Böcker av Richard Hell

From an early age, Richard Hell dreamed of running away. He arrived penniless in New York City at seventeen; ten years later he was a pivotal voice of the age of punk, cofounding such seminal bands as Television, The Heartbreakers, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids—whose song "Blank Generation" remains the defining anthem of the era, an era that would forever alter popular culture in all its forms. How this legendary downtown artist went from a bucolic childhood in the idyllic Kentucky foothills to igniting a movement that would take over New York and London''s restless youth culture—cementing CBGB as the ground zero of punk and spawning the careers of not only Hell himself, but a cohort of friends such as Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, the Ramones, and Debby Harry—is a mesmerizing chronicle of self-invention, and of Hell''s yearning for redemption through poetry, music, and art. An acutely rendered, unforgettable coming-of-age story, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp evokes with feeling, lyricism, and piercing intelligence both the world that shaped him and the world he shaped.

In WHAT JUST HAPPENED, Richard Hell's new poems are interspersed with images created for the book by Christopher Wool. Hell's 2019 valedictory of an essay, "Falling Asleep," which asserts his dreamy conclusions regarding the nature of reality, and "Chronicle," a list drawn from his recent years' notebooks, complete the collection.Kentucky native Richard Meyers dropped out of high school and moved to New York to be a poet, but after a few years of writing and editing poems and pamphlets and literary magazines he decided--in 1972--to change his name to Hell and sing and write songs in a rock and roll band instead. He still wrote poems at times but didn't want to be seen as a "rock poet," so he underplayed that part of his story. After 10 years and the impact of "punk," which D.I.Y. movement Hell had a lot to do with triggering, he left music behind too, in favor of fiction and journalism. He hasn't published a proper book of new poems until now, 50 years later. Nearly all the poems in WHAT JUST HAPPENED were written during the 2020-2021 pandemic. The poems are accompanied by an essay on the subject of "Falling Asleep," which condition Richard proposes as being the closest humans get to a direct experience of reality, and the book closes with "Chronicle," an 88-entry list of observations, eruptions and goofs.Poetry. Essay.