CC BY
11Scientific Journal Impact Factor
UDC code: 8294
THE LIVERPOOL POET: ADRIAN HENRI
Khakimova Maksadkhon Dilshodbekovna - Teacher Departmentof integrated language skills, Uzbek state worls languages university,
Tashkent, Republic of Uzbekistan Email: maqsadxonhakimova@gmail.com
Abstract: The article devoted to the study of distinctive features of The Liverpool poets, particularly Adrian Henry's dedication and character, who had a great influence on creating the very movement in art and poetry. Adrian Henri was a much-loved figure in the world of performance poetry, fine art and beyond. Henri's poetry retained a freshness and directness of approach best savoured perhaps in performance when he was often accompanied by musical instruments
Key words: The Liverpool poetry, dedication, anthology, Liverpool scene, Performance poetry.
Аннотация: Статья посвящена изучению отличительных черт ливерпульских поэтов, в частности самоотверженности и характера Адриана Генри, оказавших большое влияние на создание самого движения в искусстве и поэзии. Адриан Анри был очень любимой фигурой в мире поэзии, изобразительного искусства и не только. Поэзия Генри сохранила свежесть и прямоту подхода, которые лучше всего ощущались, возможно, в исполнении, когда его часто аккомпанировали музыкальные инструменты.
Ключевые слова: ливерпульская поэзия, посвящение, антология, ливерпульская сцена, поэзия перформанса.
The Liverpool poets, The name given to a group of three poets, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, and Brian Patten (1946- ), who came together in the 1960s in the period of the Liverpool euphoria generated partly by the success of the Beatles. Their anthologies include The Mersey Sound (1967), The Liverpool Scene (1967), and New Volume (1983). The combined tone of their work was pop, urban, anti-academic, good-humoured, and vocal: poetry was conceived by them as a medium for public rather than private consumption, a Performance Art.
INTRODUCTION
Scientific Journal Impact Factor
THE METHODS AND MATERIALS
Adrian Henri is perhaps best known as one of the Liverpool poets, with Brian Patten and Roger McGough, but his career spanned everything from artist and poet to teacher, rock and roll performer, playwright and librettist. Inspired by his home city of Liverpool, his characterisation of popular culture in verse helped to widen the audience for poetry among 1960s British youth, and he could name among his friends John Lennon and Paul McCartney. When Henri, McGough and Patten became well known nationally, Henri chose to remain in Liverpool, turning his back on the trendier London scene, saying there was nowhere he loved better.
('I'm concerned about the person next door, and the person next to me.' [5]) and are filled with images of their environment, such as streets, cafes, buses, parties, cinemas, and chip shops. They also drew on popular culture, such as pop music, comic books, and television, and make references to casual relationships, and the 'recreational' drugs of the era such as cannabis and LSD. Political issues of the day, such as the Vietnam war, CND (The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), the Cold War, racial intolerance and 'the bomb', also make an occasional appearance in their poems. Live for today, because we could all be annihilated at the push of a button tomorrow, was part of the mind-set of the generation growing up in the wake of Hiroshima.
Their main influences were the Beat poets of America, particularly Alan Ginsberg, who impressed them when he visited Liverpool, and French Symbolist poetry, such as that of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. They were not interested in imitating the form or subject matter of the writers they admired, but were, rather, inspired by the mood and tone of their poems, and by their power to make an immediate emotional impact on the reader.
I suddenly realised that when I was reading about people like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, I felt as they felt. I recognised a kindred spirit, and therefore I must be a poet [7]
Their other influences were many and various. In Adrian Henri's poem 'Me' he lists people he admires, and alongside Burroughs, Rimbaud and Mallarmé we find pop, jazz, and classical musicians, radical political figures, film directors, artists, and poets and novelists from all eras. The concept of this poem has something in common with the cover of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album of 1967, being a catalogue of diverse influences, and showing the levelling effect of pop culture in bringing together the 'high' and 'low' arts.
Scientific Journal Impact Factor
Henri dedicated the poem 'Mrs Albion You've Got a Lovely Daughter' to Ginsberg, and on the death of the leading figure of modernist poetry, T. S. Eliot, in 1965, paid tribute to him in 'Poem in Memoriam to T. S. Eliot', likening him to 'a favourite distant uncle'.
And it was as if a favourite distant uncle had died. . .
For years I measured out my life with your coffeespoons
Your poems on the table in dusty bedsitters
Henri was a painter as well as a poet, and both he and Roger McGough were also musicians. Henri led a group called Liverpool Scene, and McGough was part of the pop group The Scaffold, along with Michael McCartney, brother of Beatle Paul.
Although the poetry of all three had aims and attitudes in common, they also had their own distinctive styles, both in performance and on the page, Brian Patten being the most serious and intense. In Henri's poems we typically find whimsical surrealism, gentle humour, and wistful romanticism. We also find, reflecting his other artistic endeavours, frequent references to painting and borrowings from pop music.
Adrian Henri was a much-loved figure in the world of performance poetry, fine art and beyond. Born in Birkenhead, Henri grew up in Rhyl, Wales, during the war years and trained as a painter at King's College, Newcastle where he was influenced by the abstract expressionists and the then newly-emergent pop artists. Painting would always remain a huge part of his life, influencing his writing and running alongside it. He first came to prominence as a poet as part of the Liverpool scene in the 1960s appearing alongside Roger McGough and Brian Patten in the groundbreaking anthology Penguin Modern Poets 10, more famously known as The Mersey Sound. This volume spearheaded the revival in performance poetry and gave it a genuinely popular status, in the words of one critic "wrestling poetry out of the hands of academe and taking it into pubs, clubs and the lives of everyday people." To date the anthology has sold over half a million copies and was highly influential in opening the doors to other performance-orientated artists who followed in subsequent decades including John Hegley, John Cooper-Clarke, Linton Kwesi Johnson and others. For many people the idea that poetry could open itself to working-class language and landscapes was genuinely liberating. Always a hugely energetic man, the success of The Mersey Sound marked the start of a frenetic period of activity for Henri as he took part in performances around the country and the globe and even formed a poetry band, The Liverpool Scene. Meanwhile he continued to produce his art, winning a major prize for his painting in the John Moores competition in 1972.
Scientific Journal Impact Factor
CONCLUSION
For the rest of his life Henri happily combined the twin activities of writing and painting, branching out into children's poetry, stage plays and television dramas. He taught at schools, colleges of further education and at both Liverpool and Manchester Colleges of Art, and he also undertook lectureships around the country, writers' tours for the Arts Council and a number of writer-in-residence appointments. He was president of the Merseyside Arts Association and Liverpool Academy of the Arts in the 1970s and was honorary professor of the city's John Moores University. At the end of the 1990s he suffered a severe stroke which severely impaired his capacity to communicate, but he remained undaunted, learning to walk, talk and paint again. However, the illness took its toll and he died in 2000 at the age of 68. Throughout his peripatetic life, Henri had continued to make Liverpool his base, saying there was nowhere he loved better. It was more than appropriate therefore, that just before his death, the city council conferred the freedom of the city on him.
Henri's poetry retained a freshness and directness of approach best savoured perhaps in performance when he was often accompanied by musical instruments. Influenced by the French symbolists and the Beat generation, Henri's work was often free in form and rich in imagery. These qualities are to the fore in 'Death in the Suburbs' which captures Henri at a public reading in his beloved Liverpool. The poem itself, with typical verve, imagines if the world were ever to end "it would start ending in Orpington" and demonstrates a characteristic Henri ploy, taking the everyday world and giving it a surreal twist. His reading is charged with the energy of his undimmed political and social commitment, but the piece rises above simple sloganeering in his painter's eye for the objects of the world, both beautiful and debased; the cherry blossom alongside the pre-packaged meals. Although the poem envisages destruction and has a satirical bite, in its energy and closing images of beauty it's typical of the generous vision of this eclectic and tolerant writer.
1. Booth, Martin. British Poetry 1964-84: Driving Through the Barricades. London:
2. Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1985.
3. Cookson, Linda. Brian Patten. Plymouth: Northcote House. 1997.
4. Lindop, Grevel. 'Poetry Rhetoric and the Mass Audience: The case of the Liverpool poets'. British Poetry Since 1960. Ed. G. Lindop and M. Schmidt. London: Carcanet, 1972.
REFERENCES
Oriental Renaissance: Innovative, R VOLUME 1 | ISSUE 4
educational, natural and social sciences 0 ISSN 2181-1784
Scientific Journal Impact Factor SJIF 2021: 5.423
5. Lucie-Smith, Edward. ed. The Liverpool Scene. New York: Doubleday. 1968.
6. Penguin Modern Poets 10: The Mersey Sound. Penguin. 1967.
7. Thwaite, Antony. Poetry Today: A critical Guide to British Poetry: 1960-1984. London: Longman. 1985.
