Godlike by Richard Hell

Join us at e-flux on Tuesday, March 3, at 7pm to celebrate the re-issue of Godlike (New York Review of Books, 2026), with a reading by author Richard Hell. Books will be available for purchase, and a signing will follow the reading.

Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City. The book takes us through Paul Vaughn’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, most pertinently the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous R. T. Wode. Godlike is infused with evocations—and sometimes actual poems—of many New York poets of the era, from Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett to Edwin Denby and James Schuyler. It achieves a lyricism both profane and profound as it conjures the frenetic vitality as well as the existential malaise of an era. It’s a searching meditation on art, life, love, and the impossibility of everything.

Originally published in 2005, Godlike is newly reissued by NYRB Classics, featuring an introduction by Raymond Foye.

Richard Hell was born and grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, but dropped out of high school and moved alone to New York at the age of seventeen. He first came to public attention in the mid-1970s as an originator of punk. In 1984 he retired from music and returned to his original ambition of writing books. He is the author of several works of fiction, poetry, essays, notebooks, and autobiography, including The Voidoid, Across the Years, Artifact, Go Now, Hot and Cold, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, Massive Pissed Love, and What Just Happened, as well as co-author of book-length collaborations, including the collection of poems Wanna Go Out? (published under the heteronym Theresa Stern) with the musician Tom Verlaine and the image-texts of Psychopts with the artist Christopher Wool.

For more information, please contact [email protected].

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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