The chorus to one of the definitive punk anthems petulantly declared, "I belong to the blank generation/I can take it or leave it each time."

		Richard Hell Where: The Andy Warhol Museum, North Side. When: 8 p.m. Saturday. Tickets: $15; 412-237-8300.

And that seems to be the kind of relationship that its writer, Richard Hell, has had to being a punk rock icon. When the Kentucky native originally arrived in New York in 1974 with his buddy Tom Verlaine, his intention was to become a poet and publish his own work.

Although he continued to write, Hell (real name Richard Meyers) became a member of such seminal bands as Television and the Heartbreakers before moving on to his more memorable work with Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Hell left his mark not only with songs like "Blank Generation" and "Spurts," but with his spiky hair, shredded clothes and an abrasive, slurred delivery that was unconcerned with such niceties as key and pitch.

The Voidoids never amassed the catalog of CBGB contemporaries like the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads or Patti Smith. They released the 1977 classic "Blank Generation" and followed in 1982 with "Destiny Street." Hell returned in 1992 with the Dim Stars, a noise-rock side project with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

Hell's slight output as rocker has much to do with his literary pursuits (with a little drug addiction thrown in). He cast music aside to release several volumes of poetry and edit the literary magazine Cuz. In 1996 he released his first full-length novel, "Go Now," the story of a junkie punk on a cross-country road trip.

He's won even more acclaim for his latest novel, "Godlike," in which he loosely sets the century-old love story between poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud in 1970s New York.

On Saturday night, he will be at The Andy Warhol Museum, in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984," to read from his work and share some anecdotes about that revolutionary scene.

Earlier this week, the 56-year-old Hell reflected on the past, his writing and the Rhino retrospective "Spurts: The Richard Hell Story."

You went to New York to be a writer and poet. How did you get pulled into the music scene?

I didn't get pulled into it, I just got frustrated with the writing. I wanted to do something that was going to have a wider impact. I always had been excited by music, like most people of my generation. I was a teenager in high school when the bands of the '60s were making music that was relevant to people's lives -- basically, the news about what life was like, as opposed to how most adults depicted it and the mass media depicted it. But by the time I was in New York, in a position to do things myself, that era had passed and music had become really dull and pompous and irrelevant. So I wanted to, and the people I was hanging with wanted to, make music that was about real life again. So, we went that way. The thing about music as opposed to writing that interested me at the time -- though I did sort of exhaust my interest in that -- is it includes so many other media, so many various ways of communicating.

I read that you never considered yourself as having the personality of a performer.

It was always a challenge. I did just finally realize it was more depleting than it was rewarding. At the same time, if I go 18 months or a year without some kind of relation to a live audience, even a simple reading, I start feeling antsy and dissatisfied. I think I'm kind of an inhibited person. But there are some great performers who are that way. It's possible to be more reserved that way, whether it's Frank Sinatra or Bob Dylan. Neither of them are demonstrative as performers. I start feeling uncomfortable with having everyone stare at me.

Did you have any sense back then that what you were doing was important enough for people to still be talking about now?

I was surprised that it wasn't like mass mania at the time. It was obviously the most interesting stuff going on in the world in music, but it took, like, 30 years to break through. It didn't really happen until after Nirvana that the records from that era started getting the respect they deserve. Even the Sex Pistols, who were the most successful, their record didn't go gold for 15 years or something like that.

People still argue about the origins of punk. What would you say you were drawing from?

There are a lot of ways to conceive of what you mean when you say punk. Generally, people are referring to that big explosion of anger and frustration and in-your-face obnoxiousness of the early '70s. When I was first starting to do stuff in 1974, I was really stimulated by the idea of these various ways of communicating. So I wanted everything to have a message. I wanted my hair to say something, my clothes to say something, my lyrics, the music, the posters. I very consciously came up with approaches to those things to have that impact. There were a couple different themes that were important to me: A major one was talking about real life, as opposed to presenting yourself as some heroic god; and two, doing it yourself, and that was all mixed up with refusing to be a pawn for the corporations who were always trying to persuade you that you have to have their stuff and dress the way they say, use their products to be an interesting, sexy person. I was countering that with inventing your own self and precluding the possibility of you being sold it. In other words, thrift store clothes that are shredded and hair that you cut yourself -- and you don't even need a mirror to do it.

Obviously the corporate influence is even bigger now than in the '70s. Do you think there's validity to punk now, to people dressing like you guys did?

No. There wasn't even them. The point was, "This is how I'm doing it." I remember in 1977 seeing ripped up clothes in the windows of Macy's. If punk has any meaning that matters, if it has any substance, it's to stay ahead of the people who classify you. The point isn't to do it the way I did it or any other person did it. It's to escape classification. Once they can successfully label you, you're their property.

Music is a collaborative effort. Writing is solitary. Do you like the more solitary work you're doing now?

I love the records, but I do like being the one who's in charge. The nice thing about the solitariness is you don't have responsibilities to other people. If you have a band, you have to be working all the time to keep people fed. You have to be rehearsing all the time to keep the stuff honed. And it's such an expensive proposition. The relationship to the record company means you have to be touring. There's a lot of other obligations besides making the record, which to me is the interesting part.

What inspired you to write "Godlike"? Did you see some of your own journey in it?

Not much. It is set in the '70s in New York and I was there then, so that was useful. But I went into the book wanting to write about poets in a way that made writing as vocation and poetry as a set of values as exciting as it seems to me. Which sounds really farfetched, but that's why I wanted to write the book. I mean, no one really seems to think of poetry as exciting. When I say poetry, I mean the values of poetry -- wanting every moment of life to somehow be extreme and extremely ... felt.

That's hard to maintain.

It is. It's really impossible. Certain people who have that as an aim, it tends to be not only exhausting but fatal. There is a long list of people who burn out quickly.

Anyway, that was my initial intention, to write a book about poets at the height of their intensity. But I didn't know what to use for a story. This is always a problem for me. I'm not plot-oriented. It's not what comes naturally, so I'm always having to find pre-existing plots to use. My first novel was a road trip book, and road trips supply their own momentum. For this book, I used as the bare structure the love story of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. The point of the book was not to tell the story. I go wherever I want to. It was fun because I knew it was going to require me to write poems to serve as the work in the book. I also wanted to talk about that it feels like to outlive your youth, to hit middle age, 'cause that was something I was thinking about.

Your musical credibility is established. Is it hard to establish literary cred?

It has been, but I've been working on it for a while. I'm fairly happy with the degree of respect I'm given. It is a battle, but I don't want to complain too much because it is an advantage to be a guy who has a reputation in another area to be working in a given area. It's also frustrating, because it happens in both fields. In music, people try to dismiss me as a so-called "poet" making records. As a novelist, I have a problem with people saying, "This is a punk rocker writing a book." It makes it easy for them to not take it seriously, dismiss the thing without looking at what's being achieved. I feel like I know at least as well as anyone my level of competence in both areas. I'm probably more critical of myself than anyone else, but I also know how good I am. I'm pretty secure in my abilities as a writer.

You recently released "Spurts: The Richard Hell Story." Did you enjoy listening back to the old stuff and compiling this, and were there any revelations?

It was really good to finally get that done so that it was like a lid on my music career. I wanted to have something like that for a long time, because no single record completely satisfied me. I wanted to make one that had that the best performances of my best songs all in one place. You know, that music does have the power. Any music people have from the past has this funny power to carry you back. All that music does that for me. I don't really let myself succumb to it, but it takes you over to some degree, returning you to that time when it was the soundtrack of my existence. But I didn't really live there. I was pretty clinical about it.