Sunday Poet: Gregory Corso

I Am 25

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
has gone from ear to ear:
I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:--I did those then
but that was then
that was then--
O I would quiet old men
say to them:--I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again--
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.

*****

Last Night I Drove A Car

Last night I drove a car
not knowing how to drive
not owning a car
I drove and knocked down
people I loved
...went 120 through one town.

I stopped at Hedgeville
and slept in the back seat
...excited about my new life.

*****

Destiny

They deliver the edicts of God
without delay
And are exempt from apprehension
from detention
And with their God-given
Petasus, Caduceus, and Talaria
ferry like bolts of lightning
unhindered between the tribunals
of Space & Time

The Messenger-Spirit
in human flesh
is assigned a dependable,
self-reliant, versatile,
thoroughly poet existence
upon its sojourn in life

It does not knock
or ring the bell
or telephone
When the Messenger-Spirit
comes to your door
though locked
It'll enter like an electric midwife
and deliver the message

There is no tell
throughout the ages
that a Messenger-Spirit
ever stumbled into darkness

*****

Some biography on Gregory Corso from The Academy of American Poets:

Photo courtesy of New Directions.

Gregory Corso

Gregory Nunzio Corso was born in New York's Greenwich Village on March 26, 1930, to teenage Italian parents. A year later, his mother moved back to Italy. After living in orphanages and foster homes, at age eleven Corso moved back in with his father, who had just remarried. After two years, however, he ran away; upon being caught he was placed in a boys' home for two years. He also spent several months in the New York City jail while being held as a material witness in a theft trial. He was returned to his father, but after running away again was sent to Bellevue Hospital for three months "for observation." At age sixteen, he began a three-year sentence at Clinton State Prison for another theft. While in prison, he read widely in the classics, including Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe, as well as the dictionary; it was there that he also began writing poems.

In a Greenwich Village bar in 1950, the year of his release from prison, he met Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to experimental poetry. In 1954 he moved to Boston, where again he devoted himself to the library—this time at Harvard University. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and the publication of his first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), was underwritten by Harvard and Radcliffe students. Corso worked at times as a laborer, a newspaper reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner, and a merchant seaman.

The following year he went to San Francisco, where he performed readings and interviews with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and became known as one of the major figures of the Beat movement. From 1957 to 1958 Corso lived in Paris, where he wrote many of the poems that became his book Gasoline, which Lawrence Ferlinghetti/City Lights Books published in 1958. From 1970 to 1974 Corso worked on a manuscript that was to be titled Who Am I—Who I Am, but the manuscript was stolen. He did not issue another major work until 1981's Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Among other notable books are Bomb (1958), The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), Long Live Man (1962), Elegaic Feelings American (1970), and Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (Thunder's Mouth, 1989).

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. (He was dismissed from the SUNY teaching position in 1965 for refusing to sign an affadavit certifying that he was not a member of the Communist Party.) He was married three times and had five children. Gregory Corso died on January 17, 2001, at the age of seventy.

I began reading Corso in college when I wanted to emulate the Beat writers. We smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and wrote angry poems about the corruption of America. We wore black. We drank a lot. But one thing we missed in adopting those personas for a year or so was the humor.

Corso is funny -- and he didn't take much of anything seriously, especially himself. But then, if we had had his childhood, instead of our somewhat pampered white, middle class uprbringing, maybe we wouldn't have taken ourselves so seriously, either.

I Held a Shelley Manuscript

My hands did numb to beauty
as they reached into Death and tightened!

O sovereign was my touch
upon the tan-inks's fragile page!

Quickly, my eyes moved quickly,
sought for smell for dust for lace
for dry hair!

I would have taken the page
breathing in the crime!
For no evidence have I wrung from dreams--
yet what triumph is there in private credence?

Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples
and torched-skin mushrooms,
my cypressean skein outreaches the recorded age
and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk,
pour secrecy upon the dying page.

*****

The Mad Yak

I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his -- I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they'll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!

Gregory Corso on the web:
The Academy of American Poets
The Beat Page
Famous Poets and Poems
PoemHunter


tag: Gregory Corso, poetry, Beat poets, poems, American poets