Gregory Corso, beat poet, 70

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

Thursday January 18 6:41 PM ET

Beat Poet Gregory Corso Dies at 70 

By DOUG GLASS, Associated Press Writer 

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Poet Gregory Corso, one of the circle of Beat poets
that included Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has died. He was 70.

Corso, who had prostate cancer, died Wednesday, his daughter, Sheri
Langerman, said Thursday. He had been living with her since September, she
said.

Born in New York's Greenwich Village, Corso was the author or co-author of
more than 20 collections of poetry and other works. Ginsberg discovered
Corso in the 1950s. Corso's first poems were published in 1955.

One of his best-known works was the 1958 poem ``Bomb,'' an ode to atomic
weapons in the shape of a mushroom cloud. ``Know that the earth will
madonna the Bomb/ that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be
born/ magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine,'' he wrote.

Among his collections of poems are ``Gasoline,'' ``Elegiac Feelings
American'' and ``Mindfield.''

He remained active up until his death, recording a CD with Marianne
Faithfull at his daughter's home, Langerman said.

Corso was born March 26, 1930, to teen-age parents who separated a year
after his birth. His own biographical notes in a compilation called ``The
New American Poetry'' give a sample of his style and the early hardship of
his life:

``Born by young Italian parents, father 17 mother 16, born in New York
City Greenwich Village 190 Bleecker, mother year after me left
not-too-bright father and went back to Italy, thus I entered life of
orphanage and four foster parents and at 11 father remarried and took me
back but all was wrong because two years later I ran away and caught sent
away again and sent away to boys home for two years and let out and went
back home and ran away again and sent to Bellevue for observation ...''

At age 17, Corso went to prison for three years on a theft charge. After
his release in 1950, he worked as a laborer in New York City, a newspaper
reporter in Los Angeles, and a sailor on a boat to Africa and South
America.

It was in New York City that he first met Ginsberg, who introduced him to
contemporary, experimental work.

Maria Damon, an English professor at the University of Minnesota who has
taught Beat literature, spent a week studying under Corso at the Naropa
Institute in Boulder, Colo., in 1977. While Corso was lesser known than
Ginsberg and Kerouac, he deserves no less recognition, she said.

``I would say that he was very gifted, also undisciplined, which is part
of the beauty of Beat writing,'' she said. ``He was very well-read but not
from formal schooling. He put things together in a highly romanticized
way.''

Michael Skau, author of a 1999 book on Corso, said Corso was a media
favorite when the Beat movement exploded in the 1950s because he was ``the
prototype of a bad boy.''

``He was very disruptive whether it was a social setting or a literary
setting, very antagonistic even toward his closest friends,'' Skau
said. ``Ginsberg tolerated behavior from Corso that made Ginsberg look
like a saint.''

Corso was married three times. Survivors include five children, seven
grandchildren and one great-grandchild, Langerman said.

Funeral arrangements were not final, but a service was planned in
Greenwich Village, with burial in Rome, Langerman said. 



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