Godlike

By: Richard Hell

Published by New York Review of Books, 2026-02-10

An outrageous spectacle of love between two untamed poets, a 27-year old man and a teenage boy, written by one of America’s original punks and finest writers.

Based on Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine’s notorious affair, but set in the epochal downtown poetry scene of filthy 1970s New York, Godlike is a tribute to poetry and the beauty and mess of art, desire, and New York City.

New York poet Paul Vaughn has a trick for enjoying poetry readings: he simply imagines the reader died a long time ago. Paul is twenty-seven, married, and an admired poet himself. R. T. Wode’s mission is to give offense. He’s also a poet, freshly landed in the city, and, at age sixteen, unknown.

Paul worships T. They embark on a tempestuous affair, dropping acid and crashing parties and perambulating the grit and grime of New York City ca. 1972 in pursuit of experience that is the nourishment for art. Paul is in love with T., but T. is in love with experience. Their relationship disintegrates.

A novel of compelling originality and transcendent beauty by legendary musician and poet Richard Hell, Godlike transposes the notorious romance between Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud to the East Village in its squalid, glorious ’70s heyday. The book comprises a version of Paul’s 1997 hospital notebooks: diaries amidst poems and essays, along with, most pertinently, the poet’s third-person memoir-novelette of his youthful time with the now-famous T. Godlike is infused as well with evocations—and actual poems—of poets such as Ted Berrigan, James Schuyler, Rene Ricard, Edwin Denby, Ron Padgett, and Frank O’Hara. 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.