Gregory Corso facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Gregory Corso
Born	Gregory Nunzio Corso (1930-03-26)March 26, 1930 New York City, U.S.
Died	January 17, 2001(2001-01-17) (aged 70) Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.
Occupation	Poet, writer
Movement	Beat, postmodernism

Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs).

Early life

Born Nunzio Corso at New York City's St. Vincent's Hospital, Corso later selected the name "Gregory" as a confirmation name. Within Little Italy and its community he was "Nunzio," while he dealt with others as "Gregory." He often would use "Nunzio" as short for "Annunziato," the announcing angel Gabriel, hence a poet. Corso identified with not only Gabriel but also Hermes, the divine messenger.

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

Sometime in his first year, Corso's mother mysteriously abandoned him, leaving him at the New York child care home, a branch of the Catholic Church Charities. Corso's father, Sam "Fortunato" Corso, a garment center worker, found the infant and promptly put him in a foster home.

Corso spent the next 11 years in foster care in at least five different homes. His father rarely visited him. As a foster child, Corso was among thousands that the Church aided during the Depression, with the intention of reconstituting families as the economy picked up. Corso went to Catholic parochial schools, was an altar boy and a gifted student. His father, in order to avoid the military draft, brought Gregory home in 1941. Nevertheless, Sam Corso was drafted and sent overseas.

Corso, then alone, became a homeless 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 streets. With permission, he took breakfast bread from a bakery in Little Italy. Street food stall merchants would give him food in exchange for running errands.

Adolescence

At age 13, Corso was asked to deliver a toaster to a neighbor. While he was running the errand, a passerby offered money (around 94 dollars) for the toaster, and Corso sold it. He used the money to buy a tie and white shirt, and dressed up to see The Song of Bernadette, a movie about the mystical appearance of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. On returning from the movie, the police apprehended him. Corso claimed he was seeking a miracle, namely to find his mother. Corso had a lifelong affection for saints and holy men: "They were my only heroes." Nonetheless, he was arrested for petty larceny and incarcerated in The Tombs, New York's infamous jail. Corso, though only 13 years old. Neither Corso's stepmother nor his paternal grandmother would post his $50 bond. With his own mother missing and unable to make bail, he remained in the Tombs.

Later, in 1944 during a New York blizzard, a 14-year-old freezing 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 for a second time with adults.

On the eve of his 18th birthday, Corso broke into a tailor shop and stole an oversized suit to dress for a date. Police records indicate he was arrested two blocks from the shop. He spent the night in the Tombs and was arraigned the next morning as an 18-year-old with prior offenses. No longer a "youthful offender," he was given a two to three years sentence to Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, New York. It was New York's toughest prison. There, Corso began writing poetry. He studied the Greek and Roman classics, and voraciously absorbed encyclopedia and dictionary entries. He credited The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant's ground-breaking compendium of history and philosophy, for his general education and philosophical sophistication.

New York City

Corso joined the Beat circle and was adopted by its co-leaders, 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 he developed a crude and fragmented mastery of Shelley, Marlowe, and Chatterton. Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1821, posthumously published in 1840), with its emphasis on the ability of genuine poetic impulse to stimulate "unapprehended combinations of thought" that led 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. He referred to Shelley often as a "Revolutionary of Spirit", which he considered Ginsberg and himself to be.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

In 1954, Corso moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, 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 Harvard University's Widener Library. He spent his days there reading the great works of poetry and also auditing classes in the Greek and Roman Classics. Corso's appreciation of the classics had come from the Durants' books that he had read in prison. At Harvard, he considered becoming a classics scholar. Corso, penniless, lived on a dorm room floor in Elliott house, welcomed by students Peter Sourian, Bobby Sedgwick (brother of Edie), and Paul Grand. He would dress up for dinner and not be noticed. Members of the elite Porcellian Club reported Corso to the Harvard administration as an interloper. Dean Archibald MacLeish met with Corso intending to expel him, but Corso showed him his poems and MacLeish relented and allowed Corso to be a non-matriculating student—a poet in residence. Corso's 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 the esteemed Poets' Theater the following year.

Harvard and Radcliffe students, notably Grand, Sourian and Sedgwick, underwrote the printing expenses of Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems. The poems featured in the volume are usually considered apprentice work 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 believed the meter must arise naturally from the poet's voice; it is never consciously chosen.

Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet.

San Francisco, "Howl", and the Beat Phenomenon

Corso and Ginsberg decided to head to San Francisco, separately. Corso wound up temporarily in Los Angeles and worked at the L.A. Examiner news morgue. Ginsberg was delayed in Denver. They were drawn by reports of an iconoclast circle of poets, including Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. An older literary mentor, the socialist writer Kenneth Rexroth, lent his apartment as a Friday-night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth's, had given him an introductory letter).

Wally Hedrick wanted to organize the famous Six Gallery reading, and Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve as master of ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations. Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend John Hoffman. At his first public reading Ginsberg performed the just-finished first part of "Howl." Gregory Corso arrived late the next day, missing the historic reading, at which he had been scheduled to read.

The Six Gallery was a success, and the evening led to many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. It was also a marker of the beginning of the West Coast Beat movement, since the 1956 publication of Howl brought it to nationwide attention.

Ginsberg and Corso hitchhiked from San Francisco, visiting Henry Miller in Big Sur, and stopped off in Los Angeles. As guests of Anaïs Nin and writer Lawrence Lipton, Corso and Ginsberg gave a reading to a gathering of L.A. literati.

To Paris and the "Beat Hotel"

In 1957, Allen Ginsberg traveled with Peter Orlovsky to visit William S. Burroughs in Morocco. They were joined by Kerouac, who was researching the French origins of his family. Corso, already in Europe, joined them in Tangiers. In Paris, Corso introduced Ginsberg and Orlovsky to a Left Bank lodging house above a bar at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur, that he named 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. 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's Paris sojourn resulted in his third volume of poetry, The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), Minutes to Go (1960, visual poetry deemed "cut-ups") with William S. Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, and Brion Gysin, The American Express (1961, an Olympia Press novel), and Long Live Man (1962, poetry). Corso's work found a strong reception at New Directions Publishing, founded by James Laughlin, who had heard of Corso through Harvard connections. New Directions was considered the premier publisher of poetry, with Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Merton, Denise Levertov, James Agee, and ironically, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. While in Europe Corso visited Rome and Greece. He returned to New York in 1958, amazed that he and his compatriots had become famous, or notorious, emerging literary figures.

Return to New York – The "Beatniks"

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.

Upon their return, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac and Burroughs were published in the venerable Chicago Review. Corso also published in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.

During the early 1960s, Corso married Sally November, an English teacher who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and attended Shaker High School, and graduated from the University of Michigan. At first, Corso mimicked "Marriage" and moved to Cleveland to work in Sally's father's florist shop. Then the couple lived in Manhattan and Sally was known to Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Rivers and others in the beat circle at that time. The marriage, while a failure, did produce a child, Miranda Corso. Corso maintained contact with Sally and his daughter sporadically during his lifetime.

Corso married two other times and had sons and a daughter.

Corso lived in Rome for many years, and later married in Paris and taught in Greece, all the while traveling widely. He strangely remained close to the Catholic Church as critic and had a loose identification as a lapsed Catholic. His collection Dear Fathers was several letters commenting on needed reforms in the Vatican.

In 1969, Corso published a volume, Elegiac Feelings American, whose lead poem, dedicated to the recently deceased Jack Kerouac, is regarded by some critics as Corso's best poem. In 1981 he published poems mostly written while residing in Europe, entitled Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit.

Poetry

Corso's first volume of poetry The Vestal Lady on Brattle was published in 1955 (with the assistance of students at Harvard, where he had been auditing classes). Corso was the second member of the Beats to be published, despite the fact that he was the youngest member of the group. (Jack Kerouac's The Town and the City was published in February 1950.) His poems were first published in the Harvard Advocate. 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. Corso's notable poems include the following: "Bomb,""Elegiac Feelings American," "Marriage," and "The Whole Mess... Almost."

Filmography

• Pull My Daisy (1959)
• Me and My Brother (1969)
• What Happened to Kerouac? (1986)
• The Godfather Part III (1990) – Unruly Stockholder
• What About Me (1993) – Hotel Desk Clerk (final film role)
• Corso: The Last Beat (2009)

See also

In Spanish: Gregory Corso para niños