Gregory Corso

Born: March, 26 1930
Years Active: 1955-1989. Although Gregory Corso continued to write periodically until the time of his death, he published his last major work in 1989.
Genre: Beat Poetry

Biography

Gregory Corso was born Nunzio Corso, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, to parents Sam and Michelina Corso. It wasn’t until the time of his confirmation that he assumed the name Gregory Corso. Only one month after his birth, Michelina abandoned Gregory, leaving him in his father’s care who soon after placed him into foster care. At the young age of 13, Gregory was living on the streets of New York City where he slept in subways and on rooftops and would run errands for local merchants in exchange for food. Before he had turned 17, Gregory had already served three stints jail, one of which was served in the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in New York state. While in Clinton, he spent his time reading and studying extensively began writing poetry.

After leaving Clinton, he returned to New York City, where he lived and was supported as an “artist-in-residence” at the Pony Stable, an openly lesbian bar in Greenwich Village. It was there that he met Allen Ginsberg, who took an immediate liking to Corso and introduced him to other beat poets, including Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. In 1957, Corso, along with Ginsberg and Burroughs moved to Paris and lived in a hostel known for housing musicians artists and writers, that later became known as the Beat Hotel. During his time there, he wrote one of his greatest collections of poems, Bombs and Marriage, before returning to New York City towards the end of 1958.

When the trio of writers returned home, they were surprised to find that a powerful social movement had sprung up in their wake, known commonly as the Beatnik movement. Unlike many of his Beatnik contemporaries, Corso was not pleased at having achieved a certain level of celebrity within the movement, being dubbed “The Last Beat” and always shyed away from public appearances. After Ginsberg’s death, Corso returned over seas where retraced his own footsteps from their original European trip.

While in Paris, Corso gave his permission for filmmaker Gustave Reiningerto to do a documentary on his life. In an unusual turn of events, Reiningerto managed to locate Corso’s mother, who he thought had died in Italy She was living in Trenton, New Jersey. During their on camera reunion, Gregory discovered that his mother, who his father had denounced as a whore and told him had moved back to Italy, only abandoned him because she was the victim of vicious abuse at the hand of his father. Her intention was to provide him a better life by leaving him in the hands of the Catholic Charities. Despite attempting to find him later in life, his father had ensured that she never was able to. The two formed a strong bond until he succumbed to prostate cancer on January 17, 2001, and died.

Works Consulted:

1955: The Vestal Lady and Other Poems
1955: This Hung-Up Age
1958: Gasoline
1958: Bomb
1960: The Happy Birthday of Death
1960: Minutes to Go (In collaboration with Sinclair Beiles, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin.)
1961: The American Express
1962: Long Live Man
1965: There is Yet Time to Run Back through Life and Expiate All That's been Sadly Done
1970: Elegiac Feelings American
1972: The Night Last Night was at its Nightest
1974: Earth Egg
1979: Writings from OX
1981: Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit
1989: Mind Field
1989: Mindfield: New and Selected Poems

Moods:

Intense – “Being dead didn’t mean much/I still felt the pain where the bullet went through” from In the Morgue: a dream.

Whimsical – “Oh, dear! Oh, me! Oh, my!/ I married the pig’s daughter/ I married the pigs daughter/ Why? Why? Why?” from Song.

Political – "I am a great American/ I am almost nationalistic about it!/ I love America like a madness!/ But I am afraid to return to America/ I’m even afraid to go into the American Express-“ from The American Way.

Humorous – “And When the mayor comes to get my vote tell him/ When are you going to stop people killing whales!/ And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle/ Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust” from Marriage.

Philosophical – “What with everybody so bomb conscious it is as though it has fallen in a way, mentally that is, because now they got these shelters and they're always gonna have them and that means that all the babies to come will have to ask what the shelters are, and the parents will have to explain to them, and not many parents can explain death, so the poor kids will have to consult their deaths when everything about them is life.” From Standing on a Street Corner: A Little Play

Groups or Movements:

Beat Generation
The Beat Generation came into being during the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. They were a group of poets, writers, musicians and artists who rejected the American dream and way of life and embraced art, sexuality and Eastern religion, all while experimenting with various drugs. If the movement had a primary goal, it was to show the mainstream that it is alright to express ones own beliefs and ideas, even and especially if they go against the status quo. This ideal was frequently applied to feelings towards the conflict in Vietnam, which was the prevailing political topic of the day.

While his works were not as free-spirited as Kerouac, nor were they as intellectual as Ginsberg, Corso’s works, none the less, struck a chord with the beat generation. His writings were romantic, satirical, intelligent, and political all at once, and were a perfect fit for a movement whose primary goal was to show that the status quo was not a goal to strive for, but a mold to break out of. The following lines from his poem “Bomb,” a love-poem written to atomic weapons structured in the shape of a mushroom was does well to illustrate this point: “Poor little Bomb that'll never be/ an Eskimo song I love thee/ I want to put a lollipop/ in thy furcal mouth/ A wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean/ and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel/ along the Hollywoodian screen/ O Bomb in which all lovely things/ moral and physical anxiously participate/ O fairylike plucked from the/ grandest universe tree/ O piece of heaven which gives/ both mountain and anthill a sun.”

Similar Artist:

Jack Kerouac
As a fellow member of the Beat Generation, Kerouac was inspired and influenced by many of the same ideas and events as Corso. They were both intrigued by the romantic writers that came before them and were heavily influenced by the free-spirited ideas of their contemporaries. Perhaps the most common shared influence which distinguished them from their fellow Beatniks was their love of travel. It was during his travels around Europe, with right-hand-man, Alan Ginsberg, that Corso honed his skills and style as a writer. For Kerouac, it was the great American road that called to him, which he traveled extensively with his iconic compatriot, Neil Cassidy. These similar life experiences, coupled with their membership in virtually the same social and literary circles, shows up in very notable ways in both of their works.

Allen Ginsberg
Ginsberg found and delivered Corso, the missing link, to a trio of writers who became the fathers of the beat Generation, consisting himself, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg recognized Corso’s highly intelligent and romantic style as being similar to that of his own and immediately saw his potential. It is so rare that people are able to hand-pick those who will become their contemporaries, but Ginsberg did just that. Additionally, the two were enormous influences on each other, as they spend the better part of 16 months living and writing together in Europe.

Follower:

Diane Di Prima
Diane was considered a member of the second wave of beat poets. Her career in writing started in the later end of the 1960's, and although she was writing in the style of the beat generation, she was several years behind the movements founders, such as Corso. She did, however continue to write in the same style and became one of the poets to bridge the gap between the beat and hippie movement. As an homage to Corso, Ginsberg, Burroughs and those others who came before her, she wrote the difinitive homage to the beat generation in her book, Memoirs of a Beatnik.

Influenced By:

T.S. Elliot
Elliot was considered by many of the Beat to be a strong influence and predecessor. His works frequently dealt with topics that were of great interest to the beats, such as the utopian/distopian idea of an American police state and the threat of nuclear annihilation (a topic that showed up repeatedly in Corso’s writing). Also, much like Elliot, Corso saw his own writing as being a way to escape the self and an opportunity to shy away from objectivity and venture into the absurd. We can see Corso’s love of Elliot’s work most directly in one of his most notable poems, "Marriage," was a comedic parody of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Percy Shelley
One of the primary influences on the Beatniks writers was romantic writing. Among others, the generation placed the bohemian ideas of beauty, love and truth on a very high pedestal. Shelly, one of the most prolific and profound of the romantic writers was worshiped as a hero by Corso, even though he was seen as being too "flowery" for some. He even went so far as to leave in his last will and testament that he wanted to be buried at the foot of Shelly’s grave, located in a cemetery in Rome. His final wish was acquiesced.

Sites Consulted:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Corso
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/corso/bomb.htm
http://www.beatmuseum.org/corso/GregoryCorso.html
http://www.litkicks.com/Texts/Bomb.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/2001-01-23/books/gregory-corso-1930-2001/