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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