What Just Happened - Richard Hell

What Just Happened, by Richard Hell, with images by Christopher Wool / ISBN 9781959708001 / 156-page paperback published in 2023 by Winter Editions *** 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 mus