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Blowing Up the Last Beat |
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A student’s encounter with THE WORD in the person of Gregory Corso
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Join the Discussion
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“Lots of us propose to be poets but who finally stakes all, or just takes all, as being that way?”
• Creeley on Corso (from PAULMCD1)
Tell us about the time you met him, in life or in poetry, or share your poem his spirit inspired.
• Stories & Poems for Gregory Corso
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The most important observation anyone can make about the death of Corso is that it represents the death of the original Beat mindbomb fuse. Yes, they called it a “generation,” but after Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, and Corso, the rest is simply anthology-filler. Quote all the ancillary and second-generation imitators you want, but they are simply the mental fire spread from the sparks playfully tossed at the embers of 20th century creativity by Allen, Bill, Jack, and Gregory.
The amazing thing about the Beats for me was that they managed to upend any institution they encountered in the simultaneous act of praising it. What Corso did for poetry is what the Beats did for America. They loved it so much they had to blow it up and re-make it. Allen did pretty much the same thing with academic institutions and it pretty much sums up my experience of taking his first graduate seminar at the City University of New York. We were an over-packed class of 20-odd eager and mystified students of literary theory, anxious to take our best shot at applying fancy French theories to books from the “anti-academic” school of counterculture. But Allen didn’t want to hear no “fucking theories” as he called them (see below); he simply wanted to tell his story and parade his compadres each week through the seminar, like a self-produced version of This Is Your Life. So we engaged in the most entertaining grad class ever, surely, hosting visits each week from people like Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, and Peter Orlovsky (who stared at us silently for a full fifteen minutes before shouting out “I just got outta Bellevue!!” and scaring the bejeezus out of me).
And then there was Gregory. I had known little of his work before picking up the reading list for that class and poring over Mindfield. I hunted down every Corso book I could find and thought that The Happy Birthday of Death was the perfect book of poems to read once a day for the rest of your life, the perfect inspiration for one who aspired to the never-ending carnival genius enjoyment of poetry. Fried shoes. Allen gladly fed my new Corso addiction and lent me several extremely rare texts from his personal collection. So sad that I never photocopied such things, like the complete script from a seminar where Corso antagonized a panel of poets and professors, skewering every line of questioning with his street poet perspective. I should have know from there what to expect when I had to present to Allen and the class the results of my own “graduate studies," wherein I attempted a 30-odd page outline of synergies between Corso, the Beats, and the post-structuralist theory of deconstruction. Allen and I fought over it in the classroom and afterwards in his office (never before had I had a smackdown-style shouting match over poetry, and to have had Allen as my opponent was kind of fun). Of course, the week after, Corso was our guest of honor. He made it all real simple; as far as he was concerned all you needed to be a great poet was an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a pen. After that, all was fun and genius.
The class was going well, until Allen turned me and said, “Why don’t you tell him your fucking theory!” Corso listened with patience as I struggled to run through the meanings of “the signifier and the signified” for him, but it was kind of like that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen pulls in the film director to silence the obnoxious, theory-spouting fan. I was stuck, but it was a mindblow I needed. The theory was shit. All theory is shit, really. Nothing mattered but the word, the poem, what it did to you when you read it. Allen and Gregory were the dogs-in-street-clothes I’d been looking to talk to since I started academic studies.
So yeah, I muddled through more years of theories and squeaked out a couple of Master’s degrees. But I don’t read any “fucking theory” anymore. Give me fried shoes and let me imagine myself a king with a pen once more.
Bob Timm
Bob Timm studied with Allen Ginsberg at the City University of New York and wrote his Master’s thesis on Gregory Corso and Beat poetics. Bob has served as About’s Guide to Ska and Reggae (now expanded to cover world music) since 1997.
Next page > Corso poems & books available online > page 1, 2, 3
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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