On Corso’s Virtues
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by Allen Ginsberg
Gregory corso’s aphoristic poet, and a poet of ideas.
What
modern poets write with such terse clarity that their
verses
stick in the mind without effort? Certaily Yeats,
Pound,
Williams, Elio, Kerouac, Creely, Dylan & Corso
have
that quality.
Corso’s handling of ideas is unique, as in various
one-word-title-poems
(“Power”, “Bomb”, “Marriage”,
“Army”,
“Hair”, “Death”, “Clown” and later “Friend”).
He
distills the essence of archetypal concepts, recycling
them
with humor to make them new, examining, contrasting
and
alchemizing common vernacular notions into
mindblowing
(deconstructive or de-conditioning) insights.
In
this mode, his late 1950’s poems (like Kerouac’s 1951-52
scriptures
on “Joan [Crawford] Rawshanks in the Fog”
&
“Neal and The Three Stooges”) manifest a precursor
pop
artistry, the realized notice of quotidian artifacts.
Poetic philosophe, Corso’s uncanny
insight mixes
wisdom
& logopoeia. “I’d a humor save me from amateur
philosophy,”
he writes: “Fish is animalized water”-“knowing
my
words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men / and
my
unwords no less an acquaintanceship”-“Nothing sits
on
nothing in a nothing of many nothings a nothing king”-
“I
found God a gigantic fly paper”-“Standing on a street
corner
waiting for no one is Power”-“A star / is as far / as
the
eye / can see / and / as near as my eye / is to me”-“And how
can
I trust them / who pollute the sky / with heavens / the
below
with hells.”
As poetic craftsman, Corso is
impeccable. His revision
process,
which he calls “tailoring,” generally elision and
condensation,
yields gist-phrasing, extraordinary mind-jump
humor.
Clown sounds of circus, abstracted from plethora
are
reduced to perfect expresion, “Tang-a-lang boom. Fife
feef!
toot!” Quick sketch, sharp mind scissors.
As engineer of ideas, certain concepts
recur retailored
for
nuance, such as “I shall never known my death,”
(i.e.
dead he won’t know it) and “You can’t step in the same
river
once.”
His late work, “The Whole Mess ...
Almost” is a
masterpiece
of Experience, the grand poetic abstractions
Truth,
Love, God, faith Hope Charity, Beauty, money
Death
& Humor are animated in a single poem with
brilliant
& intimate familiarity.
As poetic wordslinger he has command of
idiomatic
simplicity,
to wir: “A hat is power,” “fried shoes” or:
I want to kiss you clank eat you boom
You are a pean an acme of scream
a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
as
well as exuberant invention as “an astrologer dabbling
in dragon prose”:
Bomb
from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
along the brink of Paradise
Corso also excels as political
philosophe; his many years
as
classic artisr wanderer dwelling in european hotels,
castles,
& and streets gives him perspective on North America.
His
crucial position world cultural revolution mid-XX-century
as
originator of the “Beat Generation” literary movement,
along
with Kerouac, Burroughs, Orlovsky and others, grants
him
an experience inside history few bards or politicians have
known.
Readers of the poem cluster “Elegiac Feelings
American”
will appreciate Corso’s generational insight into
Empire
sickness. Earlier poems like “Power,” “Bomb”,
“Army”,
& many brief expatriate lyrics prove Corso to be
Shelley’s
natural prophet among “unacknowledged legislators
of
the world.”
Corso is a poet’s Poet, his verse pure
velvet, close to
John
Keats for aour time, exquisitely delicate in manners of
the
Muse. He has been and always will be a popular poet,
awakener
of youth, puzzlement & pleasure of sophisticated
elder
bibliophiles, “Immortal” as immortal is, Captain Poetry
exampling
revolution of Spirit, his “poetry the opposite of
hypocrisy,”
a loner, laughably unlaurelled by native whose
wild
fame’s extend for decades around the world the world
from
France to China, World poet.
ALLEN
GINSBERG