Out of the Woodworks Like Cockroaches They Come ~ The Beat Goes On...
If you thought "Beat" is a thing of the past or that beat is dead, then think again. Maybe you're the deadbeat...
The Last Beat ~ The Story of Gregory Corso
The last lost voices of the past are surfacing for just one more tryst. Gregory Corso revisits the Beat Hotel, with a camera and a poet's cursory comments. Now even he is gone, but the beat goes on...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Corso
Here's the man who wanted to change the world through poetry. Man, this guy is beat! The Beat Generation’s Gregory Corso, who despite dire hardship - infant abandonment, foster homes, living in the streets of Little Italy, a teenage prison term - became one of four in the inner circle of the Beats - along with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. Corso denied the existence of a Beat Generation - denied, famously, that he was a Beat: "I'm not Beat, but I ain't square." But perhaps that was a consequence of the nebulousness of the concept as much as his occasional orneriness. Anyone with spirit and ideas and something positive to say is by default a poet by their tears, unless like some laureate one is elevated to the position by their peers. This Pope, the poet, name of Gregory, is this the Corso who was Ginsberg's bitch? Or the other way around; Gay and young and full of tears, crying for America and the life he could have Lear'd. Hey Corso, Pull My Daisy! Ginsberg claims he was immediately attracted to Corso, who was straight but understanding of homosexuality after three years in prison. Ginsberg was even more struck by reading Corso's poems, realizing Corso was "spiritually gifted." In 1950, the year of his release from prison after three years for theft, he met Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to experimental poetry and introduced Corso to the rest of his inner circle. "One night in a dark, empty bar sitting with my prison poems I was graced with a deep-eyed apparition: Allen Ginsberg. Through him I first learned about contemporary poesy . . ." Corso wrote about their meeting. In their first meeting at the Pony Stable, Corso showed Ginsberg a poem about a woman who lived across the street from him, and sunbathed naked in the window. Amazingly, the woman just happened to be Ginsberg's girlfriend during one of his forays into heterosexuality. At the time Corso's poetic theory revolved around the notion that God was "a beautiful painter who'd painted a beautiful picture of a world that man had painted over". Shelley remained Corso's ideal because he was a "revolutionary but spilled no blood". Randall Jarrell, who was also the Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, thought Corso's poems as good as Shelley's. In 1957, Ginsberg surprised the literary world by abandoning San Francisco. After a spell in Morocco, he and Peter Orlovsky joined Gregory Corso in Paris. Corso introduced them to a shabby 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 productive, creative time for all of them. There, Ginsberg finished his epic poem "Kaddish", Corso composed "Bomb" and "Marriage", and Burroughs (with help from Ginsberg and Corso) put together Naked Lunch, from previous writings. In 1958, he had written one of his best-known poems - "Bomb" - during and after a trip to England when he had met Ban the Bomb demonstrators. "Bomb" was the core of Corso's volume of poetry The Happy Birthday of Death, which came out in 1960. The Beat writers all used drugs of various sorts as well as alcohol. The title poem of the new collection was written from notes Corso took after blacking out from trying laughing gas. After Earth Egg (1974), there was a seven-year silence until in 1981 he published Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. It was 10 years before his next work, Mindfield, in 1991.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Paul Bowles (r-l) Tangiers, Morocco 1961
This photo is important. Exactly two hours later Paul Bowles (left) saw himself in the mirror and noticed how far he'd come since his tea making days. Now he wore a tie. O life. Gregory, on the other hand, was at the top of his game. He was young and strong and liked to emphasize this by standing next to Burroughs. He did this to compensate for feelings of inadequacy, fostered by the attention his compatriots received at midnight invisible parties. Burroughs as already quite mad by this time. He'd looked like your grandpa since he was 22 and practiced the art of urban invisibility. He learned to see through things. He was pretty good. He knew why Corso stood so close.
Beat Postcard no.12: Opaque
http://thedayonfire.blogspot.com/2008/07/beat-postcard-12-opaque.html
In later years, Corso disliked public appearances and became irritated with his own "Beat" celebrity. He did however agree to allow filmmaker Gustave Reiningerto 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corso:_The_Last_Beat
In Corso: The Last Beat, Corso claimed that he was healed in many ways by meeting his mother and saw his life coming full circle. Ironically, 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:
Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea
The Last Beat ~ Gregory Corso
http://thebeatgeneration.net/gregory-corso-and-his-muse/
Locus Solus ~ With Minutes to Go a.k.a Gregory Corso
The Four Writers
In Barry Miles’ The Beat Hotel, there is mention of the release party for Minutes to Go in April at Gait Froge’s English Bookshop. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press supplied the champagne. A large portion of the sales at the English Bookshop came from the tourist market in Girodias’ Traveller’s Companion titles of which Naked Lunch was one (No. 76 in fact). The writers who hung around the English Bookshop (as well as the Mistral) provided Girodias with his stable of pornographers. According to an interview Ted Morgan did with Sinclair Beiles, the four authors, Burroughs, Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, all signed at the party. One prominent bookseller challenges this fact in his description of a dedication copy of Minutes to Go to Gait Froge on sale for $32,500. This book of course lacks the Corso signature. In Literary Outlaw, Morgan recounts that Corso arrived with his girlfriend Sally November and that Froge, herself, commented “Do you have one for every other month as well?” In addition, all of Corso’s letters collected in An Accidental Biography from April 1960 are postmarked from Paris. It would appear that Corso was there and not in Scandanavia as suggested. Burroughs was lucky to make the party. At the time, the French authorities were pursuing Burroughs on a drug charge and suggested that he leave the country. Burroughs left Paris (soon after the publication party) and traveled to England with Sommerville. I believe he also went to Scandanavia as well before returning to Paris once the pot smoke had cleared. Yet it is true that the Corso signature is unusual given the fact he disavowed all involvement with the book as contrary to his sensibilities as a poet. This is made very clear in a postscript to Minutes to Go. Yet he wavered on this point. The publication of a cut-up with Burroughs in the collaboration issue of Locus Solus in 1961 is proof that he was still associated with the technique after the publication of Minutes to Go. Possibly the dedication copy currently on the market was signed to Froge at a later date or maybe Corso refused to sign it at the party in an act of spite. Corso was nothing if not unpredictable. Two Cities was a bilingual (French and English) magazine edited by Jean Fanchette, a young doctor. Fanchette published expats like Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell. The first issue was dedicated to Durrell. Years later, the correspondence between Fanchette and Durrell from this period would be published by Two Cities as well. Anaïs Nin was a correspondent for the magazine. With Gysin designing the covers, Fanchette fashioned Minutes to Go to mirror the magazine. Gysin and Burroughs were known for their cut-up method and collaboration on their project The Third Mind.
Burroughs and Bookstores ~ Reality Studio
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/burroughs-and-bookstores/
Yet a new Third Mind comes to mind...
THE THIRD MIND (Of another kind...) - Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1999
58 minutes. This film focuses on the "the third mind" which results when Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek (Remember The Doors?) perform together. "Th(is) Third Mind" combines concert footage, other poets' thoughts on the collaboration, & segments in which the two explore the literary history of San Francisco since the 1950s. $19.95 (new)
WTF? Sounds Like a Ripoff of Bryson and Burroughs...
Other stories to check out;
Pope Gregory, Corso Biography; Even Dead Men Tell Their Tales
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/gregory-corso-728736.html
Dream of Life: An Intimate Portrait of Patti Smith/ Chelsea Hotel, Publick and Private Curiosties
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/category/the-chelsea-hotel/
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: Emergence of The New Journalism/ Pull My Daisy
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/category/bubbleshare/
Bomb ~ Or How I Wrote the Poem By Dr. (Gregory Corso) Strangelove 1958
Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
Ah and the sad desparate gun of Verlaine Pushkin Dillinger Bogart
And hath not St. Michael a burning sword St. George a lance David a sling
Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you and you're no crueller than cancer
All Man hates you they'd rather die by car-crash lightning drowning
Falling off a roof electric-chair heart-attack old age old age O Bomb
They'd rather die by anything but you Death's finger is free-lance
Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its
categorical blue I sing thee Bomb Death's extravagance Death's jubilee
Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
No-feeling deaths like birth-death sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like senators
And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx girls on Vogue covers my own
I do not know just how horrible Bombdeath is I can only imagine
Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview I scope
a city New York City streaming starkeyed subway shelter
Scores and scores A fumble of humanity High heels bend
Hats whelming away Youth forgetting their combs
Ladies not knowing what to do with their shopping bags
Unperturbed gum machines Yet dangerous 3rd rail
Ritz Brothers from the Bronx caught in the A train
The smiling Schenley poster will always smile
Impish death Satyr Bomb Bombdeath
Turtles exploding over Istanbul
The jaguar's flying foot
soon to sink in arctic snow
Penguins plunged against the Sphinx
The top of the Empire state
arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily
Eiffel shaped like a C in Magnolia Gardens
St. Sophia peeling over Sudan
O athletic Death Sportive Bomb
the temples of ancient times
their grand ruin ceased
Electrons Protons Neutrons
gathering Hersperean hair
walking the dolorous gulf of Arcady
joining marble helmsmen
entering the final ampitheater
with a hymnody feeling of all Troys
heralding cypressean torches
racing plumes and banners
and yet knowing Homer with a step of grace
Lo the visiting team of Present
the home team of Past
Lyre and tube together joined
Hark the hotdog soda olive grape
gala galaxy robed and uniformed
commissary O the happy stands
Ethereal root and cheer and boo
The billioned all-time attendance
The Zeusian pandemonium
Hermes racing Owens
The Spitball of Buddha
Christ striking out
Luther stealing third
Planeterium Death Hosannah Bomb
Gush the final rose O Spring Bomb
Come with thy gown of dynamite green
unmenace Nature's inviolate eye
Before you the wimpled Past
behind you the hallooing Future O Bomb
Bound in the grassy clarion air
like the fox of the tally-ho
thy field the universe thy hedge the geo
Leap Bomb bound Bomb frolic zig and zag
The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag
Stick angels on your jubilee feet
wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat
You are due and behold you are due
and the heavens are with you
hosanna incalescent glorious liaison
BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
set forth awful agenda
Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements
Corpse the universe tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
over its long long dead Nor
From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
From thy appellational womb
spew birth-gusts of of great worms
Rip open your belly Bomb
from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
along the brink of Paradise
O Bomb O final Pied Piper
both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
God abandoned mock-nude
beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
He cannot hear thy flute's
happy-the-day profanations
He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
Sealed angels unsing Him
A thunderless God A dead God
O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb
That I lean forward on a desk of science
an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose
half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs
That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love
That I can't exist in a world that consents
a child in a park a man dying in an electric-chair
That I am able to laugh at all things
all that I know and do not know thus to conceal my pain
That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man
knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men
and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship
That I am manifold
a man pursuing the big lies of gold
or a poet roaming in bright ashes
or that which I imagine myself to be
a shark-toothed sleep a man-eater of dreams
I need not then be all-smart about bombs
Happily so for if I felt bombs were caterpillars
I'd doubt not they'd become butterflies
There is a hell for bombs
They're there I see them there
They sit in bits and sing songs
mostly German songs
And two very long American songs
and they wish there were more songs
especially Russian and Chinese songs
and some more very long American songs
Poor little Bomb that'll never be
an Eskimo song I love thee
I want to put a lollipop
in thy furcal mouth
a wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean
and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel
along the Hollywoodian screen
O Bomb in which all lovely things
moral and physical anxiously participate
O fairylike plucked from the
grandest universe tree
O piece of heaven which gives
both mountain and anthill a sun
I am standing before your fantastic lily door
I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk
Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven
Welcome me fear not thy opened door
nor thy cold ghost's grey memory
nor the pimps of indefinite weather
their cruel terrestial thaw
Oppenheimer is seated
in the dark pocket of Light
Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
Einstein his mythmouth
a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head
Let me in Bomb rise from that pregnant-rat corner
nor fear the raised-broom nations of the world
O Bomb I love you
I want to kiss your clank eat your boom
You are a paean an acme of scream
a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
O resound thy tanky knees
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM
BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains
Go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING
Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
Ubangi BOOM orangutang
BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon
ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
the tail the fin the wing
Yes Yes into our midst a bomb will fall
Flowers will leap in joy their roots aching
Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind
Pinkbombs will blossom Elkbombs will perk their ears
Ah many a bomb that day will awe the bird a gentle look
Yet not enough to say a bomb will fall
or even contend celestial fire goes out
Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful
and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires
fierce with moustaches of gold
Gregory Nunzio Corso 1930-2001
.
The Last Beat ~ The Story of Gregory Corso
The last lost voices of the past are surfacing for just one more tryst. Gregory Corso revisits the Beat Hotel, with a camera and a poet's cursory comments. Now even he is gone, but the beat goes on...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Corso
Here's the man who wanted to change the world through poetry. Man, this guy is beat! The Beat Generation’s Gregory Corso, who despite dire hardship - infant abandonment, foster homes, living in the streets of Little Italy, a teenage prison term - became one of four in the inner circle of the Beats - along with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. Corso denied the existence of a Beat Generation - denied, famously, that he was a Beat: "I'm not Beat, but I ain't square." But perhaps that was a consequence of the nebulousness of the concept as much as his occasional orneriness. Anyone with spirit and ideas and something positive to say is by default a poet by their tears, unless like some laureate one is elevated to the position by their peers. This Pope, the poet, name of Gregory, is this the Corso who was Ginsberg's bitch? Or the other way around; Gay and young and full of tears, crying for America and the life he could have Lear'd. Hey Corso, Pull My Daisy! Ginsberg claims he was immediately attracted to Corso, who was straight but understanding of homosexuality after three years in prison. Ginsberg was even more struck by reading Corso's poems, realizing Corso was "spiritually gifted." In 1950, the year of his release from prison after three years for theft, he met Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to experimental poetry and introduced Corso to the rest of his inner circle. "One night in a dark, empty bar sitting with my prison poems I was graced with a deep-eyed apparition: Allen Ginsberg. Through him I first learned about contemporary poesy . . ." Corso wrote about their meeting. In their first meeting at the Pony Stable, Corso showed Ginsberg a poem about a woman who lived across the street from him, and sunbathed naked in the window. Amazingly, the woman just happened to be Ginsberg's girlfriend during one of his forays into heterosexuality. At the time Corso's poetic theory revolved around the notion that God was "a beautiful painter who'd painted a beautiful picture of a world that man had painted over". Shelley remained Corso's ideal because he was a "revolutionary but spilled no blood". Randall Jarrell, who was also the Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, thought Corso's poems as good as Shelley's. In 1957, Ginsberg surprised the literary world by abandoning San Francisco. After a spell in Morocco, he and Peter Orlovsky joined Gregory Corso in Paris. Corso introduced them to a shabby 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 productive, creative time for all of them. There, Ginsberg finished his epic poem "Kaddish", Corso composed "Bomb" and "Marriage", and Burroughs (with help from Ginsberg and Corso) put together Naked Lunch, from previous writings. In 1958, he had written one of his best-known poems - "Bomb" - during and after a trip to England when he had met Ban the Bomb demonstrators. "Bomb" was the core of Corso's volume of poetry The Happy Birthday of Death, which came out in 1960. The Beat writers all used drugs of various sorts as well as alcohol. The title poem of the new collection was written from notes Corso took after blacking out from trying laughing gas. After Earth Egg (1974), there was a seven-year silence until in 1981 he published Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. It was 10 years before his next work, Mindfield, in 1991.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Paul Bowles (r-l) Tangiers, Morocco 1961
This photo is important. Exactly two hours later Paul Bowles (left) saw himself in the mirror and noticed how far he'd come since his tea making days. Now he wore a tie. O life. Gregory, on the other hand, was at the top of his game. He was young and strong and liked to emphasize this by standing next to Burroughs. He did this to compensate for feelings of inadequacy, fostered by the attention his compatriots received at midnight invisible parties. Burroughs as already quite mad by this time. He'd looked like your grandpa since he was 22 and practiced the art of urban invisibility. He learned to see through things. He was pretty good. He knew why Corso stood so close.
Beat Postcard no.12: Opaque
http://thedayonfire.blogspot.com/2008/07/beat-postcard-12-opaque.html
In later years, Corso disliked public appearances and became irritated with his own "Beat" celebrity. He did however agree to allow filmmaker Gustave Reiningerto 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corso:_The_Last_Beat
In Corso: The Last Beat, Corso claimed that he was healed in many ways by meeting his mother and saw his life coming full circle. Ironically, 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:
Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea
The Last Beat ~ Gregory Corso
http://thebeatgeneration.net/gregory-corso-and-his-muse/
Click to viewLocus Solus ~ With Minutes to Go a.k.a Gregory Corso
The Four Writers
In Barry Miles’ The Beat Hotel, there is mention of the release party for Minutes to Go in April at Gait Froge’s English Bookshop. Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press supplied the champagne. A large portion of the sales at the English Bookshop came from the tourist market in Girodias’ Traveller’s Companion titles of which Naked Lunch was one (No. 76 in fact). The writers who hung around the English Bookshop (as well as the Mistral) provided Girodias with his stable of pornographers. According to an interview Ted Morgan did with Sinclair Beiles, the four authors, Burroughs, Gysin, Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso, all signed at the party. One prominent bookseller challenges this fact in his description of a dedication copy of Minutes to Go to Gait Froge on sale for $32,500. This book of course lacks the Corso signature. In Literary Outlaw, Morgan recounts that Corso arrived with his girlfriend Sally November and that Froge, herself, commented “Do you have one for every other month as well?” In addition, all of Corso’s letters collected in An Accidental Biography from April 1960 are postmarked from Paris. It would appear that Corso was there and not in Scandanavia as suggested. Burroughs was lucky to make the party. At the time, the French authorities were pursuing Burroughs on a drug charge and suggested that he leave the country. Burroughs left Paris (soon after the publication party) and traveled to England with Sommerville. I believe he also went to Scandanavia as well before returning to Paris once the pot smoke had cleared. Yet it is true that the Corso signature is unusual given the fact he disavowed all involvement with the book as contrary to his sensibilities as a poet. This is made very clear in a postscript to Minutes to Go. Yet he wavered on this point. The publication of a cut-up with Burroughs in the collaboration issue of Locus Solus in 1961 is proof that he was still associated with the technique after the publication of Minutes to Go. Possibly the dedication copy currently on the market was signed to Froge at a later date or maybe Corso refused to sign it at the party in an act of spite. Corso was nothing if not unpredictable. Two Cities was a bilingual (French and English) magazine edited by Jean Fanchette, a young doctor. Fanchette published expats like Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, and Lawrence Durrell. The first issue was dedicated to Durrell. Years later, the correspondence between Fanchette and Durrell from this period would be published by Two Cities as well. Anaïs Nin was a correspondent for the magazine. With Gysin designing the covers, Fanchette fashioned Minutes to Go to mirror the magazine. Gysin and Burroughs were known for their cut-up method and collaboration on their project The Third Mind.
Burroughs and Bookstores ~ Reality Studio
http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/burroughs-and-bookstores/
Yet a new Third Mind comes to mind...
THE THIRD MIND (Of another kind...) - Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1999
58 minutes. This film focuses on the "the third mind" which results when Michael McClure & Ray Manzarek (Remember The Doors?) perform together. "Th(is) Third Mind" combines concert footage, other poets' thoughts on the collaboration, & segments in which the two explore the literary history of San Francisco since the 1950s. $19.95 (new)
WTF? Sounds Like a Ripoff of Bryson and Burroughs...
Other stories to check out;
Pope Gregory, Corso Biography; Even Dead Men Tell Their Tales
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/gregory-corso-728736.html
Dream of Life: An Intimate Portrait of Patti Smith/ Chelsea Hotel, Publick and Private Curiosties
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/category/the-chelsea-hotel/
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: Emergence of The New Journalism/ Pull My Daisy
http://disembedded.wordpress.com/category/bubbleshare/
Bomb ~ Or How I Wrote the Poem By Dr. (Gregory Corso) Strangelove 1958
Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
Ah and the sad desparate gun of Verlaine Pushkin Dillinger Bogart
And hath not St. Michael a burning sword St. George a lance David a sling
Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you and you're no crueller than cancer
All Man hates you they'd rather die by car-crash lightning drowning
Falling off a roof electric-chair heart-attack old age old age O Bomb
They'd rather die by anything but you Death's finger is free-lance
Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its
categorical blue I sing thee Bomb Death's extravagance Death's jubilee
Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
No-feeling deaths like birth-death sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like senators
And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx girls on Vogue covers my own
I do not know just how horrible Bombdeath is I can only imagine
Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview I scope
a city New York City streaming starkeyed subway shelter
Scores and scores A fumble of humanity High heels bend
Hats whelming away Youth forgetting their combs
Ladies not knowing what to do with their shopping bags
Unperturbed gum machines Yet dangerous 3rd rail
Ritz Brothers from the Bronx caught in the A train
The smiling Schenley poster will always smile
Impish death Satyr Bomb Bombdeath
Turtles exploding over Istanbul
The jaguar's flying foot
soon to sink in arctic snow
Penguins plunged against the Sphinx
The top of the Empire state
arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily
Eiffel shaped like a C in Magnolia Gardens
St. Sophia peeling over Sudan
O athletic Death Sportive Bomb
the temples of ancient times
their grand ruin ceased
Electrons Protons Neutrons
gathering Hersperean hair
walking the dolorous gulf of Arcady
joining marble helmsmen
entering the final ampitheater
with a hymnody feeling of all Troys
heralding cypressean torches
racing plumes and banners
and yet knowing Homer with a step of grace
Lo the visiting team of Present
the home team of Past
Lyre and tube together joined
Hark the hotdog soda olive grape
gala galaxy robed and uniformed
commissary O the happy stands
Ethereal root and cheer and boo
The billioned all-time attendance
The Zeusian pandemonium
Hermes racing Owens
The Spitball of Buddha
Christ striking out
Luther stealing third
Planeterium Death Hosannah Bomb
Gush the final rose O Spring Bomb
Come with thy gown of dynamite green
unmenace Nature's inviolate eye
Before you the wimpled Past
behind you the hallooing Future O Bomb
Bound in the grassy clarion air
like the fox of the tally-ho
thy field the universe thy hedge the geo
Leap Bomb bound Bomb frolic zig and zag
The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag
Stick angels on your jubilee feet
wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat
You are due and behold you are due
and the heavens are with you
hosanna incalescent glorious liaison
BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
set forth awful agenda
Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements
Corpse the universe tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
over its long long dead Nor
From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
From thy appellational womb
spew birth-gusts of of great worms
Rip open your belly Bomb
from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
along the brink of Paradise
O Bomb O final Pied Piper
both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
God abandoned mock-nude
beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
He cannot hear thy flute's
happy-the-day profanations
He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
Sealed angels unsing Him
A thunderless God A dead God
O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb
That I lean forward on a desk of science
an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose
half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs
That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love
That I can't exist in a world that consents
a child in a park a man dying in an electric-chair
That I am able to laugh at all things
all that I know and do not know thus to conceal my pain
That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man
knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men
and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship
That I am manifold
a man pursuing the big lies of gold
or a poet roaming in bright ashes
or that which I imagine myself to be
a shark-toothed sleep a man-eater of dreams
I need not then be all-smart about bombs
Happily so for if I felt bombs were caterpillars
I'd doubt not they'd become butterflies
There is a hell for bombs
They're there I see them there
They sit in bits and sing songs
mostly German songs
And two very long American songs
and they wish there were more songs
especially Russian and Chinese songs
and some more very long American songs
Poor little Bomb that'll never be
an Eskimo song I love thee
I want to put a lollipop
in thy furcal mouth
a wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean
and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel
along the Hollywoodian screen
O Bomb in which all lovely things
moral and physical anxiously participate
O fairylike plucked from the
grandest universe tree
O piece of heaven which gives
both mountain and anthill a sun
I am standing before your fantastic lily door
I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk
Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven
Welcome me fear not thy opened door
nor thy cold ghost's grey memory
nor the pimps of indefinite weather
their cruel terrestial thaw
Oppenheimer is seated
in the dark pocket of Light
Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
Einstein his mythmouth
a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head
Let me in Bomb rise from that pregnant-rat corner
nor fear the raised-broom nations of the world
O Bomb I love you
I want to kiss your clank eat your boom
You are a paean an acme of scream
a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
O resound thy tanky knees
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM
BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains
Go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING
Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
Ubangi BOOM orangutang
BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon
ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
the tail the fin the wing
Yes Yes into our midst a bomb will fall
Flowers will leap in joy their roots aching
Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind
Pinkbombs will blossom Elkbombs will perk their ears
Ah many a bomb that day will awe the bird a gentle look
Yet not enough to say a bomb will fall
or even contend celestial fire goes out
Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful
and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires
fierce with moustaches of gold
Gregory Nunzio Corso 1930-2001
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