# Richard Hell on ’Godlike’ and Poetry as a Way of Life

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/richard-hell-on-godlike-and-poetry-as-a-way-of-life
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/richard-hell-on-godlike-and-poetry-as-a-way-of-life.md
Podcast: [Private Life: A New York Review Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958)
Published: 2026-03-11T17:34:33+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/0113eb07
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/0113eb07/d3e0b05d.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/episodes/richard-hell-on-godlike-and-poetry-as-a-way-of-life
Duration seconds: 3490

## Resource

In this episode of Private Life , Richard Hell joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss his novel Godlike (newly reissued by NYRB Classics), his creative process, the love of poetry, and the stories behind his work. Richard Hell is a writer and former musician best known as a pioneer of the punk rock scene in 1970s New York. Originally from Kentucky, he moved to New York at the age of seventeen and began publishing his poetry. In his early twenties, along with his friend Tom Verlaine, he started the Neon Boys, which later became the influential punk rock band Television. He went on to form the bands the Heartbreakers and Richard Hell and the Voidoids. In addition to Godlike , Hell has written several novels, poetry collections, and essay collections, as well as a memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp (2013). His most recent book of poetry, What Just Happened , was published in 2023. Godlike , which was reissued last month by NYRB Classics with a new afterword by Raymond Foye, was originally published in 2005. Crossing Hell’s experiences in the demimonde of 1970s New York City with the doomed romance of the nineteenth-century poètes maudits of France, it traverses the profane and the profound in the story of a poet perambulating downtown Manhattan and pining for a young poet who probably won’t love him back. To find Richard Hell’s Godlike and other NYRB Classics, visit our book imprint at nyrb.com. Subscribe to The New York Review of Books , which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, provides online access to our full archive going back to 1963.

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