Versed

It may come as a shock to realize that Richard Hell, famed punk of bands such as the Voidoids, was originally a published poet. It's not surprising that he was interested in poetry, since late-1960s New York was awash in Beat fervor, but he made it into print, and prolifically. He can clearly write this stuff, which he ably proves in his latest novel, Godlike, a many-layered work full of Beat prosody, poems, and bursts of narrative that don't direct the book as much as escape from it.

Echo Danon

Richard Hell is Godlike.

Details

Appears at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29

Admission is free

362-8193

www.cit yl ights.com

City Lights, 261 Columbus (at Broadway), S.F.

Related Content

• A Trip to the Gay Bar with Hunx and His Punx's Seth Bogart
  April 1, 2011
• Hunx-a Hunx-a Burnin’ Love
  March 23, 2011
• 10 Words That Will Make Your New Band Name Suck in 2011
  January 5, 2011
• Rambo vs. Rimbaud - Muni Vandal Strikes 'First Blood'
  January 4, 2008
• Last Night: Nobunny at the Independent
  January 25, 2009

More About

• Richard Hell
• Paul Vaughn
• Paul Verlaine
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Book Reviews

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Subtitled The Hospital Notebooks of Paul Vaughn, Incorporating His Memoir-Novelette of R.T. Wode, the book is primarily a love story between the 16-year-old R.T. and the 27-year-old Paul, both poets, both mad for life, both doing plenty of drugs and engaging in sex, homosexual and otherwise, in 1970s New York. R.T. quits poetry in his 20s, vanishes into South America, and becomes a legend in the States. The parallel to Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine is there for the taking, but never announced.

These poets, like the Beats and every mad visionary before them, do not shy away from tackling intellectual ideas, which they toss around like beach balls before letting them drift away, unresolved, the luxury of drug-addled freethinkers. Often the prose appears to be an exercise in spontaneous writing, or is impenetrable -- "Thick heavy ribbons from the sky of slow golden syrup form a sideways stack of slanting 8's that slump at once." I have no idea what this means, even in the context of nearby sentences. But Hell does haul out some memorable lines, such as, "He felt like his insides were aligned in wide vertical stripes."

It's a book true to the eccentricities, and annoyances, of Beat writing. Sometimes Hell puts quotes around clichéd phrases, almost like he's apologizing for their use. Parenthetical asides factor heavily, mimicking a poet's frantic mind. But the poetry (Hell's own, written by different characters) is clearly defined, properly indented, and quite good. It may be billed as fiction, but Godlike is Hell's book of verse.