During the late 1960s, a number of rock critics – Ralph J. Gleason, among them, as well as literary critics Susan Sontag and Richard Poirier – claimed that real poetry was being composed by the new generation of songwriters – Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney of the Beatles. I knew nothing about poetry when I first heard these remarks, but having now worked for 20 years as poetry editor of the New Criterion, I know enough to realize that in those days lyricists rarely wrote even lines that could be deemed verse.

Only later, with the emergence of Lou Reed and the Talking Heads – both, not coincidentally, products of the New York scene – did things being to change. R.E.M.’s songs contain, or at least used to, more genuine lines than most contemporary collections of poetry, a fact unmentioned by critics. And, in general, the number of lines of verse in contemporary lyrics continues to increase – just listen to Belle and Sebastian. Such lyrics still never amount to full-fledged poems, but they are getting closer.

Back in the 1960s, Paul Simon at least did write occasionally decent metrically: “In restless dreams I walk alone / Narrow streets of cobblestone,” and “I turned my collar to the cold and damp,” from “The Sounds of Silence.” But “Yesterday” is one of the sappiest, cliche-ridden songs ever in the lyric category. Even as songwriting it is choked by the formulaic:

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly, I’m not half the man I used to be,
There’s a shadow hanging over me.
Oh yesterday came suddenly.

Why she had to go I don’t know she wouldn’t say.
I said something wrong now I long for yesterday.

Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh I believe in yesterday.

In the space of 11 lines, we must endure “half the man I used to be,” “a shadow hanging over me,” “I long for yesterday,” “an easy game to play,” “a place to hide away.” As for Bob Dylan, I’ll spare you “Forever Young,” which has more trite phrases than “Yesterday”; “Lay Lady Lay,” which almost does, too; and “Hurricane,” with its banal newspaper report style. A line from REM’s “You Are the Everything,” from “Green” (1988) is preferable to all of “Yesterday:” “For you alone you are the everything.” By the 1960s many poets had turned away from rhyming and strict metrical constructions. Many of the better rock lyricists of the next few decades would, too, and I believe that may have had more success. Lyrics by Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground often constituted poetry. He is the only lyricist I know who studied with a respected poet, Delmore Schwartz.

Downy sins of streetlight fancies
Chase the costumes she shall wear
Ermine furs adorn the imperious
Severin, Severin awaits you there.
(“Venus in Furs”)

I’ve been bound
To the memories of yesterday’s clouds.
(I’m Set Free”)

let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won’t be afraid.
(“I’ll Be Your Mirror”)

Good lines in rock songs derive from four styles: the straightforward, with a normal response to an ordinary experience; the lyrical, where elegant language is used to discuss love or loss; the political, when social issues are the focus; and surrealism, where writers use straight (if you will) nonsense, the juxtaposition of images not normally linked, or the taking to task of language and ideas worth demeaning. R.E.M. has lines in all categories (I say R.E.M. because band members share composition credits).”So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry),” from “Reckoning” (1984), falls in the straightforward category. The first line about phone calls – using the speech of time zones and telephone operators – is something:

Eastern to Mountain, third party call, the lines are down
The wise man built his words upon the rocks
But I’m not bound to follow suit

Also in the straightforward group, from the same record, are parts of “Camera”:

From the inside room, when the front room greeting
Becomes your special book, it was simple then.
When the party lulls, if we fall by the side
Will you be remembered? Will she be remembered?
Alone in a crowd, a bartered lantern borrowed
If I’m to be your camera, then who will be your face?

The lines work despite a (rare for R.E.M.) familiar phrase, “alone in a crowd.” Cliches like that bedevil lyricists, as they have bedeviled real poets since the dawn of time. In Christopher Brisson’s poem, “Same Circuitry, Different Programs,” we read on one page the phrases “lack of options” and “how did I ever / live without you?” Most of Maya Angelou’s body of work consists of cliches: “make you proud” and “palm of my hand,” from “Phenomenal Woman.” In fact, between Angelou’s cliches and egomania (“I’m a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / That’s me”) any self-respecting shredder would balk at the job of getting rid of her phenomenally bad books. Mixing well the straightforward and lyrical – and free of worn phrases – are these lines of “Harborcoat,” from “Reckoning”:

They shifted the statues for harboring ghosts
Reddened their necks, collared their clothes
Then we danced the dance till the menace got out
She gathered the corners and called it her gown.

On “Seven Chinese Brothers,” also from “Reckoning,” the lyrics betray a surrealist impulse, the first line with an unnaturally-juxtaposed image, the second with some inventive meaninglessness: “Wrap your heel in bones of steel, turn the leg, a twist of color / Autumn waited hold it to you in the colored come another.” Later there is lyricism of a high order: “Seven thousand years to sleep away the pain.” In poetry, these varieties of the surrealism have among their many exponents John Ashbery and the New York School. This has never been my most beloved verse style. Yet R.E.M.’s work impresses. Similarly, in Talking Heads’s “Don’t Worry About the Government,” the lyrics evince surrealism; in this case, a golly-gee type is allowed to go at length:

My building has every convenience
It’s gonna make life easy for me
It’s gonna be easy to get things done
I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building
Take the highway, park and come up and see me
I’ll be working, working but if you come visit
I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important.

Doing this, New York School poets use words radically untrue to the speaker, often mixing contemporary speech in with, say, the high diction from an earlier century. R.E.M.’s “Stand,” from “Green” (1988), said to someone as clueless as Mr. Byrne’s speaker, shares with Byrne a straightforwardness of language and a memory of rhyme:

If you are confused, check with the sun
Carry a compass to help you along
Your feet are going to be on the ground
Your head is there to move you around.

R.E.M.’s very recent lyrics are actually not as good as the early ones, unfortunately. Among younger songwriters, some of the best lyrics are being produced by Belle and Sebastian. There’s no disdain, deserved or otherwise, in “Piazza, New York Catcher” by Belle and Sebastian from “Dear Catastrophe Waitress” (2004). If not free of tired images – “sail around the world” – many parts work as lyric:

Elope with me Miss Private and we’ll sail around the world
I will be your Ferdinand and you my wayward girl
How many nights of talking in hotels rooms can you take?
How many nights of limping round on pagan holidays?
Oh elope with me in private and we’ll set something ablaze
A trail for the devil to erase […]
I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend
I know it wouldn’t come to love, my heroine pretend

As does their “Asleep on a Sunbeam”:

When the half-light makes for a clearer view
Sleep along if you want to
But restlessness has seized me now, it’s true
I could watch the dreams flicker in your eyes
Lying here asleep on a sunbeam

Aside from Reed and a few others, poetry in rock lyrics has increased since the “great”1960s.Yet there still is not a single song lyric I know of from beginning to end that works as a poem. Lyrics still seem written with a partial state of attentiveness. But aren’t real poets just as guilty of affording us half their concentration?

Mr. Richman is the poetry editor of the New Criterion.