Once in the realm of the pop charts, routinely, there were poets. Songwriters whom you could easily imagine not only reading and being inspired by some of the major linear poets, but thinkers who used words within their music on purpose, rather than accidentally; to create images, truth, a voice, works of enduring art. I wrote an essay, sometime in the 70's, comparing these songpoets to print poets: If Bob Dylan were Allan Ginsberg, and Joni Mitchell were Sara Teasdale, then Laura Nyro could have been Emily Dickenson (and vice-versa) and Bruce Springsteen Walt Whitman. Lou Reed was Delmore Schwartz, of course, Paul Simon was Robert Frost, and Loudon Wainwright was definitely my choice for e.e. cummings. There was no Shakespeare, unfortunately, but how about Leonard Cohen as Ezra Pound, Van Morrison as Dylan Thomas, Tom Waits as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and David Byrne as T.S. Eliot?

Lately I notice you can still play this game, but the cast of characters has been severely depleted up at the high end of the songwriting-as-art community: John Cougar Mellancamp as Carl Sandburg, Natalie Merchant as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Morrisey as Shelley, Robert Smith as Lord Byron, Christine Lavin as Judith Viorst. The comparison that rings truest to me these days is Suzanne Vega as Sylvia Plath.

If the grumbling critics decrying her inablility to produce another "Luka" would instead devote their attention to examining the body of work that she's created, Suzanne Vega's reputation would be placed in its proper perspective, as that of the first true songpoet of the 90's. In fact, in the face of such immense pressure to simplify and trivialize and commercialize her soul and spirit, Vega's refusal to capitulate to commerce and redundancy stands as perhaps her most remarkable achievement.

Vega herself never had any fear of losing her resolve or her voice. Her respect for the language is inborn, inherited from her father, a novelist, and nurtured by two brothers and a sister throughout a lifetime of intense dinner table conversations. "Everyone in my family is well-spoken and articulate," says Vega. "You almost have to be in our family. My father was very precise about words, because he had been brought up in Puerto Rico until he was 12 or 13; he came to New York and learned the language from scratch."

So the slings and arrows of critics hardly pierce her tower of words. "I don't think I made any claims that I don't fulfill," she says of her career thus far. "I don't make any claims; I just write songs the best way I can. I have a lot of faith in my writing ability. I feel like the songs are good, and that's the bottom line." Which doesn't mean she's immune to criticism. "People are always giving me advice. 'You should take voice lessons. You should learn how to read music. You should take guitar lessons. You should write with more melodic lines. You should put more hooks in. You should write about more mainstream things.' I listen to what they say, and then I go off and do what I do."

It's the depth of what Vega does, however, what she gives us on record, that brings to mind the tragic spectre of the doomed Syvia Plath, who took her own life in 1963, at the age of 30, eventually becoming in the late 60's and 70's, a kind of sedentary female James Dean figure for a generation of sensitive and creative women. Images of alienation, solitude, decay, and despair abound in Vega's first three albums. In Days of Open Hand, her first-peson narrator sleeps all day, feels like she's missing certain vital parts, identifies with suicides and the institutionalized, sees herself only on the printed page, and envies from afar "Those whole girls...with bloom to spare. They know health...." These are not exactly up tunes. In fact, "Luka," from her second album, possibly the most depressing lyric to reach number one since "Teen Angel," was for Vega something like a day at the beach, musically at least. It's as if fame has made her even more wary and self-conscious.

"I know I must be getting big," she jokes, "because all of a sudden, people are much more critical of what I say or do or wear." For the first 10 years of her career she never had to worry about that. "When I was 16, I would just go out and sing, and some people would listen and some people wouldn't," she recalls. "And it they didn't listen, Iwould laugh."

Although in person Vega is nowhere near as dire and solemn as her writing persona, she's deadly serious about her purpose in life. "I knew from the time I was four or five that I wanted to do something, and it wasn't work in a library or be a school teacher or be a nurse," she says. "It's almost something that you don't question; you're born to it. Maybe I'd gotten an example from my parents, who were struggling for a long time and are still struggling. I was inspired by Dylan, by his character more than his actual music; by what he represented. He was a person who wrote about what he felt, and this, to me, was more interesting than other people who are famous for a week or a year. I don't want to be a flash or a fad that's going to come and go like that. I would rather think of myself in a more old-fashioned sense as a craftsperson. Kurt Weill wasn't a folk star. He wasn't the big thing of 1935, or whenever it was. He was just thought of as a person who worked hard at what he did, and who earned a certain respect. He didn't have to do videos. He was a lyricist and he was respected for it. In the long run, I would rather not be this sensational celebrity-type."

While Vega is confident that her passion for the language will ultimately see her through whatever dry spells fame and its attendant demons may inflict, her biggest problem and challenge remains translating her singular vision from the guitar to the world.

"When I first started working with musicians," she says, "I used to feel like, 'There's no way that you're going to do anything to this song because it's my song.' But I learned that the song is still there, no matter what you do to it. At first, I was really nervous about going on tour with a band, because I was so used to playing by myself and having that freedom of dynamics. Even though I'm not entirely comfortable on stage, it's something that I have to do. I still miss having that kind of solitary feeling I get with the audience when I'm up there by myself. On the other hand, there's a lot more strength. It's such a different feeling to hear all the music behind you and to hear everybody coming together in harmony. I'd never felt anything like that before, to be in front of this sound that was coming out of the stage."

For Suzanne Vega, clearly, the struggle is not over. "I'm kind of passing between two worlds," she reflects. "I'm not a rock singer and I never will be. But at the same time, I'm not a folk singer in the way that I used to be years ago when I first started, when I had long hair and my flower dresses and my guitar. I still feel like I'm walking some weird line. Like if I take one wrong step, I could just fall off."

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Submitted by Eric Szczerbinski

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