Bøger af Gregory Corso

Six humorous plays written between 1952 and 1968 by Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), two of which have never before been published.

Gregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930 in New York City. His first book of poetry was published by City Lights Press in 1955.

Gregory Corso is still kicking "the ivory applecart of tyrannical values," heralding the wild and keenly experienced life. Since the 1950s, when with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others, Corso electrified the literary establishment with what he describes as "spontaneous subterranean poesy of the streets," he has fathered "three fleshed angels," traveled through Europe and Egypt, seen the demise of several fellow "Daddies of an Age," and now finds himself over half a century old.The lush, fervent oratory of Shelley is evident in these poems of one who may be his most ardent American heir, and the author of The Happy Birthday of Death and Elegiac Feelings American never entirely forgets that a "leaky lifeboat" is the mortal's only home. "You'd think there would be chaos/the futility of it all/Yet children are born/oft times spitting images of us/ ... and the gift keeps on coming."Corso knows death, despair, and silence only too well, and his first major collection in eleven years is permeated with a sense of crucial choices to be made. "Columbia U Poesy Reading--1975" begins with Beat history and ends with a solitary vision of God in the form of the muse: "Seated on a cold park bench/I heard her moan: 'O Gregorio Gregorio/you'll fail me, I know/Walking away/a little old lady behind me was singing: True! True!'/'Not so!'/ rang the spirit, 'Not so!'" In a cocky, exuberant blend of high style and down-home New Yorkese, the Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit brings more auspicious tidings.

Gregory Corso's collection of poems contains works of major proportions. The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. The second major work, "The Geometric Poem," published previously in a limited edition by Fernanda Pivano in Italy, is a complex visionary restatement of themes from ancient Egyptian religion. Reproduced in facsimile from Corso's handwritten sheets, his marginal decorations, drawings and glyphs are included. The balance of the book is drawn from his shorter poems. Corso's reputation as a leading poet and co-founder of the Beat movement is clearly upheld in these poems. His instinct for integrated lyrical statement, his special contribution to Beat poetry, is as strong as ever; his sense of humor and sexuality have not diminished. But he has added a wider-ranging moral urgency and a new depth of humane solicitude that hold even his strangest visions close to the heart of contemporary feeling.

Gregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930 in New York City. His first book of poetry was published by City Lights Press in 1955.