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."
Marriage
"Marriage" (1960) is perhaps Corso's signature poem. It is a 111-line work that lacks a consistent narrative thread. Instead, it offers a rambling debate about the advantages and disadvantages of marriage. It employs a free verse style, with no set meter, no set rhyme scheme, and varying line lengths. Corso acknowledges the length of some of the lines, but argues "they just flow, like a musical thing within me."[12] "Marriage" was among his "title poems," along with "Power," "Army," and others that explore a concept. "Should I get married?" (1), the speaker begins. Could marriage bring about the results that the speaker is looking for? Coming "home to her" (54) and sitting "by the fireplace and she in the kitchen/aproned young and lovely wanting my baby/ and so happy about me she burns the roast beef" (55–57). Idealizing marriage and fatherhood initially, Corso's speaker embraces reality in the second half of the poem admitting, "No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father" (84). Recognizing that the act of marriage is in itself a form of imprisonment, "No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream" (103), Corso's speaker acknowledges in the end that the possibility of marriage is not promising for him. Bruce Cook, in The Beat Generation[13] illuminates Corso's skill at juxtaposing humor and serious critical commentary: "Yet as funny and entertaining as all this certainly is, it is not merely that, for in its zany way 'Marriage' offers serious criticism of what is phony about a sacred American institution."
"Marriage" excerpt:
Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood? Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries and she going just so far and I understanding why not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel! Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky— When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where's the bathroom? How else to feel other than I am, often thinking Flash Gordon soap— O how terrible it must be for a young man seated before a family and the family thinking We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou! After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living? Should I tell them? Would they like me then? Say All right get married, we're not losing a daughter but we're gaining a son— And should I then ask Where's the bathroom? O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded just wait to get at the drinks and food—[14]
Corso's sometimes surreal word mash-ups in the poem—"forked clarinets," "Flash Gordon soap," "werewolf bathtubs"—caught the attention of many. Ethan Hawke recited the poem in the 1994 film Reality Bites, and Corso later thanked Hawke for the resulting royalty check.[15]
Bomb
According to Catharine Seigel, Corso's "Bomb" (published in 1958), was one of the earliest poems to confront the existence of the nuclear bomb.[16] The poem was published as a multiple-paged broadside, with the text shaped as a mushroom cloud. The first 30 lines create a round mushroom top, while lines 30-190 create the pillar of debris and destruction rising up from the ground. Corso recalled the tradition of patterned or shape poetry, but made the irreverent choice to create the shape of the cloud that results from the detonation of a nuclear bomb. Previous uses of shape poetry include angel wings and altars, which Siegel says makes Corso's choice "ironically appropriate." The poem appeared in the volume "The Happy Birthday of Death," which featured a black and white photograph of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, Japan.[16]
Corso makes extensive use of onomatopoeia toward the end of the poem, with all-caps font exclaiming "BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM" (166). Siegel describes these interruptions as "attempting to sound the reign of a nuclear, apocalyptic chaos." According to Corso himself, "When it's read, it's a sound poem.[17] "Bomb" was controversial because it mixed humor and politics. The poem was initially misinterpreted by many as being supportive of nuclear war.[16] The opening lines of the poem tend to lead the reader to believe that Corso supported the bomb. He writes, "You Bomb /Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched-sky I cannot hate you [extra spaces Corso's]" (lines 2–3). The speaker goes on to state that he cannot hate the bomb just as he cannot hate other instruments of violence, such as clubs, daggers, and St. Michael's burning sword. He continues on to point out that people would rather die by any other means including the electric chair, but death is death no matter how it happens. The poem moves on to other death imagery and at time becomes a prayer to the bomb. The speaker offers to bring mythological roses, a gesture that evokes an image of a suitor at the door. The other suitors courting the bomb include Oppenheimer and Einstein, scientists who are responsible for the creation of the bomb. He concludes the poem with the idea that more bombs will be made "and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires/ fierce with moustaches of gold" (lines 87–8).[18]
Christine Hoff Kraemer states the idea succinctly, "The bomb is a reality; death is a reality, and for Corso, the only reasonable reaction is to embrace, celebrate, and laugh with the resulting chaos" ("The Brake of Time: Corso's Bomb as Postmodern God(dess)"). Kraemer also asserts, "Corso gives the reader only one clue to interpreting this mishmash of images: the association of disparate objects is always presented in conjunction with the exploding bomb" ("The Brake of Time: Corso's Bomb as Postmodern God(dess)"). In addition she points to Corso's denial that the poem contained political significance.[19] Instead, he describes the poem as a "death shot" that pokes fun at the preoccupation with death by bomb in the 1950s when death by other causes is much more likely. This irreverent, humorous approach is characteristic of the Beat movement.
"Bomb" and "Marriage" caught the eye of a young Bob Dylan, still in Minnesota. Dylan said, "The Gregory Corso poem 'Bomb' was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better—a wasted world and totally mechanized—a lot of hustle and bustle—a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn't going to pin my hopes on that."[20]
Corso in other poetry
In contrast to Corso's use of marriage as a synecdoche for a Beat view of women, postmodern feminist poet Hedwig Gorski chronicles a night with Corso in her poem "Could not get Gregory Corso out of my Car" (1985, Austin, Texas) showing the womanizing typical for heterosexual Beat behavior.[21] Gorski criticizes the Beat movement for tokenism towards women writers and their work, with very few exceptions, including Anne Waldman, and post-beats like Diane DiPrima and herself. Male domination and womanizing by its heterosexual members, along with tokenism by its major homosexual members characterize the Beat Literary Movement. Beats scoffed at the Feminist Movement which offered liberalizing social and professional views of women and their works as did the Beat Movement for men, especially homosexuals.[22] Corso however always defended women's role in the Beat Generation, often citing his lover, Hope Savage, as a primary influence on him and Allen Ginsberg.
Relationship with the Beat Movement
The battle against social conformity and literary tradition was central to the work of the Beats. This group of poets questioned mainstream politics and culture, and they were concerned with changing consciousness and defying conventional writing. Corso's poems "Marriage" and "Bomb" demonstrate his willingness to provide an unconventional, humorous, and irreverent perspective on serious or controversial topics.
Ted Morgan described Corso's place in the Beat literary world: "If Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs were the Three Musketeers of the movement, Corso was their D'Artagnan, a sort of junior partner, accepted and appreciated, but with less than complete parity. He had not been in at the start, which was the alliance of the Columbia intellectuals with the Times Square hipsters. He was a recent adherent, although his credentials were impressive enough to gain him unrestricted admittance ..."[23] It has taken 50 years and the death of the other Beats, for Corso to be fully appreciated as a poet of equal stature and significance.
