On the evening of March 10, 1971 a familiar, tousle-haired figure took to the stage at a poetry reading in St Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, a New York landmark dating from 1799. Celebrated poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan were among the hip downtown crowd as 28-year-old Lou Reed, the former singer of an alternative rock band called the Velvet Underground, began to mumble: “This is a poem that got a beautiful layout . . . I was real proud. I said, ‘Hey, man, I’m a poet. Look at that, man.’ ”
Reed was indeed a poet, as a new book published by the cultural archivist Anthology Editions confirms, shining a light on the point in Reed’s life just before he embarked on his extraordinary