Lou Reed Papers: Poetry

The first serious instance we have of Lou Reed's writing are found in his self-published poetry zine Lonely Woman Quarterly, Spring 1962, while he was undergraduate studying Literature at Syracuse University. During his time at Syracuse he famously wrote "Heroin" which he would read at the St. Marks Poetry Project in 1971.

The sentiment that Rock & Roll could be more permeated his entire life, that there could be more to the music that he loved was something he expressed on multiple occasions and in different ways. In a 1985 interview for NBC News Today Los Angeles with Rona Elliot, Reed says of his early writing,

I was right out of college and I had these great novelist ambitions about it. I wanted the Velvet Underground to write about adult themes. I wanted to make Rock & Roll songs about things that really matter. 

I never considered [Velvet Underground songs as] the edge. If it had been a novel, nobody'd think twice about it. That's the thing. People had, and I think still have, a contempt for the form. What I was writing about was no big deal, it just hadn't taken place in Rock & Roll. I just thought of the Rock & Roll format as a sonnet, a contemporary sonnet. Three chords, turn it up to eleven, there you go.

If it was all autobiographical I'd be dead 100 times. And another things is, there isn't enough about me to write about that's just that interesting. I always wrote about the people around me. ... I wanted it to be really real. Like Clint playing Dirty Harry, I want you to really believe I was like that, that was really what I was all about.

In a 1990 interview on Dutch TV show Onrust! for the occasion of the release of album Songs for Drella (1990), Reed speaks about his love of writing:

Writing is really amazing. It never ceases to amaze me, what you find out when you're writing. It seems you can think about something for the longest time but it's only when you enter the formal act of writing - commuting things to paper - that I really gain that clarity. Not just sitting thinking. The process of writing is when I find things out. I do a lot of rewriting.

His explanation in this interview of his righting and rewriting process include some insight as to why there are so few pieces of handwritten lyrics in the Lou Reed Papers:

I got a computer, it helps somebody like me enormously because I can't read my handwriting. It's a very serious problem for me because you have notes over here and you're trying to write quickly and you can't read any of it. All these great insights, all these universal truths, you can't read any of it. They're completely gone.

And he concludes with his perspective on his writing process:

More than anything I love writing. Just the process of writing. It never ceases to amaze me how much I just love doing that. I mean, it was a long time before I understood that and I don't know why I would deny myself the pleasure of doing it, but I do. I hold off for a long time with it; give my brain a chance to get going on a subject. It's no good to just sit right down, [my brain's] got a subject then I forget about it. Consciously. Then I sit down and write, and with any kind of luck [knocks on wood table] something will have been happening".

In the 1992 Mark Scheerer interview he also talked about the publishing of his 1991 collection of poetry and lyrics "Between Thought and Expression",

My interest in the collection was that it would tell a story almost like a novel. It's taking you through 3 decades. I see improvement.

I think it can hold it's own to contemporary poetry. But I'd like it to do a lot better than that.

A decade later Lou Reed would continue to blur the lines lines between Music and Poetry, releasing album The Raven (2003). In a series of 2003 "AOL Sessions" videos, Lou Reed explained

One day Robert Wilson came to me and said "You should write a play about Edgar Allan Poe". I took this very seriously and reread a lot of Poe and eventually wrote a play that was about different works of Edgar Allan Poe which has now been rewritten for Music.