The Romance of Gregory Corso: Cypress, Marble, Moon!

 “I hate poetry and all its fucking ambitious son-of-a-bitches who call me a showman because I act myself”. Gregory Corso  letter to Lawrence Ferlingetti, September 6th 1957.

My poor life is so fucked up, what’s the meaning of it all? I don’t yet know, when I do find out i fear it will be too late.” Gregory Corso, letter to Allen Ginsberg Amsterdam, Sept. 11 1957.

There – right below Shelley’s memorial stone – is the grave marker for the American poet Gregory Corso.

Corso – the permanently acting-out bad boy of the Beats; the intellectual with a sixth grade education; the classical street-wise scholar; the juvenile delinquent with a prison record; the Catholic who died in Minneapolis in 2001 – how did he come to be buried at the rather exclusive Cimitero Acattolico – non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome? Was this urn burial the ultimate antic and final hustle?

Corso had been there before. In Rome in 1958 – amid drunken antics and escapades – he visited the cemetery and the grave of his hero and muse Percy Bysshe Shelley. He wrote an effusive letter to Allen Ginsberg describing his over-the-top flow of feeling.

Dear Allen,

Am writing this is the sniper’s ruin just before Shelley’s tomb….Romance is madly alive! ….this is the sturdy unfailing symbol of Romance: Cypress, marble, moon.” Corso to Allen Ginsberg, Rome, October 1958

Corso was a Poet with a capital P. He identified with the wild men of literature who saw themselves and their work as one. Poetry, performance and persona were the same, united, a fused identity. Poetry was a way of life; it was life.

His heroes included Marlowe and Chatterton and especially Shelley. These were the kind of poets and men he admired and sought to emulate in his poetry, and life. 

Christopher Marlowe – the brawler, rake-hell, playwright contemporary of Shakespeare – lived a life on the edge of legality, was murdered in murky and mysterious circumstances and buried in an unmarked grave in Deptford.

Thomas Chatterton was the child prodigy, poet and forger who killed himself in despair at the age of 17 when he was not able to earn enough to live on. He died penniless and starving in a garret room tormented by his sense of failure. That was 1770. In the next few decades the “marvelous’ boy became an enduring symbol of the Romantic movement and its preoccupations with neglected genius, premature death and artistic suffering. He was beloved by the Romantics who saw in his tragic early death the martyrdom of the pure poet in a heartless and materialistic world.

Shelley of course was the poet, political activist, radical and rebel and who was expelled from Oxford University because he refused to deny authorship of a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism.

The young Corso was scathing about the well-known poets of the time – the “New England poets, apocalyptic crocodilians, the whole horde of them.” In their tame respectability they fell far short of his dramatic ideals..

How can anyone truly be a poet who goes to the john with a clothespin on his nose?

They do not realize that poems are nothing without the poet. Why are Shelley, Chatterton, Byron, Rimbaud, to name but a few, so beautiful? I’ll tell you why, they and their works are one the same, the poet and his poems are a whole. These New England poets aren’t hip enough to realize that. They stand away from their poetry, as though it was something they were ashamed to be associated with. That’s why they write for the New Yorker. Not only can they be poets but sophisticates, too.

How can anyone truly be a poet who goes to the john with a clothespin on his nose? Fops, that’s what they are, not poets. I dare one of them take rat poison like Chatterton did. They wouldn’t dare. Aside from wanting to be buried in some quiet Episcopal graveyard, they want to endure-endure. And they do! How old is that Frost? It’s disgusting! An old man writing verse. Verse is for youth, after 30 the only honorable thing to do is give it up. Look at what happened to Goethe-Wordsworth.

Corso identified with the disrupters, the untamed energy of wild romantics who threw caution to the wind and lived a life of spontaneity and feeling and always on the edge.

He defended his attack in a letter to Randall Jarrell  “…I wanted to cause rebellion, I wanted to wake them up, even if my song was impractical, or somewhat silly. The poet is the minstrel, the legislator, the eternal rebel”.

“But haven’t you discovered Lucifer? he admonished Ginsberg in a letter in 1956 “… Is not Lucifer the first free thinker? Is he not the emancipator of worlds? The eternal rebel? Lucifer is love….”

Corso was the quintessential 1950’s angry young man railing against the established order – a full throttle word-slinger and shock-artist, a rebel bohemian with unmatchable bona fides in background and experience. He didn’t gravitate to Greenwich Village – he was born there in downtrodden poverty, right on the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal.

A Dickensian Childhood of Abandonment, Poverty, Brutality and Unremitting Misery

In a letter he provided a short biography:

Born by young Italian parents, father 17 mother 16, born in New York City Greenwich Village 190 Bleecker, mother year after me left not-too-bright father and went back to Italy, thus I entered life of orphanage and four foster parents and at 11 father remarried and took me back but all was wrong because two years later I ran away and caught sent away again and sent away to boys home for two years and let out and went back home and ran away again and sent to Bellevue for observation two years later I ran away and caught sent away to boys home for two years and let out and went back home and ran away again and sent to Bellevue for observation where I spent three frightening sad months with mad old men….

…from 13 to 17 I lived with Irish on 99th and Lexington, with Italians on 105th and 3rd, with two runaway Texans on 43rd etc. until 17th year when did steal and get three years in Clinton Prison where an old man handed me Karamozov, Les Miserables, Red and the Black, and thus I learned, and was free to think and feel and write.

Came out twenty and in love with Chatterton and Marlowe and Shelley, went home stayed two days left family forever, but returned at night to beg their forgiveness and retrieve my stamp collection.

–  September 7, 1957 fromThe Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters of Gregory Corso.

Spiritually Gifted – Meeting Allen Ginsberg

After his release from prison in 1950, he worked as a laborer, in New York City, a cub reporter in Los Angeles, a salesman in Florida and a merchant seaman on a boat to Africa and South America.

While he was working as a laborer in the garment district he hung out at The Pony Stable Inn – a Lesbian bar on West 4th Street.

Throughout his adult life, Corso was adept at finding women for emotional and financial support and he seems to have been adopted as a kind of writer-in-residence at The Pony Stable. 

It was there that he met a young Columbia student – Allen Ginsberg

Ginsberg, cruising bars, was immediately attracted sexually to Corso. Ginsberg later said, “The Pony Stable was I think a dyke bar… I just wandered in and I remember he was sitted at a table, and he was a very nice looking kid. Alone… So I thought, was he gay or what was it? Maybe not.” Ginsberg was even more struck by reading Corso’s poems, immediately realizing Corso’s talent. “One he showed me…blew my mind instantly…and it struck me instantly that he was… spiritually gifted.” Eventually Ginsberg introduced Corso to the rest of his inner circle. – Art and Popular Culture

And so the poets of the Beat Scene acquired a new member. Corso’s story was that he defended himself against prison rapists with the help of the mafia. As the story goes he was not interested in a sexual relationship with Ginsberg although they did develop a close and lasting friendship.

Gasoline was his second published book of poetry and it came with an introduction by Ginsberg.

Half a century after that first meeting Gregory Corso died at his daughter Sheri Langerman”s house in Minnesota on January 17, 2001.

Sometime before that he was reunited with his mother. Gregory had been told she had gone back to Italy and become a prostitute. Neither was true. She was living in New Jersey and in the last years of his life she and Gregory established a warm relationship.

How did he come to be buried in Rome?

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea