“Poetry is seeking the answer
Joy is in knowing there is an answer
Death is knowing the Answer”
(from “The Happy Birthday of Death”
by Gregory Corso)
For Gregory to die three days before W ascends to be 43rd President, where’s the logic in that, the poetry? Simply that Corso represents the human born of the soil who is that soil, the cantankerous inevitable, the kicker over of “the ivory applecart of tyrannical values” and W is the human born of tyrant dad and maintains that reptilian vision.
Corso is famous for his invention, “The Poets’ Choice”: when offered a choice between any two things, always take both of them. In the early 70s, I ran into Gregory at the park on 72nd and Broadway then known as Needle Park. Young poet energy perzapified, I was coming from the Performance Group’s production of Michael McClure’s “The Beard” and was still in its thrall. I accosted him, and on the sidewalk began to enact my favorite scenes, especially the moment where Liz LeCompte explodes from a tiny Jane Harlow to a giant Billy the Kid all in a single gesture. When I turned back for applause, Gregory had disappeared.
At Columbia, Professor Angus MacLeish had been one of the students at Harvard who adopted Corso, published Vestal Lady of Brattle, or so goes the myth of Gregory on the dorm floors, Gregory with a universal Harvard meal ticket.... Raging in the bookstores of Rome or Oklahoma, “I’m Gregory Corso! The poet! I’ll sign all the books! and, I’m hungry!”.... Introducing Cookie Mueller to me at St. Mark’s Marathon, “This is the best poet here, get her on!” and he was right.... “I don’t know why you hang out with us Beats, we’re old,” he decried, “if I were young I’d go to the Slam....”
“Marriage,” the first poem I memorized.... “Bomb,” the first concrete poem I ever saw.... The alternate titles of “The Happy Birthday of Death,” how to get process into text.... The Wild Child of Greenwich Village in Pull My Daisy.... Ginsberg: “He’s the best poet of us all....” But comparisons not. When it comes to poets, I take all of them, thanks to the gods’ messenger, sweet Gregory Corso.
Bob Holman
Do you have Gregory Corso stories to share? Visit our Poetry Forum to read Robert Creeley’s e-letter on Corso (brought to us from the Buffalo Poetics List by PAULMCD1). Then browse through our Forum collection of stories & poems for Gregory Corso, & add your own.
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