Bøker av Gregory Corso

Six humorous plays written between 1952 and 1968 by Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), two of which have never before been published.

Gregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930 in New York City. His first book of poetry was published by City Lights Press in 1955.

Prior to the publication of his first collection of poetry, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems (1955), Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote three plays while living as a "stowaway" on the campus of Harvard University. The first of these plays, written in 1954, was Sarpedon, which Corso described as "a great funny Prometheus Unbound ... all in metre and rhyme" and "...an attempt to replicate Euripides, though the whole shot be an original. Like the great Greek masters, I took off where Homer left an opening (like Euripides did with the fate of Agamemnon). My opening was found in The Iliad. Sarpedon, son of Zeus and Europa, died on the fields of Troy, and Homer had him sent up to Olympus with no complaint from Hades, who got all the others what died there. Thus I have Hades complain, demanding from his brother Zeus, the dead, all the dead, from said fields." The play comprises 17 pages of this volume. It is supplemented with a two-page introduction by Corso himself, taken from a transcript of his prefatory remarks at his 1978 reading of Sarpedon at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Also included are an editor's introduction which provides information about the plays Corso wrote while at Harvard and describes the circumstances surrounding his brief residence in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The volume is footnoted as well. Corso never professed to be a Greek scholar but this brilliant yet little-known work clearly demonstrates the depth of his mastery of classical literature, no doubt picked up from auditing Harvard lectures as well as from the extensive reading he did in the Clinton State Prison library in Dannemora, New York, while serving a three-year sentence for theft. What makes it all the more significant is that, despite the ancient subject matter, his verse is infused with the street slang and Beat vernacular of the time in which it was written, and portends the irreverent humor that would become a hallmark of much of his later work.

Gregory Corso is still kicking "the ivory applecart of tyrannical values," heralding the wild and keenly experienced life. Since the 1950s, when with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others, Corso electrified the literary establishment with what he describes as "spontaneous subterranean poesy of the streets," he has fathered "three fleshed angels," traveled through Europe and Egypt, seen the demise of several fellow "Daddies of an Age," and now finds himself over half a century old.The lush, fervent oratory of Shelley is evident in these poems of one who may be his most ardent American heir, and the author of The Happy Birthday of Death and Elegiac Feelings American never entirely forgets that a "leaky lifeboat" is the mortal's only home. "You'd think there would be chaos/the futility of it all/Yet children are born/oft times spitting images of us/ ... and the gift keeps on coming."Corso knows death, despair, and silence only too well, and his first major collection in eleven years is permeated with a sense of crucial choices to be made. "Columbia U Poesy Reading--1975" begins with Beat history and ends with a solitary vision of God in the form of the muse: "Seated on a cold park bench/I heard her moan: 'O Gregorio Gregorio/you'll fail me, I know/Walking away/a little old lady behind me was singing: True! True!'/'Not so!'/ rang the spirit, 'Not so!'" In a cocky, exuberant blend of high style and down-home New Yorkese, the Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit brings more auspicious tidings.

Gregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930 in New York City. His first book of poetry was published by City Lights Press in 1955.