This edition of Genesis Grasp was released in 1971, two years before Television was formed.
This poem is untitled, and really makes no sense at all. Richard Hell's first poem where he really found a unique voice, a blend of Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan.
“I rise to shut the window and looking out resolve never to turn back. Then she told me why the pinhead couldn't stay at the party.”
Hell plays around with time a lot in the poem above. Here, he uses non-parallel structure, "rise" and "told" to change the representation of time and ultimately the perspective of the reader. This is something that, even after Hell left Television, was used by Tom Verlaine in the lyrics of Televisions album, "Marquee Moon." In the song "Venus" Verlaine sings, "My senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves, Broadway looked so medieval." Here, in this group of lyrics, Verlaine uses "senses are sharp" and "looked so medieval" to acquire the same literary effect as the poem above.
Dark Poems and Falling Lines
Richard Hell's love for French poetry really shows in his poem, "Goodbye." In Baudelaire's poem "The Abyss," a poem that Hell is known to have enjoyed, Baudelaire divides up long, near run-on sentences with line breaks, which give the work a unique, uneven pace. The pace of the poem makes the reader feel as though they are sliding to an unavoidable ending. In the poem below, Hell uses line breaks and even formats the poem so that the lines get shorter and shorter over time for each main idea. This technique is also used by the members of Television in the lyrics of their song "Marquee Moon." Interestingly, because how the lyrics look on a page will never matter to the listener of a song, Tom Verlaine repeats several lines to give the lyrics a dark feeling of pace and movement. The last lines of the lyrics go, "I was listening/Listening to the rain/I was hearing/Hearing something else." Even though Verlaine could not put up with Richard Hell's antics, he hold a lot of the same literary techniques as Hell.
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