Art-school and college poetry training directly seeded the Velvet Underground’s songwriting

Evidence

Soon after, Conrad moved out of Ludlow Street and Reed, who had been living with his parents on suburban Long Island, moved in. Before long he and Cale were doing drugs—although Cale was selling marijuana and cocaine for La Monte Young, Reed turned him on to heroin. They were also working on songs, including “I’m Waiting for the Man” and “Heroin,” that Reed had written in college. Reed, Cale learned, was not just a committed rocker but during his years at Syracuse University had played Ornette Coleman on the college radio station and been mentored by the poet Delmore Schwartz. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 648

Categorization

• XREF: The Delmore Schwartz mentorship is a concrete bridge from high-art poetry education into rock songwriting — relevant to the reader’s question about what conditions produced cultural density.