System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Gregory Corso, Beat Poet
By Barbara Stufflebeem
For readers of a certain age, the death of Gregory Corso is as unpleasant a reminder of the passage of time as watching Bob Dylan thank the Academy. Corso was the royal jester of the Beat Generation with his philosophy of free verse, free love, and free drinks (he was a notorious cheapskate). As recently as the 1990s, he could be seen cavorting with Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern in California, and appearing at Marc Smith’s famous poetry “slams” in Chicago. The redemptive capacity of the literal and literary bender was an idea that Corso and others inspired in the American imagination, with such success that the idea is now universal. The image of the hairy, drunken, satyr-like declaimer of absurd verse continues to inform many people’s ideas of what poets and poetry are all about.
This Rabelaisian vision emerged at the dawn of what many have called the most oppressive era in American history, the 1950s. The iron grip of conformity was bound to prompt some reaction, and Corso and company responded to the challenge with enthusiasm. In the words of one bemused literary historian, “The character of reality in the postwar world can be described as one of disruptive chaos and equally disruptive organization.” It was the Beatniks’ gift to realize that organization was disruptive. Most of the country was under the opposite impression. A flood of advertising depicted hordes of clean-living, right-thinking youth returning from war to flock obediently into orderly compounds to start work, marry, and raise 2.4 children. The world was ripe for revolution.
In this stifling atmosphere, Gregory Corso, together with other Beat pranksters, delivered the credo of nonconformity at a series of wild, shouted readings in public places. They adopted aesthetic and personal anarchism as everyday practice. Their poetry and personal lives were equally expressive of the new order. As an avatar of this new order, Corso freely co-opted tropes from colloquial American speech, jive, and invoked beatific zen revelations. A picture of Corso’s work and personality may be seen in his poem “Marriage,” in which he imagines a nightmare vision of a honeymoon. Note how neatly the pictured representatives of normalcy become perverse voyeurs:
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I’d live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I’d sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce—
This was Corso at his comic and critical best, coming as it did in an era in which Doris Day was America’s sweetheart and a honeymoon in Niagara Falls the epitome of romance.
Corso’s reputation as a front-running Beat poet has not survived alongside those of his friends Kerouac and Ginsburg. Unlike the other beats, his life actually reflected the raw experience of life that the other Beats tried to embody in their writing. Born to teenaged parents in 1930 on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, Corso’s early life was filled with abandonment and abuse. After his parents separated when he was still an infant, Corso shuttled through a series of foster homes and orphanages. Briefly reunited with his father, he was a frequent runaway and turned to any means he could devise to survive. At the age of twelve, young Gregory was charged with selling a stolen radio. Sent to the Tombs, the notorious New York City jail, he was held for months and abused by other inmates, and then remanded to Bellevue for observation. A second conviction at sixteen, also for theft, sent him to prison at Dannemora in upstate NY.
Unlike his pals Kerouac and Ginsburg (children of the middle class who met at Columbia University) Corso’s first encounters with literature took place in jail. While incarcerated, Corso read widely and developed an inordinate fondness for the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: on a visit to Oxford he insisted upon being shown Shelley’s room and kissed the carpet inch by inch, to the astonishment of the room’s occupant. By the time Corso was released from prison in 1950, Ginsburg and Kerouac had begun to codify their spontaneity in Greenwich Village coffeehouses and bars, in one of which Corso met Ginsburg. Well-prepared by a cocktail of equal parts prison and Romantic poetry, Corso embraced the Beat party line.
In 1956, Corso moved to San Francisco to join the “renaissance” being orchestrated there, and then removed in 1958 with Ginsburg and others to a seedy hotel at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, to become even more famously bohemian, unwashed, ill-fed, and inspired. Thereafter, he published many books of poetry, said many amusing things, and struggled with alcohol and heroin addiction, He later taught at SUNY Buffalo, until he was bagged in 1965 for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. He also taught at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, now Naropa University, a pixiliated Buddhist institution still populated by denizens of the farthest fringes.
He played harmonium on Tenderness Junction, a 1969 Fuggs album. He had a bit part in “Godfather III.” He appeared in a film by Andy Warhol. There are plans to bury him in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near his beloved Shelley.
Gregory Corso was undeniably cool. He died of prostate cancer January 17, 2001, with his family by his side.
