"Thought I saw at my feet an origami crow

It was only the street hidden under the snow"

Good verse does not have to be obscure, or allusive, or clever in its use of devices. It can, as the lines from Aimee Mann's Snow Goose Cone demonstrate, simply be a deft observation about the world, or perhaps immersion in the inner life of a character. It might be both of these and other things too.

Mann is actually a very good song-writer who takes the artform seriously, crafting words, no doubt with many revisions, before she begins to set music to it. Or perhaps she has a tune in snatches in her head, and the words flow from it. There is a wonderful tension between the music and the lyric, at least, for Mann there is.

It is really just too easy to turn out endless cliches in popular music, the dross being hidden, often as not, behind layers of sound and production. I think that good writing should be able to stand on its own merits, collected and read like poetry, even if it remains a kind of poor cousin.