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

Episode Four of Private Life

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.

Listen on Apple Podcasts below and on all other platforms here.

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). 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.

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Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the Review’s robust sixty-year archive (regularly releasing newly recorded audio versions of these classic texts) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books.