Gregory Corso, Tangier, Morocco, July 1961. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate
Gregory Corso & Allen Ginsberg. New York City, September 1989. photo c. Pamela Hansen
So we thought a little walk through Corso was in line. Starting with a more obscure poem “Way Out: A Poem in Discord” published as a limited edition by Ira Cohen’s Bardo Matrix press in Kathmandu, 1974, posted here by the good people at Jack Magazine:
Next stop, Woodstock Journal’s memorial, published a few months after Corso passed away, including tributes & poems by Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ed Sanders, Andy Clausen, Anselm Hollo and more >>
Of course we couldn’t mention Corso’s birthday without somehow bringing up Happy Birthday of Death. Here’s the frontispiece of possible titles he was considering:
Gregory sometimes loses out in Beat histories–his work is certainly much harder to find than Ginsberg's, or Kerouac's–but he's a crucial figure, and although it's not always acknowledged, a big influence on the poets of the contemporary-alternative scene. The poem and the other pieces here give us a great insight into who he was and why he matters.