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Number
287
April/May 2001
From
"Revolutionary of the Spirit: Gregory
Corso"
NEELI
CHERKOVSKI
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
Gregory Corso is not a poet of nature, yet I
remember being with him on several occasions when
he would suddenly stop to admire a strange cloud
formation, a sunset, flowers in an outdoor pot, or
a subtle change in the weather with the longing of
a nature lover. In a passage from the book
Elegiac Feelings American, evocative of
Whitman's vast American vision, Corso portrays the
oppression of the Indian in vivid natural
imagery:
Requiem, america, sing a dirge that might stalk
the white wheat
black in praise of Indianever again to be, gone,
gone, gone, des-
olate, and gone;
Hear the plains, the great divide, hear the wind
of this night
Oklahoma race to weep first in the dirge of
mountains
and streams and trees and birds and day and night
and the
bright yet lost appartional sled
It is the green world that a poet listens to,
utterances of wind, horizon, tree, and grass that
tug at the emotions and make even the smallest
things of nature and the mind significant.
Sometimes I felt as if Corso had long ago fled a
legendary kingdom, bringing with him the secrets of
its libraries and of its wise men to our own
mundane world. He can be as audacious as Whitman,
who wrote "shut not your doors to me proud
libraries," yet introspective in the manner of
Emily Dickinson, defining himself amid colorful,
evocative language that plays fanciful tricks on
our notions of love, death, and immortality.
This may seem at odds with the poet's origins.
Born on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal
streets in New York City's Greenwich Village in
1930, Corso came of age in that once-Italian
neighborhood. His "advanced" education took place
in Danamora Prison during a three-year sentence for
burglary when he was a teenager. Often dressed in
corduroy pants, velvet sash, purple shirt, black
vest with pinstripes, and a sparkling ring, he
personifies the image of an elegant bohemian, who,
like Edgar Allan Poe (one of Corso's heroes) might
have been found in Pfaffs Tavern on New York's
lower Broadway in the 1850's, beguiling William
Dean Howells and Walt Whitman.
Most of my "Corso imprints" are centered around
nighttime. That is when I usually saw him. He would
magically appear as if from nowhere, and always
seemed to blend with the decor of the North Beach
neon and the well-lit cafes. There were times when
I'd run to him whining, "Gregory ...I'm so lonely,"
and he might answer, "I'm not interested in your
condition." But whenever I was really down, another
side of the man would appear. While I sat
despondently in my apartment late one night, Corso
rang the bell. I let him in and he sensed something
was wrong. I told him my story of woe. He responded
by turning to a poem of John Keats. "You have to
get into this poem ...see, it's one of his last,
and it seems so modern":
This living hand, now warm and capable
of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
and in the icy silence of the tomb
so haunt thy days
I wasn't surprised that Corso had fallen in love
with that poem. It compresses so much thought into
a few short lines, moving rapidly from life to
death, sparing nothing in between. The spontaneous
essay that ensued, once he had finished reading the
poem, took me far from my troubles. What he pointed
out that night was the economy with which Keats
expressed himself. I would later find this idea of
trimming the poem down to its essentials a major
concern of Corso's poetics.
This is an excerpt from Whitman's Wild
Children: Portraits of Twelve Poets, by Neeli
Cherkovski, Steerforth Press, South Royalton,
Vermont, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the
author.
Neeli Cherkovski's latest poetry book is
Elegy for Bob Kaufman. Also the author of
biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles
Bukowski, he organized the New College memorial to
Gregory Corso on January 24, San Francisco.
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