An
Accidental Appreciation:
A Few Pieces on Gregory Corso
with a Nod Toward a New Sincerity
_________________________________________________________________________
by Matt Hart
[Author’s
Note: I intended to end this appreciation after the second section—no doubt
some will say I should have. However, I felt
there was more to say, so I kept writing.
And though the result is somewhat tangled and perhaps even repetitive,
there’s something about the scattershot-ness of the pieces altogether that I
think Gregory Corso himself might’ve understood. With that in mind I have made no attempt to
connect the various tissues, nor even to be
particularly argumentative; I have only meant to be excited about something, as
a means of getting others similarly excited.
Anyway, I hope that genuine excitement is the least of what this points
to]
“No one wants you to be a poet; in being a
poet one is always disobeying society’s wishes… Society’s interest is in having
everyone who has disobeyed reform.”
—Alice Notley (APR Vol. 33, No 3. May/June 2004 18)
“I feel lonely for joy for the spur of
joy.” —Donald Revell (from the preface to Apollinaire’s Alcools x)
“Poems show us how it feels to like
trouble.” —James Longenbach
(The Resistance to Poetry 94)
“We will not force ourselves into any
hand-me-down-inherited straight-jacket of all cast- off moral concepts mixed
with beastly superstition derived from the primitive mythology which is found
in the bible—not that I have any objection to mythology in its proper
place.” —Gregory Corso
(“Variations on a Generation” Portable Beat Reader 184)
1.
It’s a little dispiriting to me that often
when I bring up my great fondness for Gregory Corso’s
work among poets of my own generation, the attitude isn’t one of either great passion
or disdain, but rather something more along the lines of “Yeah, I haven’t
really read him much” with just a tinge of astonishment and/or condescension
thrown in for good measure. This is, I
think, largely because Corso’s poetry isn’t really
being taught in MFA programs (and therefore, it isn’t being read). I don’t think he was ever even mentioned to
me in graduate school, and except for a couple of widely anthologized pieces it
seems that his work has been relegated—and ever so wrongly—to the bottom of the
heap of dead Beat Poets in pieces. That
said, I can see how part of the reason for Corso’s
absence in academia is also due to his unflinching romanticism and sloppified popular accessibility. As Allen Ginsberg wrote in the introduction
to Corso’s 1991 new and selected poems Mindfield:
Corso is a poet’s poet…
close to John Keats for our time, exquisitely delicate in manners of the
Muse. He has been and always will be a
popular poet, awakener of youth, puzzlement and pleasure for sophisticated elder
bibliophiles, “Immortal” as immortal is, Captain Poetry exampling revolution of
Spirit, his “poetry the opposite of hypocrisy,” a loner, laughably unlaurelled by native prizes, divine Poet Maudit, rascal poet Villonesque
and Rimbaudian whose wild fame’s extended for decades
around the world from France to China, World poet. (xii-xiii)
In other words, to align oneself with Corso is to align oneself with outdated, naïve emotional
exuberance—which as we all know is a way to look stupid in the world of contemporary
ideas. However, it’s also, I would argue
(more importantly), to align oneself with exciting, excitable, readable
poems, ones which burn with wit and intensity and all too human error, poems
which are about things—big and small, ordinary and strange—marriage,
hair, atomic devastation—“penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin
dust” (Mindfield “Marriage” 63). To put it plainly, and also to throw down the
gauntlet, Corso’s poetry offers us an opportunity to
remember what it’s like to read poems and to understand something about
ourselves and the world—rather than to look at them as language for
their own sake or as just another example of disintegrated hipster
consciousness.
Of course, to be fair, another reason for Corso’s neglect these days is the fact that the great
stories of his antics as a human being can be so provocative as to overshadow
his achievement as an artist. That is,
unfortunately, what people do remember about Corso
(when they remember anything at all) are the tales of his great excesses—his
legendary drinking and heroin addiction, his cantankerousness, his pouting and
over-the-top childish flailing about. It
seems everyone even marginally affiliated with the Beats has a story about Corso, from his tossing a lit firecracker into the
meditation hall at Naropa to drunkenly cutting Marcel
Duchamp’s tie in half at a party. Corso, it seems, is
better known for his willful unpredictable absurdity—which was at times
disrespectful, pathetic and sentimental—than he is for his poems. This is a shame, and something I hope here to
write aright—though I admit that the focus on Corso’s
exploits is also understandable. Many of
the stories are outrageous, cathartically entertaining and just plain fun.
Nevertheless, when Gregory Corso passed away into the Vast on
What I want to talk about in this
appreciation is how Gregory Corso and his work can be
seen as a precursor to a New Sincerity in poetry, one that I’m beginning to see
in the work of many of the poets of my own generation—and which frankly I’d
like to see more of—a poetry which thrives on the ideas that 1) capital-B
Beauty and other aesthetic and human values are real and available to us both
experientially and intellectually, 2) that language is so inefficient with
regard to the expression of essentials that we need poetry to make it work
significantly, 3) that as poets, we need to emphasize poetry as a means to an
end, rather than merely as an end in itself, and 4) that poetry needs to
utilize the experimental muscle of the last century to move beyond mere experimentation
and instead start amounting to something—something fully beautifully
human. Corso
did this brilliantly, perhaps at times in spite of himself.
2.
Rocker/poet Patti Smith, in a moving and
eloquent Foreword to Corso’s selected letters, An
Accidental Autobiography, called him “the flower of the Beat Generation”
and described her first meeting with him this way:
I first encountered
Gregory long ago in front of the
It seems to me Smith’s remembrance praises Corso as he would’ve wanted to be praised—both for his
virtues and his shortcomings—as a true poet, someone “who was called upon…and
knew it” (Letters Foreword xi), but who struggled desperately,
ridiculously and tragically (as we all do) with his humanness.
Corso clearly had an
effect on Smith, which was not just personal, but artistic as well. Sure, he pulled down his pants and threw up
on people, but his real achievement is the poetry—imaginative, inventive, frothing at the mouth, soul crushing and life
affirming. His poems speak, by turns,
kindly and violently to people’s hearts.
What’s funny is how this is the very thing that’s been used to
marginalize his work. As Michael Skau points out in his wonderful book A Clown in a
Grave: Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso,
this seeming propensity of Corso’s for
emphasizing/ romanticizing the life of the poet, has lead several critics
(including Richard Howard) to argue that Corso wrote
a lot of Poetry, but not so many poems (112).
Which is another way of saying that Corso got so caught up in the business of “poesy” as he
liked to call it, that the quality of his work is spotty at best.
And while it’s true that his poetic output
decreased as his lifestyle—drug addiction, etc.— spiraled out of control—and
while also perhaps true that his poems are at times, technically speaking,
somewhat hit and miss—when he hits he hits with all his might! And that has to be good for a lot, especially
in this day and age when so many poets and people don’t HIT at all. Yes, Corso’s poems
are sometimes formally inconsistent and sloppy.
Yes, his rhymes are sometimes forced and easy. Yes, occasionally his poems seem slight and
tossed off leaving a reader asking so what?
And yes, I will even grant that sometimes his emotional exuberance turns
into recklessness and/or sentimental quicksand… [for a
sympathetic but critical treatment of all of the above check out Skau’s book mentioned above].
However, I would argue that this is in fact
exactly the reason that his work is so marvelous and poignant. Corso didn't
see the point in writing poems—as well-made machines, coded messages, or
language experiments—strictly for their own sake; he was after something
bigger—the IDEA of POETRY—an idea capable of connecting people to each other
and their world on an ever so human level—that level where we recognize how
we're a lot more alike than we are different. Poetry was not for him an
end in itself, but a means to an end (before the final end), a diving board
into the larger discourse on what it means to be human essentially—not
theoretically, but actually. As he said in his poem Power, "Since I
observe memory and dream/ And not the images of the
moment/ I am become more vivid."
And as the poet becomes more vivid, so do all of us—that is, if we are
open to what the poet has to say.
Obviously, this is tricky. So much of what contemporary poetry has to
say, it seems, is so terribly difficult.
In a sense the poet’s job, at least as it has arrived on our doorstep in
the here and now, is to make language as damaged and strange as reality
itself—and yet, the question has to be to what ends? My fear is that we’ve lost sight of the real
reasons to ask this question (and also how to answer it significantly), and
instead have become overwhelmed and/ or excited by the images-upon-images confusion of
things to the point that now we’ve contented ourselves (as I would argue so too
have the visual arts) with an endless cycling of art for its own sake (I
include myself full-throttle in this indictment, of course).
Corso, I believe, saw
all of this coming a long time ago and decided that he would not be ripped off
by it—would not have the experience and power of poetry (and life) stripped
from either the poet or his poems. To be
a poet, for Corso, is to be essentially sincere (which
is to be romantic—see below) and to make a body of work that reflects that
sincerity—even if that means being sincerely fucked up, or ludicrous, or in
love. For Corso,
poetry shouldn’t be primarily about language, but rather primarily about:
language and feelings, the poet and people, the universe and heaven. In other words, Corso’s
project, along somewhat Beat party lines, is neo-Romantic. As he said in a 1958 letter to Philip Whalen,
“…to love fully is to laugh well, and both go into the making of Romanticism;
almost goofy existence Romanticism” (Accidental Autobiography 172). And later in the same letter he writes,
To be a poet is to be Romantic. Be any kind of romantic you want; pick out
its eyes and use them for cufflinks if you like; it makes no difference how you
bear it; it’ll stick to you and itch you and bug you, little guardian flea, old
romanticism, a pretty corny flea, at times, but then that’s where humor comes
in, that good ole nurse of Romanticism.” (173)
Corso understood that
poetry's power has always been to enliven us, and therefore it should
be both human and accessible, and yet also deal as strangely as necessary
with the poet and his audience alike—which, by the way, should be
as wide an audience as possible.
Not that his poetry is dumbed-down. On
the contrary it's quite complex, quite infamously odd. How is one to deal
ordinarily with lines like: "A child came to me/ swinging an ocean on
a stick," or "O Bomb I love you I want to kiss
your clank eat your boom", or even better:
October you fat month of gloom and poetry
It's
no longer your melodious graveyard air
Your
night yanked cypresses
Your
lovely dead moon
It is
October of me! My Power!
Alive
with a joy a sparkle a laugh
That
drops my woe and all woe to the floor
Like
a shot spy
(“Power”
Mindfield 92)
Like Ted Berrigan
and a few others, Corso considered poetry to be a
natural and necessary human enterprise (one that has been and continues to be
largely squashed by homogenized civilization and mass culture). Poetry is our primary means of expressing both
the inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable life-force
of shadows that we are essentially, and also the beauty inherent in the world
and all of us. Crispin Sartwell puts this
sentiment brilliantly in his book Six Names of Beauty when he writes:
...the experience of beauty is not bounded by the
vocabulary one possesses. Always our longings and what we
long for are barely expressible or hover at the edges of our language, stretch
our expressive capacities, or force us
into using words oddly, devising new ones, or
appropriating terms from other languages." [itallics mine] (xiii)
Corso understood
intuitively that the poet is someone who is forced over and over again to use
words oddly as a means by which to express and communicate the beauty all
around us and within us. That said, there’s a fine line to be drawn here,
and Corso drew it.
To use words “oddly” in a poetic sense does not mean “incomprehensibly”
or “frivolously” or “just because.” For Corso, poems are important only in as much as they
participate in the larger ideological aims of poetry—which are namely, to point
us toward ourselves, other people, and the world; and ultimately to make us
more alive by bringing us closer to the absolute. As James Longenbach
says in his book The Resistance to Poetry, "…poetry’s greatest power is to
instill in us a craving for something other than poetry…" (107). Or as Corso himself puts it
in his poem “Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday”:
I
love poetry because it makes me love
and presents me
life
And
of all the fires that die in me,
there’s one burns like the sun;
it might not make day my personal life
my association with people
or my behavior
toward society,
but it does tell me my
soul has a shadow
(Mindfield 121)
Corso I would argue was
the Coleridge of our age—brilliant, damaged, sorry, in love—in short, damned
strange like the rest of us.
Nevertheless, as a poet he is almost always understandable, accessible,
vivid. Among other things, Corso’s poems remind us to make our Poetry matter, not just
to poets, but to as many people as we can get to read and listen. And to do that we have not only to give, but
to receive—to engage with other people and the Vast by articulating the
connective tissue of the universe, whatever that may be and by any means
necessary. Gregory Corso
threw himself against the world over and over again, risking everything:
sentimentality, absurdity, his own authenticity. Sometimes he broke through, as he did in this
passage from his fragment poem “Man,”
When
man sings birds humble into piety;
What
history can the whale empire sing?
What
genius ant dare break from anthood
As
man can from manhood?
King
Agamemnon! Mortal man!
Ah,
immortality—
(Mindfield 102)
Still other times he woke up with a
terrible hangover. As he wrote in a 1963
letter to Allen Ginsberg,
…man o man, poetry is not something to toy
with, to dance with. Sorry, poetry is
important like doctors are, and sickness is a serious business by god… I wish
to hell those poets of power and in control of communication outlets were downright
realer and gooder.” (An Accidental
Autobiography 354)
In short, Gregory Corso
showed us how not to be uptight and snobbish about art, while at the same time
begging us to be deadly, ridiculously serious about it. What his poems demonstrate—what they model—is
not just a way of engaging with poetry, but of engaging with the world and
other people poetically—vividly, charmingly, inventively, alive—as a means of
making ourselves, and everything, better.
3.
One of the important things that sets
Gregory Corso apart from many of his New American
Poetry contemporaries—is that for all his spontaneous and unpredictable
on-the-bottom-looking-up Beatness, he always
acknowledged and applied the tradition of poetry, particularly that of the Greeks and the
Romantics, whom he loved and knew deeply in the way that others of his
generation only seemed to know (as he knew, also) that America was a
dispiriting jive dump. Corso’s work is not as spontaneous, thoughtless and
un-self-critical as it is often made out to be.
Corso was in fact an adept craftsman. His musical textures and formal
inventiveness, his frequent use of Romantic and Biblical language, his
masterfully strange juxtapositions, and clear debt to the past mark him clearly
as poet who knows his stuff. For
example, this passage from the Calligram-like “Bomb”
a massive poem in the shape of a mushroom cloud:
O Bomb I love you
I want to kiss your clank
eat you boom
You are a paean an
acme of scream
a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
O resound thy tanky knees
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
nights ye BOOM
ye days ye BOOM
BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains
go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING
Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
Ubangi BANG
orangoutang
BING BANG BONG BOOM
bee bear baboon
ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
the tail the fin the wing…
(Mindfield 69)
or these lines from
“Feelings on Getting Older”:
No,
I don’t know what it’s like being old…yet
I’ve
a wife in her early 20’s
And
I’ve a son just two and a half
In
20 years I’ll be 70
She’ll
be in her early 40’s
And
he in his early 20’s
and it’ll be the year 2,000!
and everybody will celebrate
drink and love and have fun
while me poor me
will be even more toothless
and bony-assed
and inevitably stained with pee
And
yet, yet shall planes crash
Popes,
matinee idols, Presidents, yet shall they die
And
somehow with all this oldingness
I
see with vintage eyes, Life; Spiritus eterne!
With
all the comings come
and all the goings gone
(Mindfield 205)
or, finally the first
and last stanzas of Corso’s great address/ode poem
“Hair”
My
beautiful hair is dead
Now
I am the rawhead
O
when I look in the mirror
the bald I see is balder still
When
I sleep the sleep I sleep
is not at will
And
when I dream I dream children waving goodbye—
It
was lovely hair once
it was
Hours
before shop windows gum-machine
mirrors with great
combs
*****
Damned
be hair!
Hair
that must be plucked from soup!
Hair
that clogs the bathtub!
Hair
that costs a dollar fifty to be murdered!
Disgusting
hair! eater of peroxide! dye!
sand!
Monks
and their bagel heads!
Ancient
Negroes
and their stocking caps!
Armies!
Universities! Industries! and their branded crews!
Antoinette
Du Barry Pompadour and their Platinum cakes!
Bohemians Hawaiians poodles
(Mindfield
51-53)
In these pieces I think Corso
more than demonstrates his ability to work both inside and outside the poetic
tradition. The poems range and have
range while vibrating with an energy barely contained by the page. They want to be shouted in the ruins, sung in
the streets, and then tossed for their lives down three flights of stairs. There is whimsy here and lightness, but
underneath it all a kind of horrific gravity too—mostly prophetic—an atomic
explosion, mortality, aging, cycle upon cycle into the dust and nonsense of
images, the grave. The poems are full as
dreams are full. And yet they aren’t
dreams, they’re talking wide awake in broad daylight—excitedly, but soberly,
strangely, but sure. The work is at one
and the same time completely comprehensible and simultaneously beautiful. This is craft alright, but craft on the run
from a poetry that’s too important to be stifled by it. At the same it’s also wildly experimental (O
my god it’s the avant-garde!) without being either pretentious or pompous, nor
cold and ridiculous as an internet connection.
Corso’s poems have
spirit. He is our cheerleader, our drill
sargeant, and even when he’s preaching (have I
already mentioned Coleridge?) he still manages to hit most of the right
notes. Take for example his poem “The
American Way,” which expresses both his overwhelming passion for the
individualistic principles America was founded on and simultaneously an anxiety
about the ways in which America has strayed from its ideals: “I am a great American,” he writes, “I am
almost nationalistic about it/ I love America like a madness/ But I am afraid
to return to America” (Mindfield 144). And
later, “I am telling you the American Way is a hideous monster” (145),
“American rings with such strangeness” (147).
The poem is nothing if not passionate and conflicted (sometimes to the
point of being didactic, simplistic and foolish). Yet, there are places in the
poem when Corso really hits his stride, laying things
out plainly and showing a penchant for real (even courageous) insight:
…those who seek to get out of the Way can not
The Beats are good example of this
They forsake the Way’s habits
and
acquire for themselves their own habits
And they become as distinct and regimented and
lost
as the
main flow
because the Way has many outlets
like a
snake with many tentacles—
There is no getting out of the Way
The only way out is the death of the Way
And what will kill the Way but a new
consciousness
Something great and new and wonderful must
happen
to free
man from this beast (Mindfield
149)
Corso here seems
resigned to the fact that there are forces (cultural, political, religious,
etc.) in the world, which are larger than life—larger than the poet. He is also demonstrating here an awareness
and wariness of group
affiliations and alliances—including it should be noted any avant-garde—which
by its very nature is group-oriented, and thus, suspect. Furthermore, as much as anything else this
shows Corso involved in a sort of self-indictment—as
anyone reading this either when the poem was originally published or now would
have known Corso as a Beat poet, i.e. a poet caught
up in the tentacles of The Way. For
Yet, I would point Corso
seems anything but beaten in “The American Way.” The poem ends in fact on a wildly triumphant
note with salvation arriving/arising via Corso’s belief
that, even in the midst of so much insidious replication, “Man is the victory
of life/ And I hold firm to the American man” that is, to the power of
individual(istic) consciousness and effort; “ I see standing on the skin of the Way/ America
to be as proud and victorious as St. Michael on the neck of the fallen
Lucifer” (Mindfield 150). And while I have some problems with the terms
in which Corso speaks, I appreciate his urgency, not
only his willingness to see himself as part of the problem, but also to see
himself as part of the solution—if primarily imaginatively. For Corso, the
poetic imagination is primarily transformative; it is the soul of invention and
vision, the driving force behind everything that has been, that is, or that
will be.
4.
Through everything it seems to me that Corso felt poetry’s real power was in connecting one
individual consciousness to another in terms of those things that make us
essentially human. And though he isn’t
always explicit about what these “essentials” might be, it’s clear that he is
no stranger to sadness and joy, expressiveness, beauty and the sublime. Reading Corso,
there is no question that absolutes do exist, that value in the old sense is
possible. Beauty, along with humor and
death, is one of the great obsessions of his work, and not one that’s unsophisticated—nor for that matter unconflicted. Take for example his treatment of Beauty in
one of his later poems, “The Whole Mess… Almost”. After (some might say) cavalierly tossing
Truth, Love, Faith, God and Charity out the window to certain death in the
street below, the Poet turns to Beauty:
Then Beauty… ah,
Beauty—
As I led her to the
window
I told her: “You I
loved best in life
…but you’re a
killer; Beauty kills!”
Not really meaning to
drop her
I immediately ran
downstairs
getting there just in time
to catch her
“You saved me!” she
cried
I put her down and
told her:
“Move on.”
(Mindfield 199)
Thus, one might say, Corso
recognizes the necessity of Beauty in the world, and even if it be the poet’s
prerogative (or duty) at times to “kill” Beauty—as “Beauty kills!”—the poet
mustn’t (can’t?) do it FINALLY. Corso’s poetics are rarely of the “eye for an eye”
sort. But rather, they fall somewhere in
between “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and “You can do
anything you want, as long as it doesn’t really hurt anybody else” (the key
words being “really hurt”). To actually
kill Beauty and thus one of the supreme values and enlivening forces of Poetry
is to kill not only the poet, but part of the human spirit itself. For Corso, Beauty
is intimately entwined with Being, the scaffolding of everything that is. To do away with Beauty is to become the
beast, to be merciless and destroyed, i.e. to be just like everyone else. If Beauty dies, the possibility of significant
individuality is lost, but with Beauty in the world, the possibility for
salvation, for connecting with other people (and with oneself) in terms of an un/common and absolute pleasure is not only possible, but
necessary. Indeed, after sending Beauty
on her way in the poem, the speaker returns to his room to find Death hiding
under the kitchen sink,
“I’m not real!” it cried
“I’m just a rumor spread by life…”
Laughing I threw it out ,
kitchen sink and all
and suddenly realized
Humor
was all that was left—
(Mindfield 200)
Beauty makes the struggle against
death (define “death” in as many ways as you can think of) (and having a sense
of humor in the face of it) possible. In
Beauty one has something to live for—namely, to discover what makes a person both uniquely him or herself and also exactly (strangely)
like everybody else. And it’s in the
speaker’s realization that humor is key that everything (the struggle,
Beauty, Faith, God, the poet, etc.) is forgiven.
Of course, like everything else in Corso’s poetics his relationship to Beauty is complex, as
is evidenced by his dropping “her” out the window, and then heroically rescuing
her in the nick of time. I would argue
in fact that one useful way to think of Corso is as
an avant-garde poet who was out to heroically rescue traditional poetic values
(Beauty, Expressiveness, The Sublime etc.) for the avant-garde, while at the
same time privileging the role of the poet as a sort of glue that holds the
universe together (in the face of knowing better).
But why, however, rescue Beauty at
all? By the 1950’s and 60’s, when Corso was doing the bulk of his work, Beauty in the arts
had become a largely discredited value, and—some would say—for good
reason. As Crispin Sartwell
writes in Six Names of Beauty:
…beauty came in the twentieth century to
seem like a flimsy and obsolete or even trivial value, a kind of frippery,
perhaps nothing more than a particularly poignant or elaborate prettiness. In a world dedicated to industrial production
and its critique, in a world beset by war, genocide and nuclear holocaust,
beauty as an occasion for pleasure seemed frivolous and politically suspect
(13).
Thus, while Corso’s
interest and belief in the transcendent power of Beauty and other values never
flagged, his relationship to them wasn’t unambiguous. Furthermore, the actual character of Beauty
in his poems seems ever on the verge of falling away into the fog of individual
un/dis/consciousness—or worse, of being literally
(and literarily) destroyed (forgotten) by a culture increasingly obsessed with
the surface appearances of things—and by a poet (and “poesy”) increasingly
convinced of his (and its) omnipotence.
Nowhere is this better evidenced in Corso’s
work than in his poem “Don’t Shoot the Warthog”:
A
child came to me
swinging an ocean on a
stick
He told me his
sister was dead,
I pulled down his
pants and gave him a kick.
I drove him down
the streets
down the night of my
generation
I screamed his
name, his cursed name,
down the streets of my
generation
and children lept in joy to the name
and running came.
Mothers and fathers
bent their heads to hear;
I screamed the name.
The child trembled,
fell,
and staggered up
again,
I screamed his
name!
And a fury of mothers
and fathers
sank their teeth into
his brain.
I called to the
angels of my generation
on the rooftops, in
the alleyways,
beneath the garbage and
the stones,
I screamed the
name!
and they came
and gnawed the child’s
bones.
(Mindfield 34)
In this surreal and violent poem, beauty is
definitely more than skin deep, but it’s also not something which strictly
lives in the eye of the beholder. One
has to learn to tune in to Beauty’s frequency, to distinguish between the
surfaces and the depths of things, and this is what poetry can help us to
accomplish. In “Don’t Shoot the Warthog”
Beauty is a “child swinging an ocean on a stick,” a child kicked in the pants
by the poet, eaten zombie-like alive by a “fury of mothers and fathers,” and
finally even has its bones gnawed upon by “the angels” of Corso’s
generation. Meanwhile, through it all,
the poet stands by, doing what I’m sure some people would argue, poets do best—screaming Beauty’s name in the face of
visceral carnage and ugliness.
Perhaps what’s interesting here is that the
poet doesn’t just split and run. In fact
he gives child-Beauty its first friendly (?) kick in the pants. Beauty needs Poetry (and by extension the
Poet) to proceed in the world, but the world is an ugly and terrifying
place—one where Beauty and the (true) Poet are on their own, and no amount of
screaming will change this. In the event
of Beauty’s brutalization by the powers that be, the poet is somewhat powerless
to do anything, though what he can do is make himself heard—thereby giving
beauty the last word(s): as monument and memorial and seed for fresh
flowers—perhaps ones with teeth and the good conscience to use them. The poet screams essences, and thus, speaking
oddly, scrapes away appearances to expose the beautiful soul. The warthog becomes a swan. The shotgun becomes a rose. To quote again
from Sartwell’s Six Names of Beauty, “Either
beauty died around 1895, except to refer to movie starlets and chrysanthemums,
or it became much more difficult and strange, kept developing in a subterranean
way” (14). Clearly Corso
has in mind something strange when he speaks of Beauty, something subterranean
and difficult, but which, nevertheless, must be brought to the surface and
enunciated wildly.
5.
Thus, one might say that unlike many of his
comrades, who also came of age during the second World War, Corso
had no problem asserting value in the world, “If you’re a poet you’re saved,”
he was fond of saying. I take this
notion of poetic salvation, along with Beauty and Humor, to be a central theme
and value of his work, yet I think it’s different in character than many of the
other claims about Beat value as a sort of religious state of being, the root
of beatific, and/or an existential search for value in the face of valuelessness and institutional bankruptcy. While the other Beats and much of the rest of
America/ The World were rushing around searching for something to believe in
the face of an almost nihilistic (Cold War, Atomic Bomb, Suburban) disbelief, Corso was writing poems of incredible human beauty (both
formal and imaginative) and believing somehow that they could save him and all
of us from our various and numerous horrors—Death, being chief among them.
All is answerable I need not know the answer
Poetry is seeking the answer
Joy is in knowing there is an answer
Death is knowing the
answer
(“Notes after Blacking Out”
Mindfield 47)
In other words, the
charge of the poet is to live and to believe that there is a meaning both in
the here-and-now and in the there-after.
But it’s in the poetry itself that the poet must demonstrate this life
and belief. Thus, Corso’s
work is often an earnest disaster, but one that’s hoarding both mess and
measure, and thrives on poetry as a medium for getting to something truly
essential, transformative, transcendent.
His poems always proceed as if the grounds for them are given, his
footing sure. And why
not? The grounds—the poet’s
parameters—are derived from two places: 1) the poetic choices he or she makes
and 2) from the life stuff that makes us the contradictory, twisted and
beautiful clowns we are in our pajamas our hearts. Step up to the summit or through thin ice,
but have your reasons and do it like you mean it with feeling. What happens next,
happens next. What could be more
marvelous?
******
Clearly I feel that Corso’s
work, as a positive (re)generative force in poetry should be a lasting one and
far more universally lauded than it is.
With equal parts craft, audacity, humor and love, Corso
returned poetry to its roots in Truth and Beauty, Beauty and Truth. His work reminds us that poems are art, but
that Poetry is the unacknowledged savior of the universe. And with it we have the potential to
re-orient ourselves (and everything that is) within and against the limits of
our language, which are, in fact, the limits of our world. As Frank O’Hara wrote in “Gregory Corso: Gasoline” his poem/ review of Corso’s
second book, “Thanks for the not-memory of choosing a world…// …and the poet
takes up the knives of his wounds to catch the light” (Collected O’Hara
315-316).
Works Cited/Consulted
Corso, Gregory. An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected
Letters of Gregory Corso. Ed.
Bill Morgan. New
Directions:
Corso, Gregory. Mindfield:
New and Selected Poems.
Corso, Gregory. “from
Variations on a Generation.” The Portable Beat Reader. Ed. Ann Charters.
Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry.
Notley,
Alice and Claudia Keelan. “A Conversation September 2002 – December
2003.” American
Poetry
Review. May/ June 2004. Vol.33/No.3.
15-20.
O’Hara, Frank. “Gregory Corso:
Gasoline.” The
Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Ed. Donald Allen.
Revell, Donald. Preface. Guillaume Apollinaire. Alcools. Trans.
Donald Revell.
Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty.
Skau, Michael. “A Clown in a Grave”: Complexities and
Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso.
IL: Southern
Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and
Authenticity.