GREGORY CORSO : TEN TIMES A POET
Edited by Leon Horton & Michelle MacDannold
Roadside Press. 251 pages. $22.95. ISBN 979-8-9902309-0-3
Reviewed By Jim Burns
Recently I reviewed a book about Maxwell Bodenheim, the legendary Greenwich
Village bohemian famous for his numerous love affairs, alcoholic excesses,
and general high jinks during the 1920s and 1930s. And sadly now mostly
forgotten for the novels and collections of poetry he produced. That’s the
trouble with poets who attract attention because of their
sometimes-scandalous behaviour. There’s always a danger of their work being
overlooked while the stories of what was said and done find a place in the
histories of a time and place.
Will that happen to Gregory Corso? There are probably enough accounts around
to fill a book and they’ll no doubt expand as the years roll on and memories
become hazy, and stories are repeated so that facts are distorted and events
exaggerated. Corso has been
referred to as the “bad boy” of the Beats, and long before this book came
out I heard anecdotal tales of his antics, some of which went beyond the
amusing. They inclined me to think that he may have been someone whose poems
were often worth reading, but who was best avoided in person. I did, in
fact, meet him, just once and very briefly, at the 1965 Albert Hall reading,
but nothing of importance was said and nothing memorable happened.
The contributors to this book are mostly people who spent more time with
Corso and had different experiences of him. Raymond Foye writes positively
about him in some ways, but isn’t blind to his problems. Describing visiting
Corso he refers to his skill at drawing and his “deep knowledge of art
history,” but also “the floor covered in typed poems, often stained with
wine, coffee, blood, and god knows what else”. He says that “a calm
domesticity prevailed”, but “The one vexation was his addiction. A heroin
user since the 1950s.....Veins had collapsed and he was losing use of both
arms. Infections led to visits to nearby St Luke’s Hospital”. It’s a
disturbing picture and Foye is rightly concerned to point out that “Those
who met him once or twice only saw a theatrical personality”, whereas a
wider acquaintance brought out
“a figure of great warmth and caring as his closest friends will attest”.
And he adds that “most of the truly important pointers I got
- about human nature, self-preservation, and other life lessons –
came from Gregory”
Robert Yarra’s narrative of knowing Corso over a number of years, and in a
number of locations, provides a variety of stories about his conduct. On one
occasion when “I lay in bed with a fever, Gregory came to the apartment with
a woman and yelled at me, ‘Get out, I need privacy’ so I split”. Yarra says
that Corso was contrite next
day : “Then he apologised to me and was genuinely remorseful. Gregory
practised true contrition”. Like Foye, Yarra seemed prepared to tolerate
Corso’s misbehaviour in return for knowing him.
So many people seemed prepared to put up with Corso’s erratic habits, and it
is obvious that he took advantage of their tolerance. Kirby Olson says, “I
think women, drugs, poetry mattered to him. When he was young he was not on
drugs and everybody liked him. As he got older he began to disintegrate. He
saw the Beat label as a meal ticket. He saw his fame as a meal ticket. He
saw that people could be used”. To be fair, it’s possible to blame much of
the “disintegration” on the drugs. Someone once referred in a sarcastic
manner to a famous jazz musician as “a nice bunch of guys” meaning that his
personality was affected by his drug use. And Corso’s character was no doubt
additionally shaped by his early experiences on the streets and in prison.
He had learned the hard way how to exploit people and situations for his own
benefit.
The opening piece in the book, Raymond Foye’s “A Most Dangerous Art” has
details about how Corso only met his birth-mother, who he always thought had
abandoned him when he was a child, later in life, and how it had affected
him: “I lived sixty-seven years without a mother – how can that be made up
for now?”. Foye, referring to Corso’s brutal father, also says that he had
“hated and feared the man all his life, but he made the effort to visit him,
only to find that Alzheimer’s disease had turned his father into a gentle
and kind-hearted soul”. Kurt Hemmer’s “Never Knowing a Mother’s Kiss : The
Childhood of Nunzio Corso” is a detailed account of the poet’s early days
and is compelling in its emphasis on neglect and violence. It’s little
wonder that Corso was a juvenile delinquent. (See Gregory Stephenson’s
essay, “Grand Larceny in Vermont; Undisclosed Early Misadventures of Gregory
Corso”). One has to wonder how he had enough willpower to come through such
a background and find his way to poetry and the other arts. Francis Kuipers
in “We Planned Glorious Music” recalls his preference for “melodic music”,
the scores from old movies, and
his love of Italian opera.
I don’t want to give the impression that the whole of the book is devoted to
accounts of Corso’s frequent shabby treatment of other people, or the
reasons and excuses for it. Leon Horton’s long essay about him in Greece has
value with its close focus on a particular period in the poet’s wanderings.
It inevitably refers to his dependence on drugs and alcohol, but, as Horton
says, “The extent to which Greece – its mythology, literature and philosophy
– played a significant role in Corso’s work as a poet is clear to see and
readily accessible”. Horton mentions Alan Ansen, by no means a Beat poet,
but someone on the fringes of the movement and of interest in his own right.
And when Corso visited the island of Hydra he encountered the Australian
writers, Charmaine Clift and George Johnston, though he doesn’t appear to
have made a particularly good impression on them. There are a few passing
references to Corso in Half the
Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 by
Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell (Monash University Publishing, 2018), but
Horton quotes Clift as saying “There was an American poet of some beat
renown who drugged himself into somnolence at our kitchen table”.
A. Robert Lee’s “Mapping Corso : Yaks, Bombs, Revolutions of the Spirit”
looks at Corso’s early poetry in
Gasoline (1958) and The Happy
Birthday of Death (1960) and I must admit that these books have most of
the poems I still enjoy reading. I bought them as they were published and
when the idea of the Beat literary movement was fresh and exciting. Lee
rightly singles out poems like “For Miles” and “Marriage” for particular
attention. It’s always difficult
to know how much of a poet’s work is likely to survive into the future, but
if Corso is remembered beyond academic circles in a hundred years time it
might be through a poem like “Marriage”. Other poems may still be studied
and written about, but that poem will continue to
have popular appeal. As Lee says, it
“carries a full menu of tease, a shyness at society’s presiding
institutions”, and as such will apply outside the restrictions of a specific
time, generation or society.
Ryan Mathews writes about Mindfield:
New and Selected Poems (1998), which he thinks “should be viewed as a
map of Corso’s artistic career”.
He raises some interesting points about a section of the book which
has 23 previously unpublished poems written between 1960 and 1989: “So, the
questions we need to ask are: are these works the poetic equivalents of the
“outtakes” that often “justify” the re-release of albums by including
rejected tracks the musician never intended to be heard? Are they here to
justify releasing an anthology of work that was still easily available in
more-complete forms? Did these ‘new’ poems not find their way into earlier
collections because Corso, or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or editors at New
Directions found them unworthy?”. Questions like these have often crossed my
mind when books or poems are
dug out from the “bottom drawer” and
put into print. Not everything a writer writes is necessarily worth
preserving. As Mathews observes, there are things an artist, whether poet,
painter, or musician, wouldn’t want kept for posterity. Corso could be
uneven in his writing, and It had its drawbacks.
I’ve pulled a few items from this assembly of biography, memoirs, literary
commentary, interviews and other material, and they will, I hope, give an
idea of its variety. Not all tastes will run to the tales of drinking,
doping, and general loose living, but even those who didn’t always find
Corso the best of companions – “It was never easy knowing Gregory Corso”,
(Jay Jeff Jones in “What is he
saying? Who cares?! It’s said”) – valued their encounters with him. Or,
more importantly, with his work. The best of it will, when the anecdotes of
outrageous episodes have been
largely forgotten, ensure that his name will remain somewhere in the annals
of poetry.
There are photographs and other illustrations, plenty of notes to the
more-literary essays for those who want to track down Corso’s work – he
wrote much more than poems, some of it in obscure publications – and the
whole adds up to an entertaining and instructive portrait of a poet and
personality who tried the patience of many of those he met, but who clearly
never failed to leave an impression, whether good or bad.
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