Corso's first volume of poetry The Vestal Lady on Brattle was published in 1955 (with the assistance of associates at Harvard, where he had been auditing classes). In 1958, Corso had an expanded collection of poems published as number 8 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series: Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle. His notable poems are many: "Bomb" (a "concrete poem" formatted in typed paper slips of verse, arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud), "Elegiac Feelings American" of the recently deceased Jack Kerouac, and "Marriage", a humorous meditation on the institution.

"Marriage" excerpt

Should I get married? Should I be good?Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?Don't take her to movies but to cemeteriestell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinetsthen desire her and kiss her and all the preliminariesand she going just so far and I understanding whynot getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstoneand woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky-When she introduces me to her parentsback straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,should I sit with my knees together on their 3rd degree sofaand not ask Where's the bathroom?How else to feel other than I am,often thinking Flash Gordon soap-O how terrible it must be for a young manseated before a family and the family thinkingWe never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?Should I tell them? Would they like me then?Say All right get married, we're losing a daughterbut we're gaining a son-And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friendsand only a handful of mine all scroungy and beardedjust wait to get at the drinks and food-

In "Marriage" by Gregory Corso, Corso tackles the possibilities of marriage. "Should I get married?" (1), the speaker begins. Could marriage bring about the results that the speaker is looking for? Coming "home to her" (54) and sitting "by the fireplace and she in the kitchen/aproned young and lovely wanting my baby/ and so happy about me she burns the roast beef" (55-57). Idealizing marriage and fatherhood initially, Corso's speaker embraces reality in the second half of the poem admitting, "No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father" (84). Recognizing that the act of marriage is in itself a form of imprisonment, "No, can’t imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream" (103), Corso's speaker acknowledges in the end that the possibility of marriage is not promising for him. Bruce Cook from the book The Beat Generation illuminates Corso's skill at juxtaposing humor and serious critical commentary, "Yet as funny and entertaining as all this certainly is, it is not merely that, for in its zany way ‘Marriage’ offers serious criticism of what is phony about a sacred American institution."

In contrast to Corso's use of marriage as a synecdoche for a Beat view of women, postmodern feminist poet Hedwig Gorski chronicles a night with Corso in her poem "Could not get Gregory Corso out of my Car" (1985, Austin, Texas) showing the womanizing typical for heterosexual Beat behavior. Gorski criticizes the Beat movement for tokenism towards women writers and their work, with very few exceptions, including Anne Waldman, and post-beats like Diane DiPrima and herself. Male domination and womanizing along with tokenism by its major homosexual members characterize the Beat Literary Movement. Beats scoffed at the Feminist Movement which offered liberalizing social and professional views of women and their works as did the Beat Movement for men, especially homosexuals.

Ted Morgan described Corso's place in the beat literary world: "If Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs were the Three Musketeers of the movement, Corso was their D'Artagnan, a sort of junior partner, accepted and appreciated, but with less than complete parity. He had not been in at the start, which was the alliance of the Columbia intellectuals with the Times Square hipsters. He was a recent adherent, although his credentials were impressive enough to gain him unrestricted admittance ..."

Born Nunzio Corso at St. Vincent's hospital, (later called the Poets' hospital after Dylan Thomas died there), Corso later selected the name "Gregory" as a confirmation name.[citation needed] Within the Italian community he was "Nunzio", while he dealt with others as "Gregory". He often would use "Nunzio" as a short for "Annunziato", the announcing angel Gabriel, hence a poet.

Corso's mother, Michelina Corso (born Colonna) was born in Miglianico, Abruzzo, Italy, and Immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, with her mother and four other sisters. At 16, she married Sam Corso, a first generation Italian American, also teenage, and gave birth to Nunzio Corso the same year. They lived at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, the heart of Greenwich Village and upper Little Italy.

Childhood

In April 1930, a month after he was born, Corso's mother abandoned him, leaving him in New York. Corso's father, Gary "Fortunato" Corso, consistently told his son that his mother had returned to Italy and deserted the family. He was also told that she was a prostitute and was "disgraziata" (disgraced) and forced into Italian exile.

Corso spent the next 11 years in foster care in at least five different homes. His father declined to visit him. Corso went to Christian parochial schools, was an altar boy and a gifted student. In order to avoid the military draft, his father brought Gregory home in 1941. His father was nevertheless drafted.

Corso became a child on the streets of Little Italy. For warmth he slept in subways in the winter, and then slept on rooftops during the summer. He continued to attend Catholic school, not telling authorities he was living on the street. With "permission", he stole breakfast bread from Vesuvio Bakery, in Little Italy. Street food stall merchants would give him food in exchange for errands.

Adolescence

At 13, Corso stole a toaster and sold it at a junk shop. He used the proceeds to buy a tie, and dressed up to see the film The Song of Bernadette, about the mystical appearance of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. Corso claimed he was seeking a miracle, namely, to find his mother. Instead, on returning from the movie, police were searching for him and he was arrested for petty larceny and incarcerated in The Tombs, New York's infamous jail. Corso, just 13, was celled next to an adult criminally insane murderer who had stabbed his wife repeatedly with a screwdriver. The exposure left Corso traumatized. Neither Corso's stepmother nor his paternal grandmother would post his $50 bail. With his own mother missing and unable to make his bail, he remained in the Tombs.

In 1944 during a New York blizzard, Corso broke into his tutor's office for warmth, and fell asleep on a desk. He slept through the blizzard and was arrested for breaking and entering and booked into the Tombs a second time, with adults. Terrified of other inmates, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital Center and later released.

At sixteen, he and two friends devised the wild plan of taking over New York City by means of walky-talkies, projecting a series of improbable and complex robberies. Communicating by walky-talky, each of the three boys took up an assigned position...one inside the store to be robbed, one outside on the street to watch for the police and a third, the master-planner, in a small room nearby dictating the orders. According to Corso, he was in the small room giving the orders when the police came. Given Corso's imagination, it is difficult to know exactly how much of this story is accurate. At any rate, he was arrested and sent to Clinton Prison for three years. His second book of poems Gasoline is dedicated to "the angels of Clinton Prison who, in my seventeenth year, handed me, from all the cells surrounding me, books of illumination.

Corso at Clinton Correctional

At Clinton, Corso fell under the protection of powerful Mafia inmates, and became something of a mascot because he was the youngest inmate in the prison. Ironically, Corso was jailed in the very cell just months before vacated by Charles "Lucky" Luciano[citation needed]. While imprisoned, Luciano had donated an extensive library to the prison[citation needed]. Corso read after lights-out thanks to a light specially positioned for Luciano to work late.

Corso began writing poetry. He studied the Greek and Roman classics, and consumed encyclopedias and dictionaries.

Release and return to New York City

In 1951, twenty-one-year-old Gregory Corso joined the Beat circle and was adopted by its coleaders, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw in the young street-wise writer a potential for expressing the poetic insights of a generation wholly separate from those preceding it. At this time, Corso was employed as a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner, but four years before he had been sentenced to three years at Clinton Prison, in Dannemora, New York, where despite his minimal formal education, he developed a crude and fragmented mastery of Shelley, Marlowe, and Chatterton. Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry" (1840), with its emphasis on the ability of genuine poetic impulse to stimulate "unapprehended combinations of thought" that lead to the "moral improvement of man", prompted Corso to develop a theory of poetry roughly consistent with that of the developing principles of the Beat poets. For Corso, poetry became a vehicle for change, a way to redirect the course of society by stimulating individual will.

Move to Boston

In 1954 Corso moved to Boston where several important poets, including Edward Marshall and John Wieners, were experimenting with the poetics of voice. The center for Corso's life there was not "the School of Boston", as these poets were called, but the Harvard University library, where he spent his days reading the great works of poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and his play In This Hung-up Age...concerning a group of Americans who, after their bus breaks down midway across the continent, are trampled by buffalo...was performed by students at the university the following year.

Harvard and Radcliffe students underwrote the expenses of Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems. The poems featured in the volume are usually considered apprentice works heavily indebted to Corso's reading. They are, however, unique in their innovative use of jazz rhythms...most notably in "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician", which many call the strongest poem in the book...cadences of spoken English, and hipster jargon. Corso once explained his use of rhythm and meter in an interview with Gavin Selerie for Riverside Interviews: "My music is built in--it's already natural. I don't play with the meter." In other words, Corso believes the meter must arise naturally from the poet's voice; it is never consciously chosen.

In a review of The Vestal Lady on Brattle for Poetry, Reuel Denney asked whether "a small group jargon" such as bop language would "sound interesting" to those who were not part of that culture. Corso, he concluded, "cannot balance the richness of the bebop group jargon . . . with the clarity he needs to make his work meaningful to a wider-than-clique audience." Ironically, within a few years, that "small group jargon" became a national idiom.

Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet, described by Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation as "an urchin Shelley." Gaiser suggested that Corso adopted "the mask of the sophisticated child whose every display of mad spontaneity and bizarre perception is consciously and effectively designed"--as if he is in some way deceiving his audience. But the poems at their best are controlled by an authentic, distinctive, and enormously effective voice that can range from sentimental affection and pathos to exuberance and dadaist irreverence toward almost anything except poetry itself.

In 1957, Allen Ginsberg voyaged with Peter Orlovsky to visit Burroughs in Morocco. Corso, already in Europe, joined them and then led them to Paris, introducing them to a Left Bank lodging house above a bar at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that was to become known as the Beat Hotel. They were soon joined by William Burroughs and others. It was a haven for young expatriate painters, writers and musicians. There, Ginsberg began his epic poem Kaddish, Corso composed his poems Bomb and Marriage, and Burroughs (with Brion Gysin's help) put together Naked Lunch from previous writings. This period was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who moved in at about the same time, and took pictures of the residents of the hotel until it closed in 1963 . Corso returned to New York in 1958.

In late 1958, Corso reunited with Ginsberg and Orlovsky. They were astonished that before they left for Europe they had sparked a social movement, which San Francisco columnist Herb Caen called, "Beat-nik",combining "beat" with the Russian "Sputnik", as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist.

In later years, Corso disliked public appearances and became irritated with his own "Beat" celebrity. He did however agree to allow filmmaker Gustave Reininger to make a cinema verite documentary, Corso - the Last Beat, about him.

After Allen Ginsberg's death, Corso decided to go "on the road" to Europe and retrace "the Beats" early days in Paris, Italy and Greece. While in Venice, Corso expressed on film his lifelong concerns about not having a mother, and living such an uprooted childhood. Corso became curious about where in Italy his mother, Michellina Colonna, might be buried. His father's family had always told him that his mother had returned to Italy, a disgraced woman. Filmmaker Gustave Reininger quietly launched a search for Corso's mother's Italian burial place. In an astonishing turn of events, Reininger found Corso's mother Michelina not dead, but alive; and not in Italy, but in Trenton, New Jersey. Corso was united with his mother on film. He discovered that his mother at 17 had been almost fatally brutalized (all her front teeth punched out) and was sexually abused by her teenage husband, his father. At the height of the Depression, with no trade or job, Michellina explained the she had no choice but to give her son to Catholic Charities. After she had established a new life working in a restaurant in New Jersey, his mother had attempted to find him, to no avail. The father had blocked even Catholic Charities from disclosing the boy's whereabouts. Living modestly, she lacked the means to hire a lawyer to find her son. Eventually she remarried and started a new family.

Corso and his mother quickly developed a relationship which lasted until his death, which preceded hers.

In The Last Beat, Corso claimed that he was healed in many ways by meeting his mother and saw his life coming full circle. Shortly thereafter, Corso discovered he had irreversible prostate cancer. He died of the disease in Minnesota on January 17, 2001. His ashes were deposited, just as he wanted, next to the grave of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Cimitero Acattolico, the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. He wrote his own epitaph:

Spiritis LifeIt flows thruthe death of meendlesslylike a riverunafraidof becomingthe sea

• " a tough young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the roof tops and sang Italian song as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words Amazing an beautiful, Gregory Corso, the one and only Gregory, the Herald." ... Jack Kerouac — Introduction to "Gasoline"
• "Corso's a poet's Poet, a poet much superior to me. Pure velvet... whose wild fame's extended for decades around the world from France to China, World Poet. ... Allen Ginsberg "On Corso's Virtues"
• "Gregory's voice echoes through a precarious future.... His vitality and resilience always shine through, with a light this is more than human: the immortal light of his Muse. ... Gregory is indeed one of the Daddies." ... William S. Burroughs
• "The most important of the beat poets... a really true poet with an original voice" ... Nancy Peters, editor of City Lights
• "Other than Mr. Corso, Gregory was all you ever needed to know. He defined the name by his every word or act. Always succinct, he never tried. Once he called you 'My Ira' or 'My Janine' or 'My Allen'. he was forever 'Your Gregory'." ... Ira Cohen
• "...It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within." ... Gregory Corso, How Poetry Comes to Me (epigraph of Gasoline)
• "They, that unnamed "they", they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up-and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me." ... Gregory Corso

References

Other sources

• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0140151028 (hc);

Bibliography

• The Vestal Lady and Other Poems (1955, poetry)
• This Hung-Up Age (1955, play)
• Gasoline (1958, poetry)
• Bomb (1958, poetry)
• The Happy Birthday of Death (1960, poetry)
• Minutes to Go (1960, visual poetry) with Sinclair Beiles, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin.
• The American Express (1961, novel)
• Long Live Man (1962, poetry)
• There is Yet Time to Run Back through Life and Expiate All That's been Sadly Done (1965, poetry)
• Elegiac Feelings American (1970, poetry)
• The Night Last Night was at its Nightest (1972, poetry)
• Earth Egg (1974, poetry)
• Writings from OX (1979, with interview by Michael Andre)
• Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981, poetry)
• Mind Field (1989, poetry)
• Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (1989, poetry)