Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
Now That it's Now The New Directions Blog
This is the Richard Hell everyone knows. Frontman for the seminal punk band Television (first known as The Neon Boys) and later for The Voidoids. 
He became a legend in the punk scene. Malcolm McLaren says that Hell inspired the look for the Sex Pistols. D. Boon cites him as an influence in "History Lesson Part II". And he has undoubtedly inspired legions of lesser-known punk and hardcore bands. And hopefully still is.
But prior to joining The Neon Boys, he'd dropped out of high school and moved to New York (from Kentucky) to become a poet. In addition to writing under a pen name — along with future bandmate Tom Verlaine, as a sort of combined character — he was also published under his given name: Richard Meyers. And among those editors who saw Meyers' talent and put his poems in print was our very own James Laughlin, who published eight of them in New Directions in Prose and Poetry 22 back in 1970.
In lieu of my being able to perform a little show-and-tell routine with each of you in person, here are some scanned images of that well-handled volume.
The cover:
The first of his poems, called "Cells":
And the contributor page with his short bio:
Two last comments before you run off to iTunes in search of Television or the Voidoids: 1) the back cover copy calls Richard Meyers "a promising discovery"; 2) Hell has written two novels and — according to this piece in The New York Observer — is in the process of writing his memoir. I can't wait.
*The clip of the Minutemen playing is from the wonderful documentary about them, called We Jam Econo.
Head over to Slate to read the entirety of Patti Smith's wonderful introduction to Albertine Sarrazin's Asrtagal.
ND editor Michael Barron interviewed Elaine Lustig for Bomb's blog. Read it here.
May 2013 News from New Directions
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In this week's issue of The New Yorker, you can read an excerpt from The Unknown University entitled "Mexican Manifesto". Enjoy.
Lina Meruane interviews Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas in the current issue of BOMB. Read it here.
Congratulations to Enrique Vila-Matas, whose novel Dublinesque is on the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist.
While in Denmark last August for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's Literature Festival, César Aira sat down to discuss his "ideal fairy tale." Watch it here.
Rebecca Ariel Porte, in a beautiful essay written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, dicusses Susan Howe's Sorting Facts: Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, addressing Chris Marker's films, as well. Definitely worth a read — here.
In one of the most creative reviews we've seen in a while, Bookslut's Lightsey Darst discusses all four collections in the first set of New Directions Poetry Pamphlets. Enjoy it here.
Calling it "breathatkingly subversive" in a review for the New York Review of Books, Yasmine El Rashidi discusses That Smell's English debut. Read it here.
Saying that the reading experience comes with a "sad sweetness," Vol. 1 Brooklyn dives into The Bridge Over the Neroch & Other Works, a newly translated collection by Leonid Tsypkin. Read it here.
Writing for Bookslut, Christopher Merkel reviews the 65th anniversary edition of the classic modernist text. Read it here.
Writing for The Washington Post, Scott Esposito reviewed our new edition of Queneau's Exercises in Style. Read it here.
In recent episode of Marfa Public Radio's "Talk at Ten", DeWitt read from and discussed Lightning Rods. You can listen to the entire program here.
The finalist shortlist for the annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction was recently announced, and Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods is among them. Congratulations!
In an essay entitled "Walking with Walser", The Quarterly Conversation tackles A Little Ramble and a book by Elfriede Jelinek that was inspired by Walser.
Poet Luljeta Lleshanaku recently contributed to The Paris Review Daily's "Windows on the World", a series on what writers from around the world see from their windows. Read it here.
Music & Literature's spring 2013 issue is devoted to László Krasznahorkai, the director Bela Tarr, and the artist Max Neumann. Needless to say, we're fans. Check it out here.
Poetry editor Jeffrey Yang recently spoke to The Atlantic's "By Heart" about George Oppen, grief, and the new collection Time of Greif: Mourning Poems.