'We are the people who are desperate beyond emotion': Lou Reed's lost poetry to be published

Poetry reflecting on nationhood, sex and whiskey, written in 1970 after Lou Reed left the Velvet Underground, is to be published for the first time

“We are the crystal gaze returned through the density and immensity of a berserk nation.” It’s a line that could have been written by an angry young poet from Trump’s America, but it was actually penned decades previously, by the bard of New York’s grimy rock’n’roll underbelly: Lou Reed.

A collection of the songwriter’s previously unseen poems will be published later this year, along with recordings of him performing them at St Mark’s Church, New York, in 1971 (with Allen Ginsberg in the audience). The book, entitled Do Angels Need Haircuts? and published in April, will also feature an afterword by his widow Laurie Anderson, as well as Reed’s own introductions to the poems. Of the 12 poems and short stories in the collection, only three have been published before, one as a Velvet Underground song and two in small-press poetry zines.

We are the people without land. We are the people without tradition. We are the people who do not know how to die peacefully and at ease. We are the thoughts of sorrows. Endings of tomorrows. We are the wisps of rulers and the jokers of kings.

We are the people without right. We are the people who have known only lies and desperation. We are the people without a country, a voice or a mirror. We are the crystal gaze returned through the density and immensity of a berserk nation. We are the victims of the untold manifesto of the lack of depth of full and heavy emptiness.

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