Gregory Corso’s Sound and Fury

It’s even harder to find Corso’s poems than it is to find Ferlinghetti’s poems. In fact, the only new book I could find after considerable searching in three different states was Gasoline published by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, which is one of Corso’s first books.

However, the search was well worth the effort because I like Corso’s poems very much, though I’m still unsure why. Perhaps I‘m drawn by the sound of his poems, for at his best he reminds me of Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manly Hopkins. Perhaps I’m drawn to his imagery, which reminds me of Salvador Dali, with strange, grotesques, disconnected but linked images that seem to emerge from another plane, plain despair.

His best poems in this volume range from short imagist poems like “I Miss My Dear Cats” to Whitmanesque poems like “Ode to Coit Tower” reminiscent of Ginsberg’s “Howl.”

Most of his poems, no matter how conventional in some aspects, contain a weird twist that identify them as Corso’s work, as in “I Miss My Dear Cats:”

I Miss My Dear Cats

My water-colored hands are catless now
seated here alone in the dark
my window-shaped head is bowed with sad draperies
I am catless near death almost
behind me my last cat hanging on the wall
dead of my hand drink bloated
And on all my other walls from attic to cellar
my sad life of cats hangs

At first glance the poem seems merely a tribute to an elderly lady who has loved cats her whole life. At first it even appears that she like to paint her cats, “my water-colored hands.” But this nostalgic little reverie is suddenly snapped to attention by the phrase “dead of my hand,” and “bloated,” like dead, bloated. This line makes for a rather ambiguous, and haunting, last line. The poem, despite its cheerfully inviting title, reminds one of an Edgar Allen Poe tale.

Perhaps I like “Puma In Chapultepec Zoo” purely because it captures the way I’ve felt about zoos ever since I can remember.

Puma In Chapultepec Zoo

Long smooth slow swift soft cat
What score, whose choreography did you dance to
when they pulled the final curtain down?

Can such ponderous grace remain
here, all alone, on this 9×10 stage?

Will they give you another chance
perhaps to dance the Sierras?

How sad you seem; looking at you
I think of Ulanova
locked in some small furnished room
in New York, on East 17th Street
in the Puerto Rican section.

A perfect metaphor? a beautiful, zooed puma compared to a world famous dancer, now trapped, forced to remain forever on a 9×10 stage. Who would dare consider doing the same to a human dancer?

“Paris” is a more typical Corso poem than the previous two, though. It contains delightful wordplay, driving rhythms and interesting rhymes and off-rhymes.

Paris

Childcity, Aprilcity,
Spirits of angels crouched in doorways,
Poets, worms in hair, beautiful Baudelaire,
Artaud, Rimbaud, Apollinaire,
Look to the nightcity –
Informers and concierges,
Montparnassian woe, deathical Notre Dame,
To the nightcircle look, dome heirloomed,
Hugo and Zola together entombed,
Harlequin deathtrap,
Seine generates ominous mud,
Eiffel looks down — sees the Apocalyptical ant crawl,
New Yorkless city,
City of Germans dead and gone,
Dollhouse of Mama War.

The opening line, with the invented “childcity, aprilcity,” somehow captures the romantic view of Paris. But this original clichéd view of the city is corrected through later images and magical words like “deathical” or “New Yorkless,” “entombed,” “ominous mud.” Ah, cans’t thou not imagine what couldst happen in a New Yorkless minute? It must have been magical to hear Corso read this stuff live.

Now, don’t quote me on this, I’m sure in retrospect I’ll deny it, maybe I’m just high on spring sunshine, but I think “Ode to Coit Tower,” might well be my favorite poem by a Beat poet that I’ve read so far:

Ode to Coit Tower

O anti-verdurous phallic were’t not for your pouring height looming in tears like a sick tree or your ever-gaudy- comfort jabbing your city’s much wrinkled sky you’d seem an absurd Babel squatting before mortal millions

Because I filled your dull sockets with my New York City eyes vibrations that hadn’t doomed dumb Empire State did not doom thee

Enough my eyes made you see phantasmal at night mad children of soda caps laying down their abundant blond verse on the gridiron of each other’s Eucharistic feet like distant kings laying down treasures from camels

Illuminations hinged to masculine limbs fresh with the labor sweat of cablecar & Genoa papa pushcart

Bounty of electricity & visions carpented on pig-bastard night in its spore like the dim lights of some hallucinating facade

Ah tower from thy berryless head I’d a vision in common with myself the proximity of Alcatraz and not the hip volley of white jazz & verse or verse & jazz embraced but a real heart-rending constant vision of Alcatraz marshalled before my eyes

Stocky Alcatraz weeping on Neptune’s table whose petrific bondage crushes the dreamless seaharp gasping for song O that that piece of sea fails to dream

Tower I’d a verdure vagueness fixed by a green wind the shade of Mercy lashed with cold nails against the wheatweather Western sky weeping I’m sure for hu-manity’s vast door to open that all men be free that both hinge and lock die that all doors if they close close like Chinese bells

Was it man’s love to screw the sky with monuments span the bay with orange & silver bridges shuttling structure into structure incorruptible in this endless tie each age impassions be it in stone or steel either in echo or half-heard ruin

Was it man’s love that put that rock there never to avalanche but in vision or this imaginary now or myself standing on Telegraph Hill Nob Hill Russian Hill the same view always Alcatraz like a deserted holiday

And I cried for Alcatraz there in your dumb hollows 0 tower clenching my Pan’s foot with vivid hoard of Dannemora

Cried for that which was no longer sovereign in me stinking of dead dreams dreams I yet feign to bury thus to shun reality’s worm

Dreams that once jumped joyous bright from my heart like sparks issued from a wild sharper’s wheel now issued no longer

Were’t not for cities or prisons 0 tower I might yet be that verdure monk lulling over green country albums with no greater dream than my youth’s dream

Eyes of my hands! Queen Penthesileia and her tribe! Mes-senger stars Doctor Deformous back from his leprosy and woe! Thracian ships! Joyprints of pure air!

Impossible for me to betray even the simplest tree

Idiotic colossus I came to your city during summer after Cambridge there also no leaf throbbed between my fingers no cool insect thrilled my palm though I’d a vision there Death seated like a huge black stove

Inspired by such I came to your city walked Market Street singing hark hark the dogs do bark the beggars are coming to town and ran mad across Golden Gate into Sausalito and fell exhausted in a field where an endless scarecrow lay its head on my lap

How happily mad I was 0 tower lying there amid gossipy green dreaming of Quetzalcoatl as I arched my back like a rainbow over some imaginary gulph

0 for that madness again that infinitive solitude where illu-sion spoke Truth’s divine dialect

I should have stayed yet I left to Mexico to Quetzalcoatl and heard there atop Teotihuacan in T-prophetic-Cuauhxi–calli-voice a dark anthem for the coming year

Ah tower tower that I felt sad for Alcatraz and not for your heroes lessened not the tourist love of my eyes

I saw your blackjacketed saints your Zens potsmokers Athenians and cocksmen

Though the West Wind seemed to harbor there not one
pure Shelleyean dream of let’s say hay—
-like universe
golden heap on a wall of fire
sprinting toward the gauzy eradication of
Swindleresque Ink

Corso’s vision here seems almost Blakean (forgive me, Jeff), Blakean in both its glory and its wonderment, enhanced, perhaps, by a dash of confusion, a vision of a tower dedicated to the workers forever despoiled by its nearness to The Rock, to Alcatraz, “Ah tower from thy berryless head I’d a vision in common with myself the proximity of Alcatraz and not the hip volley of white jazz & verse or verse & jazz embraced but a real heart-rending constant vision of Alcatraz marshalled before my eyes/ Stocky Alcatraz weeping on Neptune’s table whose petrific bondage crushes the dreamless seaharp gasping for song O that that piece of sea fails to dream.”

It’s nearly as impossible for me not to be caught up in the highs and lows of this poem as it is impossible to understand exactly what Corso’s vision is.

Surely, though, this home of the beats, this new paradise, is found lacking, for it does not harbor “one pure Shelleyean dream of hay-like universe.”

Still, ‘twould be a dull jack that did not jump “joyous bright” to find phrases and lines such as “sparks issued from a wild sharper’s wheel,” “verdure monk lulling over green country albums,” “Joyprints of pure air!” or “singing hark hark the dogs do bark the beggars are coming to town.”

Rock me, rock me baby, for a little while, the man doeth out-dylan Dylan.

Doeth it matter if it be but sound and fury signifying nothing?

4 thoughts on “Gregory Corso’s Sound and Fury”

  1. i have been searching unsuccessfully for a copy of a corso poem (@1959) named “made by hand.” do you have a copy of or cite to this poem? if so, could you please e-mail it? thanks!

  2. Thanks for this. A nice appreciation of Corso. The commentary is good, too, I think. Reading “Allen Ginsberg in America” and had to follow up by looking for some Corso. Your post here hits the spot. Thanks for writing a longer blog post than most.

    1. Glad you thought it was good enough to merit a comment, barrieev. Your comment even inspired me to come back and read what I had written nearly 12 years ago.

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