volume, with Roger McGough and Brian Patten. London, Penguin, 1983.

Holiday Snaps. Liverpool, Windows, 1985.

Collected Poems 1967–1985. London, Allison and Busby, 1986.

Wish You Were Here. London, Cape, 1990.

Not Fade Away. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1994.

Verse (for children)

The Phantom Lollipop Lady and Other Poems. London, Methuen, 1986.

Rhinestone Rhino. London, Methuen, 1989.

Box and Other Poems. London, Mammoth, 1990.

Dinner with the Spratts. London, Methuen, 1993.

The World's Your Lobster, with Wendy Smith. London, Bloomsbury, 1998.

Skeleton Songs. London, Bloomsbury, 1999.

Recordings: (with Liverpool Scene) St. Adrian Co., Broadway and 3rd, RCA, 1970; Heirloon, RCA, 1970; Recollections, Charisma, 1972; (solo) Adrian Henri, Canon, 1974; British Poets of Our Times, with Hugo Williams, Argo; The Blues in Rat's Alley, Rats, 1988.

Plays

I Wonder: A Guillaume Apollinaire Show, with Michael Kustow (produced London, 1968).

I Want, with Nell Dunn, adaptation of their own novel (produced Liverpool, 1983; London, 1986).

The Wakefield Mysteries (produced Wakefield, Yorkshire, 1988). London, Methuen, 1993.

Fears and Miseries of the Third Term, with others (produced Liverpool and London, 1989).

Television Plays: Yesterday's Girl, 1973; The Husband, The Wife, and the Stranger, 1986.

Novel

I Want, with Nell Dunn. London, Cape 1972.

Other

Environments and Happenings. London, Thames and Hudson, 1974; as Total Art: Environments, Happenings and Performances, New York, Praeger, 1974.

Eric the Punk Cat (for children). London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1982.

The Art of Adrian Henri (exhibition catalogue). Bracknell, South Hill Park, 1986.

Eric and Frankie in Las Vegas (for children). London, Methuen, 1987.

The Postman's Palace (for children). London, Methuen, 1990.

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Critical Studies: Art in a City by John Willett, London, Methuen, 1967; introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith to The Liverpool Scene, London, Rapp and Carroll, and New York, Doubleday, 1967; The Society of the Poem by Jonathan Raban, London, Harrap, 1971; "Bathos, Schmathos" by Michael Hulse, in New Poetry 49 (London), 1980; "Penny Arcade" by Geoffrey Ward, in Ambit 47 (London), 1984; introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith, in The Art of Adrian Henri 1955–1985, South Hill Park, Bracknell, 1986; "Adrian Henri and the Dayglo Colours," in Off the Cuff (Liverpool), 8, 1994.

Adrian Henri comments:

(1970) I was trained as a painter and still paint and exhibit paintings. I make a living primarily by performing the works that I write, mostly with music. I think of myself as a maker and presenter of images in various media. Pop poet is, I think, the most common label.

My major influences are T.S. Eliot, Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Ginsberg, Olson, and recently Tennyson, Creeley, and Hugh MacDiarmid, also the prose of Joyce and William Burroughs. I am an autobiographical poet; my poems are extensions of my own life, some fact, some fantasy. For this reason I write perhaps more love poems than anything else. I am excited by new uses of language in the mass media, like TV commercials or pop songs, and am only interested in older verse forms (i.e., rhyme, etc.) as they survive in modern society, e.g., ballad and particularly blues. I would like my poems to be read by as many people as possible since I cannot see any point either personally or politically in writing for an elite minority. I think by doing readings and by working with the Liverpool Scene I am beginning to reach a bigger and largely nonliterary audience.

(1974) Since a serious heart illness in 1970 my way of life, and to some extent my way of working, has changed somewhat. At the moment my poetry is perhaps quieter and more traditional in character. Since spending some time in Somerset and Shropshire, I have become interested in the English landscape tradition, notably Wordsworth and Housman, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters. My work as a painter is similarly involved in an investigation into the possibilities of landscape.

(1980) I am still involved with landscape but have recently extended this to "debris" paintings, studies of urban wasteland. City Hedges perhaps reflects this. Current work includes a musical version of Jarry's Ubu. Economic problems have made musical collaborations less possible, but I still work with guitarist Andy Roberts and others when I can.

(1985) After a period of retrenchment in the 1970s, there seems to be a return to a greater freedom and wider range of idiom, and some of the concerns of the 1960s, in From the Loveless Motel and Penny Arcade. Touring in Germany, Canada, Norway, the U.S.A., etc., as well as round Britain, has generated a number of travel poems, and I am still interested in the long poem (as previously with City, Autobiography, One Year) and the problems (first articulated by Poe) of making it work at the same level of intensity as the lyric. I have been increasingly affected by the prose writings of Malcolm Lowry. In an increasingly fragmented and divisive society I still see my main problem as trying to reach as wide an audience as possible while still writing what I feel to be valid modern poetry.

(1990) Writing poems for children, and more recently for teenagers, has opened up new areas of writing for me, and I relish the challenge of communicating with a very different age group. Working more on the theater, particularly on an extended scale in The Wakefield Mysteries, has helped me develop a flexible free verse form for voices other than my own.

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Adrian Henri is one of a number of contemporary artists who have forsaken conventional roles in favor of broader activity that includes public performance. Not only a poet, Henri has at various times been a painter, novelist, critic, and singer as well as an actor-out of his own poetic creations. There is in his work a strong affinity with the American artist Allan Kaprow, pioneer of the "environment" and the "happening." Henri has written on the subject, and it is signifi-cant that his collection of poems Penny Arcade shares its title with one of Kaprow's assemblages. The element of "action collage" is constant in his writings, evident early on in the barrage of images in "I Want to Paint" and in the nightmare Bosch landscape of "The Triumph of Death" and still present years later in "Death in the Suburbs" and "Annunciation."

An intensely serious writer, Henri often displays a sly humor, and the apparent simplicity of some of his poems is deceptive. Much of his work in the 1960s is reminiscent of pop song lyrics, hardly surprising for one who has performed with rock musicians and who once led his own group, Liverpool Scene. This explains the direct, acid lines of "Batpoem" or the gentler, childlike "Love Is": "Love is feeling cold in the backs of vans /Love is a fanclub with only two fans." Lyrics of this kind cannot disguise the verbal skill and the structural grasp that underlie Henri's most freewheeling flights, akin to those of jazzmen like Parker or Coltrane. "Adrian Henri's Talking after Christmas Blues" and his later "Talking Toxteth Blues" are examples both of a biting wit and of a parodist's measure of the form. The same humor is found in "Red Card," with football imagery applied to seduction and its aftermath, while in "Any Prince to Any Princess" fairy-tale themes are hilariously revamped in government jargon. Aware of most poetic styles, Henri has throughout his career attempted several homages to bards of the past—some more serious than others—including Blake, Byron, and Housman. "Tonight at Noon," his tribute to the jazz musician Charles Mingus, in turn inspired a record album by the Jam, while in "New York City Blues" Henri mourns the passing of John Lennon.

As is inevitable with an artist whose poetry is drawn from his own experience, much of Henri's writing is devoted to love and its memories. More than most, he is able to fix in a handful of words the transitory nature of human relationships, the sense of desolation that loss of love so often brings: "The sea has carefully mislaid the beach /beyond our reach. It looks like rain /Over the boardwalk bridge we trace in vain /your lost shell earring—remembered image /of harbour, swans and rainbow—gone perhaps /back to its watery element."

Autobiography is Henri's masterpiece, a self-portrait from birth to the year 1970. From the first vivid childhood recollections through the loves and influences of youth, Henri captures superbly the flavor of his time, its scents and colors. Darting from one clutch of memories to the next, seizing with what seems like total recall the essence of each, he involves the reader in his past and brings a vanished world alive. His personality pervades the work ("sad /boy-to-be-poet /head full of words /understood by no one"), lending its unique voice to what is throughout an individual testament. Autobiography marks the beginning of an increased preoccupation with landscapes in subsequent poems, whether idyllic country scenes or bleak inner cities and motorways. Though love remains, and humor flickers occasionally, the overall tone is somber.

Whatever the prevailing mood, Henri's gifts remain undiminished. His most ambitious undertaking, The Wakefield Mysteries, recreates the original sequence of medieval religious verse dramas in modern form, effectively rendering the biblical scenes of the Creation, Flood, Nativity, and Last Judgment into current vernacular speech. Tragedy is blended neatly with bawdy humor, the action enlivened by musical interludes in which plainsong alternates with "Go Down, Moses." A mammoth task, it is also an impressive achievement.

The Collected Poems 1967–1985 draws from Henri's many works to capture the essential core of his vision in a single, coherent statement, while in Not Fade Away his writings display a comparable range and imagination. Whether exploring the death of fairy tales in "The Grandmothers" or erotic love in "Harvest Festival" or constructing a comic poem entirely from familiar clichés, as in "The Life of Riley," Henri offers images drawn directly from life and scattered like life into random insights. His is an individual voice that defies the transience of poetic fashion and, at its best, is too good to be missed.

—Geoff Sadler