(Long live Man! sings the poet Gregory Corso - despite ato...)
Long live Man! sings the poet Gregory Corso - despite atom bombs and computers, cold wars that get hot and togetherness that isn’t, too many cars and too little love…and in these poems he celebrates the wonders (and the laughs and griefs) of being a man alive. Whether he is musing on antic glories amid the ruins of the Acropolis or watching a New York child invent games on the city’s sidewalks, Corso is there in it, putting us into it, with the magic of vision, with the senses - awakening images, that transmute reality into something more - insights that let us share his joy and echo his shout of Long live Man!
(New rare sketches and notes from the author's personal jo...)
New rare sketches and notes from the author's personal journal, forewords from two of the world's leading poets of the Beat Generation, and an introduction by David Amram, the man who collaborated with Jack Kerouac in the first-ever live poetry reading in 1957, are collected here for the first time in this revised and unique edition of Mindfield.
The Whole Shot: Collected Interviews with Gregory Corso
(Thirteen interviews with Beat Generation poet Gregory Cor...)
Thirteen interviews with Beat Generation poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001) that span the most productive years of his career: from 1955, when his first collection of poems was published, to 1982, the year following the publication of his last book of all new poetry. Foreword by Dick Brukenfeld, publisher of Corso's The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), that recounts the poet's early days in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as a "stowaway" on the Harvard University campus.
(WHAT ABOUT ME portrays the gradual deterioration of a you...)
WHAT ABOUT ME portrays the gradual deterioration of a young woman forced to exist on the streets, intermingling with the outcasts of society. Includes music by Johnny Thunders and composers Robert Quine and Marc Ribot.
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet. He belonged to the group of writers known as the Beats, which included such notable writers as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
Background
Gregory Nunzio Corso was born on March 26, 1930, in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Fortunato Samuel and Michelina (Colonni) Corso.
His parents were in their teens when Gregory was born. A year after his birth, Corso's parents separated, and a boy spent his early childhood in foster homes and orphanages. At the age of eleven, he went to live with his biological father, who had remarried.
Education
Corso attended Catholic school.
Career
A troubled youth, Corso repeatedly ran away and was eventually sent to a boys' home. One year later he was caught selling a stolen radio and was forced to testify in court against the dealer who purchased the illegal merchandise. While he was held as a material witness in the trial, the twelve-year-old boy spent several months in prison where, as he wrote in a biographical sketch for The New American Poetry, the other prisoners "abused me terribly, and I was indeed like an angel then because when they stole my food and beat me up and threw pee in my cell, I … would come out and tell them my beautiful dream about a floating girl who landed before a deep pit and just stared." He later spent three months under observation at Bellevue Hospital.
When Corso was sixteen, he returned to jail to serve a three-year sentence for theft. There he read widely in the classics, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe. After his release in 1950, he worked as a laborer in New York City, a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles, and a sailor on a boat to Africa and South America. It was in New York City that he first met Ginsberg, the Beat poet with whom he was most closely associated. The pair met in a Greenwich Village bar in 1950 while Corso was working on his first poems. Until then, he had read only traditional poetry, and Ginsberg introduced him to contemporary, experimental work. Within a few years Corso was writing in long, Whitmanesque lines similar to those Ginsberg had developed in his own work. The surreal word combinations that began to appear in Ginsberg's work about the same time may in turn suggest Corso's reciprocal influence.
In 1954 Corso moved to Boston where several important poets, including Edward Marshall and John Wieners, were experimenting with the poetics of voice. The center for Corso's life there was not "the School of Boston," as these poets were called, but the Harvard University library, where he spent his days reading the great works of poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and his play In This Hung-up Age - concerning a group of Americans who, after their bus breaks down midway across the continent, are trampled by buffalo - was performed by students at the university the following year. Harvard and Radcliffe students underwrote the expenses of Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems. The poems featured in the volume are usually considered apprentice works heavily indebted to Corso's reading. They are, however, unique in their innovative use of jazz rhythms - most notably in "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician," which many call the strongest poem in the book - cadences of spoken English, and hipster jargon.
When Corso moved to San Francisco in 1956 he was too late to participate in the famous reading at the Six Gallery, at which Ginsberg read "Howl" and which, since it was widely noted in newspapers and popular magazines, is conventionally cited as the first major public event in the rise of the Beat movement. However, Corso was soon identified as one of the major figures of the movement and that notoriety undoubtedly contributed much to the fame of his poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. From 1965 to 1970, he was a teacher at State University of New York. With Ginsberg, he also co-authored "The Literary Revolution in America," an article in which they declared that America now had poets who "have taken it upon themselves, with angelic clarions in hand, to announce their discontent, their demands, their hope, their final wondrous unimaginable dream."
Corso shaped his poems from 1970 to 1974 into a book he planned to call Who Am I - Who I Am, but the manuscript was stolen, and there were no other copies. Aside from chapbooks and a few miscellaneous publications, he did not issue other work until 1981 when Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit appeared. Shorter than any of his major books since Gasoline, it contains several critically acclaimed poems, many of them written in clipped, almost prosaic lines more reminiscent of William Carlos Williams than of Whitman. By the early 1980s, when Corso's Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit was published, language-centered writing, in which the conventions of language themselves become the subjects of poems, had long since surpassed the poetics of voice as the center of attention for many younger poets working outside academic traditions. Thus, Corso's book was not widely reviewed, even though it contains some of the poet's best work.
In 1991 Corso published Mindfield: New and Selected Poems. The book consists of selections from five previously published books and close to sixty pages of previously unpublished poems, including one almost thirty pages long. Corso traveled extensively and taught briefly at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and for several summers at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Corso believes the meter must arise naturally from the poet's voice; it is never consciously chosen.
Although Corso greatly reduced his output in the years leading up to his death in 2001, he continued to believe in the power of poetry to bring about change.
Quotations:
"My music is built in - it's already natural. I don't play with the meter."
"I feel that in the future many poets will blossom forth - the poetic spirit will spread and reach toward all; it will show itself not in words - the written poem - but rather in man's being and in the deeds he enacts.… A handful of poets in every country in the world can and have always been able to live in the world as well as in their own world; … and when such humankind becomes manifold, when all are embraced by the poetic spirit, by a world of poets, not by the written word but by deed and thought and beauty, then society will have no recourse but to become suitable for them and for itself. I feel man is headed in such a direction; he is fated and due to become aware of and knowledgeable about his time; his good intelligence and compassion will enable him to cope with almost all the bothersome, distracting difficulties that may arise - and when he becomes so, 'poet' will not be his name, but it will be his victory."
Personality
Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet, described by Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation as "an urchin Shelley." Gaiser suggested that Corso adopted "the mask of the sophisticated child whose every display of mad spontaneity and bizarre perception is consciously and effectively designed" - as if he is in some way deceiving his audience.
Interests
Writers
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, Christopher Marlowe
Connections
On May 7, 1963, Corso married Sally November, a teacher, but they divorced and Gregory married Belle Carpenter in 1968. Their marriage also ended in divorce and Corso married Jocelyn Stern.
Corso had five children: Mirandia, Cherie Langerman, Cybelle Nuncia, Max-Orphe and Niall Corso.
Whitman's Wild Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets
In Whitman's Wild Children, Neeli Cherkovski looks at twelve contemporary beat poets - Michael McClure, Charles Bukowski, John Wieners, James Broughton, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, Allen Ginsberg, William Everson, Gregory Corso, Harold Norse, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jack Micheline - chosen because each, like Whitman, took "his own road" and had little to do with what was thought acceptable in mainstream American culture during the 1940s.
Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since WWII
American poets from 1945-1980 wrote with their own authority and grace, with the patronage of universities and the support of university presses giving more visibility to American poetry than it enjoyed earlier in the century.
The Beat vision: A primary sourcebook
Interviews, letters, and memoirs explore the lives and writings of beat authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs.