Gregory Corso

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Gregory Corso
Grave on the cimitero acattolico in Rome

Gregory Nunzio Corso (born March 26, 1930 in Greenwich Village , New York City , † January 17, 2001 in Robbinsdale , Minnesota ) was an American poet of the Beat Generation .

Life

Corso's parents, Italian immigrants, were both 17 and 16 years old when he was born. A year later, his mother left the family to return to Italy. As a result, Corso had to spend most of his childhood in orphanages and with foster families. His father married a second time when Corso was eleven. The boy was able to stay with him, but often ran away. He also ran away from a children's home. In his checkered youth, he spent a few months in Tombs Prison in New York and at the Bellevue Hospital Center observing a radio theft . At 16, he was sentenced to three years in the Clinton State Prision in upstate New York. During this imprisonment he began to read literature, especially he became such a great admirer of the unconventional and linguistically excellent poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that on a later visit to Oxford he visited his former student room and kissed the floor on which Shelley had walked . Corso also studied Greek mythology, philosophy, and history. He also began to write his first poems while in prison.

He was released in 1950, returned to New York City, and met Allen Ginsberg in Greenwich Village . In their first long conversation, they discovered that Corso Ginsberg and his girlfriend had accidentally seen Ginsberg and his girlfriend having sex, as they both lived on opposite sides of the street. Ginsberg introduced Corso to the other Beat authors. Corso was, as Ted Morgan wrote in Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs , the junior partner of Ginsberg, Kerouac and William S. Burroughs , accepted and valued, but not completely equal in the “Alliance of Columbia intellectuals and Times Square hipsters ”.

Corso worked for the Los Angeles Examiner in 1952 and, like Jack Kerouac , went to sea with the merchant navy. In 1954 he took part in some courses at Harvard without registration, where he also collected contributions for his first publication of poems (The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems). He followed the other Beatniks to San Francisco in 1956, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti published his volume of poetry Gasoline . Together with Kerouac and Ginsberg, he did some unconventional readings and interviews in 1957 and also traveled through Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe.

In the early 1960s, Corso taught poetry for a semester at New York State University in Buffalo and at the Naropa Institute (now a university) in Boulder . He lost his Buffalo job in 1965 because he refused to sign the Feinberg Loyalty Oath , which was introduced in the McCarthy era as a means of keeping communism out of universities. Corso said that he did not want to sign this statement because Shelley would not have done either. In addition to Shelley, he also admired Friedrich Hölderlin and Emily Dickinson .

Corso died in Minnesota after suffering from prostate cancer for a long time. His daughter - Corso had five children in all - accompanied him during the last months of his life. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Rome , close to his role model Shelley. The following words are written on Corso's tombstone:

Spirit
is life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

Works

  • Gasoline. City Lights, San Francisco (1958, German gasoline , Stadtlichter Presse, Wenzendorf, 2002. Bilingual, from the American and with an afterword by Alexander Schmitz. ISBN 978-3-936271-07-2 )
  • with WS Burroughs, Brion Gysin , Sinclair Beiles: Minutes to Go (1960)
  • The Happy Birthday of Death (1960)
  • The American Express. Olympia Press, Paris (1961). Novel.
  • G. Corso, Walter Höllerer (Ed.): Young American Lyrik. Munich, Hanser (1961).
  • Long Live Man (1962)
  • Elegaic Feelings American (1970)
  • Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981)
  • Mindfield (1991)

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Corso, Gregory
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Corso, Gregory Nunzio (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American poet of the Beat Generation
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Greenwich Village , New York City
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 2001
Place of death Robbinsdale , Minnesota