Gregory Corso: A Flower Grows In The Cement Stoned Landscape Of The City

On January 17, 2001, it would not have been too difficult to notice the pale white shroud that adorned the front window display of City Lights Bookstore on that cool winter morning in San Francisco; for Gregory Corso had just died of cancer, and his face stared from a now faded poster showing the poet in his youth, his silent crisp smile overshadowed by the long brown curls that seemed to dangle across his forehead in wild untamed waves. His passing may not have attracted as much attention as his most famous counterparts and literary peers, but this did not take away from his contribution to the beat literary movement. Writers such as Kerouac, Burroughs, or Ginsberg attracted a great deal more attention at the moment of their deaths than Corso, mainly because of their decadent lifestyles and/or their flamboyant personalities. Gregory Corso, especially in middle age, stood in the background helping to support the legacy of the beat generation, while avoiding special notice from the press. He rarely captured the headlines in the same way that Burroughs or Kerouac often did with their rebellious behavior or nonconformist individualism. This did not mean that his craft lacked artistic integrity or intellectual depth. The poetry of Corso became embraced and remains respected in academic circles to the present day. Ginsberg said of Corso,

"Corso is a poet's poet, his verse pure velvet, close to John Keats for our time, exquisitely delicate in manner of the muse." (1)

He had become by accident a poet, accepted in the highest of academic circles in both name and reputation.

The strength of the poetry of Gregory Corso laid in his ability to observe the realities of life stripping the internal essence of these daily events of their innocence, exposing their true nature so that they can be viewed in their simplicity of substance. Themes bordered along subjects dealing with death, the loss of innocence, and descriptions from his observations in daily life. Like most of the beat writers, Corso used vivid imagery throughout his poetry, but also managed to use words and syllables in different combinations, so that these sounds bounced off one another to reenforce the themes expressed by the writer, while adding form to the entire totality, the naturally created being taken by the poem. At other times, Corso used his verse to transcend his inner nature by not only writing of the spiritual being in the world surrounding us, but by placing emphasis on the duality between the outer and internal perception of the human soul. Scholar and literary critic Gregory Stephenson in his book, "Exiled Angel: A Study Of The Works Of Gregory Corso" has observed this characteristic in studying the poet's work, "Long Live Man", written in l972.

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