A Gregory Corso Weekend

A Gregory Corso weekend.. It’s Gregory’s birthday. He would have been eighty-six today.

We’ve featured Gregory many many times on the Allen Ginsberg, starting way back in 2010 with this birthday announcement.

Gregory Corso Happy Birthday of Death (sic) can be found here
Corso 2013 Birthday celebration – here
Corso 2014 Birthday celebration – here
Corso 2015 Birthday celebration – here
Not Forgetting Gregory Corso – here

Two vintage Naropa readings – one (with William Burroughs) – from 1975, and one (solo), from 1981 (a reading from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit – that reading continues here)

Original Beats, Francois Bernardi’s film of Gregory and Herbert Huncke can be seen here (additional footage from that movie – here)

Here’s more footage of Gregory

Here‘s Gregory reading The Bill of Rights on an East Village rooftop!
Die on Me is the extraordinary set of recordings put out in 2002 on Paris Records. A complimentary record, Lieders (with Marianne Faithfull) was also put out by Paris Records

Listen to to “Ah Roma!” (with Francis Kuipers)

(More Gregory-in-Rome here and here)

Gregory heckling Allen? – It wouldn’t be a proper Gregory memory if there weren’t record of Gregory misbehaving. There’s his famous 1973 interruption of Allen’s uptown Y reading

That same year, he wasn’t any less restrained at the Salem State Kerouac conference.

Gregory’s more measured words on Kerouac (from 1986’s What Happened to Jack Kerouac?) here:

Allen and Gregory bickering over Shakespeare – here,
confessing he’s in error – here
and sparring with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, way back in 1975, in a hilarious series of posts (eight of them in all) starting here – (“He wants to be like me – famous! – and Allen. He wants to get into the poetry racket, that’s what he wants to do”)

That year (1975), indeed for many years, Gregory gave classes at Naropa. The Allen Ginsberg Project has featured several extensive transcriptions. The 1975 classes (serialized in seven parts) begin here (after “Two Shots From Gregory Corso“). This is followed by a four-part serializaton, (posted February 2012), “More Corso At Naropa”

Gregory interviewer and interviewee – 1961 – the Journal For The Protection of All Beings interview – Gregory and Allen interview William Burroughs

From 1959, Gregory and Allen and Peter Orlovsky are interviewed by Studs Terkel
(plus a later radio interview with Allen and Gregory)

Speaking of interviews, there’s now this essential volume:

Gregory, the “great list poet“. Allen evokes some of Gregory’s longer works here
(and offers a shorter note – here)

in 1978 (in a four-part sequence) he joins Allen with a line-by-line reading (almost) of Whitman‘s revealing and foolishly neglected poem, “Respondez!”

and there’s more….

Happy Birthday, Gregory Nunzio Corso!

more tomorrow!