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The Argotist Online |
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Adrian Henri Interview (Originally
published in
The Argotist magazine in August 1996) 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. In 1963 he was
one of the founding members (with McGough, John Gorman and Mike McCartney) of
the musical group that became the Scaffold, which went on to record many
singles, several of which were hits. In 1967, he founded the poetry/rock group
Liverpool Scene and, in 1973, he was a founding member of the Grimms, which
presented a mixture of poetry and songs, and recording several albums. He exhibited paintings both nationally and internationally; his first major London exhibition was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1968. His numerous publications include The Mersey Sound (with McGough and Patten), Wish You Were Here and Not Fade Away. He was a firm believer in the live poetry reading and read his poetry at many and varied venues as well as holding poetry workshops at schools and colleges. He died in Liverpool aged 68 in 2000 following a long illness. Shortly before his death he was awarded the Freedom of the City of Liverpool in recognition of his contribution to Liverpool's cultural scene. He also received an honorary doctorate from Liverpool university. Jeffrey
Side has had poetry published in various magazines such as Poetry Salzburg
Review, and on poetry web sites such as Underground Window,
A Little Poetry, Poethia,
nthposition, eratio, Ancient Heart, Blazevox, Lily, Big Bridge, Jacket, Textimagepoem,
Apochryphaltext,
9th St. Laboratories, P.F.S. Post, Great Works, hutt, ken*again, Poets' Corner, The Dande Review, Poetry Bay, Dusie
and
CybpherAnthology.
JS: Is there a difference between poetry that is read aloud at book launches
etc and poetry that is read aloud to a paying audience in a bar or as part of a
pub entertainment? AH: There is, but there shouldn't be. Talking
about performance poetry, in my terms, is a false dichotomy because I see
reading the poem out loud and reading the poem on the page as two aspects of the
poem's life. Both are equally important. But I can quite see that from the late
70s there is a whole school of "performance" poets whose work is
primarily not for the page. It's to some extent ephemeral. It's often
issue-based and it's intended for consumption in the kind of environment you've
just mentioned. It's meant to be entertaining, maybe thought provoking, and it
does all these things, at best, extremely well. But it doesn't really cut it as
far as being poetry is concerned because poetry is something that has to live
past the occasion. It's probably a more fruitful distinction to say that there
is a poetry that occurs for an audience and poetry that does not. One branch of
which would be performance poetry. A much bigger branch is poetry which is
simply concerned with reaching out towards the world. Adrian Mitchell, in the
preface to his first book, says, "Most people ignore most poetry because
most poetry ignores most people". At this moment, lots of poets are working
in a way that does ignore most people. A whole lot of academic poetry, written
certainly in America and England, has nothing to do with the kinds of issues
we're talking about. JS: When we read a poem silently to ourselves we can control the speed at
which it is read, we can give the poem more time and attention than a
performance would allow. Do you agree? AH: Absolutely. I suppose the analogy is with
music; you can get something from a performance that you will never get from a
CD. Listening to a poem read out loud is a first contact with the writer and
whatever skill the writer has in projecting their work makes it a different
experience than reading it on the page. Both are valid. And this is where the
issue for performance comes: the poem has to be good enough to stand up in the
cold light of day. JS: So with the spoken poem, the sound of the voice is part of the
experience—other than any supposed content? It's not really necessary to be
too hung up over getting a message? AH: Yes. T.S. Eliot said, I think,
"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood". Some part of
what the poem is about hopefully transfers itself at the reading. It's
quantatively different from reading from a page because you can't get the tone
or inflection that you get in performance. It's not theatre, it's not being an
actor; you're not pretending to be anything you're not. I think it boils down to
honesty, the feeling that somebody is talking directly to you. It's not just
talking down a telephone. It's a very considered, distilled way of talking that
articulates something for you so you go away from the reading feeling you've had
a good night out and that certain things have been made clear to you. JS: There seems to be a continuum: at one end there is someone like John
Cooper Clarke and, at the other, someone like James Fenton.
AH: There's another thing: Fenton's thought
of as being the darling of the academics, yet he's a wonderful performer of his
poetry. There are people who are mainly page poets. I don't think you'd gain an
awful lot from going to listen to Geoffrey Hill read his poems. You'd gain a
lot, assuming you liked that kind of thing, if you studied them on the page. JS: Now in performance poetry it's the personality of the poet, theatricals,
gimmicks, which are the main thing whereas spoken poetry, however much the poet
is bracketed as a performer, is essentially a communication process. AH: Yes. Pure Performance poetry often
becomes the springboard to something else. I'm thinking of someone like John
Hegley who's become an alternative comedian in all but name. That kind of
performance poetry is defined almost by what happens to people who do it. Which
is not true of other poets; poets who are concerned with writing and their craft
but at the same time happen to be rather good at projecting their work. I've seen an awful lot of awful poetry readings in my
time—sometimes I feel I don't get paid for performing, I get paid for sitting
through the others. It does demand a "something". You can't just stand
up and stammer over your words. There are performance skills; attitudes that you
learn by experience and listening to other people. But it's not theatrical quite
in that sense. You are not acting but you are projecting, slightly, an enlarged
version of yourself. You're being yourself plus. And there are other factors: things like programming
and running order are incredibly important. I've seen people who write good
poems make an utter hash of reading them because they haven't given any
attention to a lot of basics. And your audience varies. If I go into a primary
school then my whole approach is going to be different to talking to an audience
of adults. It never gets boring because you really don't get the same audience
twice. JS: Does the "pop" tag come from "poetry for the people"
coinciding with the popular song? AH: Yes, absolutely. If you thought, as I
did, that the majority of poetry in Britain up until the end of the 50s was
elitist, and if you wanted to do something about it, then that was an issue you
had to take on board. Because you weren't looking for models from the immediate
past earlier, you looked around for other models. In my case, things like the 32
bar pop song form, the Blues, Talking Blues; all these idioms offered
possibilities that more traditional things like sonnets didn't because they came
loaded with something already. JS: How do you go about getting bookings? Do you do it yourself?
AH: At
the moment I have an agent, simply because it takes the workload off me and I
always get embarrassed talking about money. At one point there was the
"London Poetry Secretariat", then a "National Poetry
Secretariat". They would issue contracts, fix readings and, to some extent,
provide subsidy. Unfortunately, both of these have now gone, so one has to work
in the commercial world. My agent would insist on conditions, like; every
reading I do now, on the contract it says there has to be a bookstall. Simple
things like that are enormously important; partly for me because of royalties,
but also because people want to buy books at readings. They like the idea of
getting their book signed, of buying them as a memento. So it's very useful to
have someone who nags people, who will check up on all the arrangements. JS: With music or theatre, the public don't mind paying but I get the feeling
that this would be different for poetry. Do you feel comfortable asking for
payment when you perform? AH: I think labour is worthy of its hire.
Promoters wouldn't pay me to go and do things and the audience wouldn't pay to
come and see me if they didn't think I was worth it. The whole idea about fees
is a bit thorny. There are some people who earn a lot more than I do and a lot
who earn less. If you're not giving value for money, then in the long-term
you're not going to get asked to do things. JS: Why do you sometimes use musical accompaniment? AH: Well, it goes back to the situation in
the early 60s. There was great excitement about the music that was going on,
what we had heard had happened in America—poetry and jazz. But then, all the
poetry and jazz I'd heard seemed to be a battle between the jazz and the words.
On the other hand, music expects lyrics. So it seemed logical to (a) work with
what was to hand (the Beat groups) and (b) work in an idiom that was
word-friendly rather than word-antipathetic. Pop music is a vehicle for words.
Since the mid 60s, Andy Roberts has been setting my poems to music: mostly to
solo acoustic guitar. He tailors the music very closely to the words and the
mood. He's also amazingly good at picking up the rhythms. JS: How would that work out in practical terms? AH: If it's a set thing, like 12 bar blues,
it's then simply a matter of finding the tempo for it. It's partly what's
written on the page, but it's also the speech rhythms, the way I accent the
words. These things determine the tune that he writes. JS: How is a poem accompanied by music different from a song? AH: It is different. It's very hard for poets to write
songs because your natural instinct is to make the words do all the work. The
really great songs have holes to allow the music through. The poet's instinct is
to fill up those spaces. In a song, there's an equivalence of words and music
but the poem can exist on its own, without the music. There are other things,
like giving the musician room to display what he's got to offer. In that sense,
the form of the poem—as it would be read out loud on its own—would be
changed; we'd get an instrumental passage somewhere in it. JS: Is there a different way of writing poems that are to be performed and
that are for the page? AH: I honestly don't think there is a
distinction. It varies over the years, but there are always some things that
lend themselves slightly more to performance than others. Which is not to say
that one couldn't read any of them out loud, ultimately. You get to have a
backlog of performance-friendly poems. One of the problems is that there are
favourite poems that everyone who turns up probably knows. If I don't read them,
they feel cheated. If I do, they'll think, "God! Hasn't he written anything
new?" So I try and include some of the "Merseysound" poems, some
from the in-between period, but maybe stress the more recent ones. JS: Apparently, when people ask Bob Dylan to sing his old songs he says
they're not "old" because he sings them every night. Could this apply
to you? AH: One of the whole points of writing poetry
is that you take a set of circumstances and, by getting words in the right
order, you preserve it. So they do exist in a continuing present. Really great
performers can perform the same thing night after night and make it sound new
every time. Bob Dylan, for instance: you never hear him on his tours doing songs
the way they were originally recorded. And that's presumably the way he keeps
himself sane; by not just reproducing the same performance. Some of the things I
do with Andy Roberts, that date back to the 60s, we've either consciously or
unconsciously changed. A lot of the things we do are very free structures. But
even on your own, you can read the same poem very differently. You have to get
to know the poems, particularly new ones. Sometimes it can be quite hard because
you don't know what words are coming next. Until you do, you can't get on top of
the rhythms. JS: That's perhaps one of the advantages of performance poetry—the
freshness. Once the poem is on the page, it becomes the reader's poem to some
extent. AH: As far as I'm concerned, once the poem is
published or on record—in the public domain—then it isn't, in any real
sense, mine. JS: I've been to a lot of readings where the introductions are better than
the actual poems, but how would you talk beforehand about some of your more
abstract pieces? AH: One of the crucial elements in reading
poetry out loud is that it would be almost impossible for one to simply stand
there and read poems: you know, Title/ Poem...Title/ Poem, for half an hour. It
would drive everybody mad. Poetry is a very heightened form of words and demands
concentration. Nevertheless, I think the poem should stand up on its own and
shouldn't need introductions and footnotes. Part of the function of talking in
between the poems is to relax attention. It's a focusing in and out of attention
on the words. JS: Why do you sometimes leave double spaces between words in your printed
poems? AH: I think of the printed page as a script
for performance. The use of white space is just for indicating a pause. It
really is quite fundamental because this whole thing arose from the idea that
the poet's own voice and breath was a measure of the rhythm of the poem.
Initially, I always used to read my poems out loud to myself or into a tape
recorder. But now I just work on the page. I can hear it in my head; I can hear
my voice saying it. It's the idea of writing for your own voice which seems to
me almost paramount .
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