“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.

The line quoted above is taken from a poem entitled We Are the People, published exclusively for the first time here, along with a recording of it at the St Mark’s Church performance.

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. We are the people without sorrow who have moved beyond national pride and indifference to a parody of instinct. We are the people who are desperate beyond emotion because it defies thought. We are the people who conceive our destruction and carry it out lawfully. We are the insects of someone else’s thought. A casualty of daytime, nighttime, space and god without race, nationality or religion. We are the people. The people. The people.

Reed, who died in 2013 and would have turned 76 today, is one of the most distinctive songwriters of the 20th century, first in the Velvet Underground, whose stark, droning take on rock’n’roll pointed the way to punk and became hugely influential. His subsequent solo career featured lush pop hits such as Perfect Day and Walk on the Wild Side as well as the uncompromisingly noisy likes of Metal Machine Music. He recorded over 20 solo albums, including Lulu, a collaboration with Metallica that his one-time producer David Bowie regarded as Reed’s masterpiece.

The poetry comes from a six-month period in 1970, after he left the Velvet Underground and went to work for his father’s accounting firm. Within six months, he had reversed his decision to quit music and was writing solo material, but the book gives a fascinating glimpse into his mindset at the time.

The rest of the poems are being kept under wraps for now, but the Guardian was granted a sneak preview. Away from the political We Are the People, others reflect on love, sex, and whiskey, and some are droll character studies. Musical references abound – one poem is entitled Playing Music is Not Like Athletics, a kind of philosophical inquiry into the reasons for making music, while another, The Murder Mystery, is an epic concrete poem in “stereo”, with different coloured lines of poetry printed alongside each other, almost like a multitracked song. It was recorded by the Velvet Underground and included on their self-titled third album.

Lou Reed, lower left, with the Velvet Undeground: John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Nico and Sterling Morrison. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The poems are part of Lou Reed’s archive, acquired by the New York Public Library following Reed’s death. “The Lou Reed Archive has been keen to to publish some of the rare and unique material from the diverse and extraordinary collection of Lou’s life’s work, and we decided to start with these poems,” said archivist Don Fleming, who has co-produced the book. “Lou was a writer at heart, and during this period he considered giving up music to follow this path. Finding Lou’s own cassette tape in the archive, that he recorded at the event, was very exciting because we knew about the reading but had little idea of what he had read. His introductions to the pieces also gave us great insight into his creative process.” He added that he was “happy to share this lesser-known but important chapter in his life.”

The literary critic and head of UCL’s English literature department, John Mullan – a self-professed Reed fan – had a muted response on seeing the poetry, however, saying Reed “is not afraid to court banality”. He added that some of the poems “look like, and read like, the transcripts of songs. We all know what Lou Reed’s voice sounds like, and you find yourself projecting that amazing voice onto the poems, backed with some sort of doomy bassline. They almost live as songs but I don’t think they survive the journey to the page; what was a heady quality in the songs is not a heady quality in the poems.”

Reed is far from the first rock star to – with varying levels of dilettantism – write poetry outside of their song lyrics. In 1964 as the Beatles’ career was going supernova, John Lennon published In His Own Write, a collection of surreal, free-associative poems and short stories – “I typed a lot of the book, and I can only do it very slowly with a finger, so the stories would be very short because I couldn’t be bothered going on,” he said in a 1968 interview.

Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, written in 1965, is a Beat-inspired poetic stream of consciousness, while more recently Tupac Shakur, Ryan Adams, Jill Scott and Tom Waits have all published poetry collections. In 1996, REM frontman Michael Stipe and six friends each wrote a haiku poem every day, and posted them to each other – 365 of them were collected for the resulting book The Haiku Year.

One of the most significant rock star poets is Reed’s friend Patti Smith, who has published numerous collections of her verse. In her speech for the posthumous induction of Reed to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, she declared that “as a poet, he must be counted as a solitary artist. And so, Lou, thank you for brutally and benevolently injecting your poetry into music.”

• We Are the People is taken from Do Angels Need Haircuts?, published by Anthology Editions, © 2018 Canal Street Communications, Inc.