It’s Gregory Corso‘s birthday today. He would’ve been 95 (now there’s an image!)
Gregory Corso – Ten Times A Poet, last year’s Corso compendium, we’ve noted in our pages here and here
David S Wills reviews it for Beatdom, and Steven Taylor reviews it for Rock and The Beat Generation – here and here
As Douglas Field observes in his jacket-note: “Composed of memoir, poems, biography, interviews and literary criticism, Gregory Corso – Ten Times A Poet celebrates and explores the contradictions and brilliance of a misunderstood street bard and visual artist. This fresh appraisal of Corso, which fills in biographical gaps, tells new stories and appraises his verse, is a reminder that he never stopped being a poet even when his reputation preceded his artistry. As the writers gathered here attest , Corso’s description of poetry as “risked nd fevered thinking” belies his mastery of form. His poems were a “refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere”, as Allen Ginsberg put it, in which Death, Humor, Truth and Beauty love, laugh and brawl.”
Horton and McDannold have managed to gather together a pretty impressive collection of contributors. Among them, Raymond Foye of course (Gregory’s literary executor), Neeli Cherkovski, Kirby Olson, Anne Waldman, Ed Sanders (noticeably reprinting the entire “A Salute to Gregory Corso – Poet Among Poets” that appeared in Woodstock Journal), and Kurt Hemmer (currently writing a biography of Gregory – A Revolutionary of the Spirit – A Gregory Corso Biography, a section of which can be read here).
Kaye McDonough‘s wonderful memoir of living with Gregory is also included – see here
A few brief (very brief) selections:
Leon Horton: “A word-slinger who delighted in surreal word combinations, a clown who danced an orphic jig, a crazed poet visionary who saw a horse-mounted in the traffic of New York, who saw the spectre of Death on the Greek island of Hydra, Gregory’s entry into the Beat canon – after a chance meeting in 1950 with Allen Ginsberg in a lesbian bar – came at a price. In a 1973 interview Victor Bockris asked him if there were any mysteries. His answer was both emphatic and enigmatic – “Generally, no. Personally one…I don’t know who I am”…
Gregory looked to his hero, Percy Bysshe Shelley – “A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight.”
Raymond Foye: “Corso did not reveal his inner life casually. Those who met him once or twice only saw a theatrical personality. For this reason the many outrageous stories that abound may be accurate in their picaresque details, but they are also terribly superficial. Underneath it all he was a figure of great warmth and caring, as his closest friends will attest. It seems strange, even to me, but when I look back on my life most of the truly important pointers I got – about human nature, self-preservation, and other life lessons – came from Gregory.”
Neeli Cherkovski: “To be with Gregory Corso on any given day in North Beach or elsewhere could be a very exciting experience. He might appear sullen and uncommunicative but he was aware everything that was going on. It was quite phenomenal. He might be sitting at the table, his eyes cast downward, you talking to somebody else about one subject or another. Corso could appear disinterested – then all of a sudden come awake and make a point. I wrote a story once about how he spent other people’s money. He had a knack of draining their pocket books. I witnessed him do this to a middle-aged beat sycophant who showed up at the Cafe Trieste...Money was spent on cabs and money was spent on cigars, and finally the poor guy had nothing left…Gregory thought the guy had gotten his money’s worth spending all that time with one of the legendary poets of the Beat Generation”
“Do you know who I am?”
Kirby Olson: “Ginsberg was big on non-attatchment but he was also an inveterate collector, He collected everything and had a huge archive. One day Corso smashed a priceless collection of Ginsberg’s vintage jazz records. When Ginsberg came back to his apartment and found them shattered all over the floor, he asked Corso why he had done this. Corso said, “To help you attain enlightenment! You’re too attached to some things!”
Anne Waldman: – “Both of us had history. I saw him as a kid, Bleecker Street. I’d followed his poetry forever. At Naropa it was like being with family. And as gatekeeper. And attending to whims. Trying to keep him like everyone from doing harm. Heh poet, do no harm…”
Ed Sanders: “Few have lived the life of a poet with more energy than Gregory Corso. He seems to have experienced almost twenty lives from a hyper-energy source that must lead directly out of ancient Parnassus. Fearlessly he has thundered through the decades, going back for more than 50 years, beginning his poetry writing even before he met Allen Ginsberg…”
The impact of Gregory – hard to overstate it. Bobby Yarra sums it up in the title of his memoir (also excerpted in Horton and McDannold’s book)- “Gregory Gave Me The World”.
Gregory on the Allen Ginsberg Project – there’s plenty. For starters, take a look – here
(and from back in 2016 – here and here – a ‘Gregory Corso Weekend’)
Gregory was ever reckless with his notebooks and manuscripts, hustling them and selling them. He was also not averse to making multiple copies of something, annotating it, and selling it as a first draft.
Gregory in the archives – here, here, here, here, here and here, (to cite just a few). Check out these manuscript pages here. The pages are scattered.
Christian White, the English rare book dealer, has currently for sale – “I Cried – I Cried Mainly For Myself” – (“an autograph manuscript on poetry and his troubled life”, written in New York City,1990-1991)
White, quoting from Corso’s musings, writes:
“At the heart of the manuscript is a long unpublished poem about Corso’s understanding of poetic inspiration, practice, and the bubble, reputation – ‘Poets who are famous and/ celebrated in their time/ experience not that fame/ say a Keats aspired to/ The Romantic Age examples a kind of balanced imbalance/ Byron and Wordsworth both immortals/ knew it in their time.’ – Corso then turns in on himself – ‘That’s me been [sic] critical/ of ambitious poets/ demanding of fame and celebration.. When all I meant without mean-spirit/ was Poetry is its own reward/ There was this person who wrote poetry/ had Kerouac introduce his book/ and for year complains poetry was getting him nowhere/ that he’d become a painter instead… I knew him as a person who wrote/ not a poet.’
For more on this item see White’s observations here ( tho’, it’s Ginsberg not Ginsburg, Christian!)
Four thousand five hundred pounds sterling – That’s heading towards six thousand American dollars! Gregory would certainly have appreciated the loot!
Happy Birthday in Eternity, Gregory!