Gregory Corso Beat Generation Drawing Signed Saturn Family Scarce Wow

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Seller: memorabilia111 ✉️ (807) 100%, Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, Ships to: US, Item: 176291626646 GREGORY CORSO BEAT GENERATION DRAWING SIGNED SATURN FAMILY SCARCE WOW. Gregory Corso, “Elegium Catullus/Corso, for Allen Ginsberg,” 1997, holograph manuscript from The Golden Dot. Gregory Corso, “You cannot replicate the soul. . ,” c. 2000, holograph manuscript from The Golden Dot. GREGORY CORSO BEAT GENERATION DRAWING SIGNED ORIGINAL SATURN FAMILY DRAWING SCARCE WOW MEASURING APPROXIMATELY 9X12 INCHES FROM HIS SATURN FAMILY SERIES Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement.[1] He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs). The Saturn Family series of prints was  published in 1981 by The Parchment Gallery which was a venture of University of Charleston Professor William Plumley . The six piece set of signed prints were sold together as a portfolio and the edition was limited to 80.


Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement.[1] He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs). Early life This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) Born Nunzio Corso at New York City's St. Vincent's Hospital, Corso later selected the name "Gregory" as a confirmation name.[2] Within Little Italy and its community he was "Nunzio," while he dealt with others as "Gregory." He often would use "Nunzio" as short for "Annunziato," the announcing angel Gabriel, hence a poet. Corso identified with not only Gabriel but also Hermes, the divine messenger.[citation needed] Corso's mother, Michelina Corso (born Colonna), was born in Miglianico, Abruzzo, Italy, and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, with her mother and four other sisters. At 16, she married Sam Corso, a first-generation Italian American, also teenage, and gave birth to Nunzio Corso the same year. They lived at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, the heart of Greenwich Village and upper Little Italy.[citation needed] Childhood Sometime in his first year, Corso's mother mysteriously abandoned him, leaving him at the New York child care home, a branch of the Catholic Church Charities. Corso's father, Sam "Fortunato" Corso, a garment center worker, found the infant and promptly put him in a foster home. Michelina came to New York from Trenton but her life was threatened by Sam. One of Michelina's sisters was married to a New Jersey mobster who offered to give Michelina her "vengeance," that is to kill Sam. Michelina declined and returned to Trenton without her child. Sam consistently told Corso that his mother had returned to Italy and deserted the family. He was also told that she was a prostitute and was "disgraziata" (disgraced) and forced into Italian exile. Sam told the young boy several times, "I should have flushed you down the toilet." It was 67 years before Corso learned the truth of his mother's disappearance. Corso spent the next 11 years in foster care in at least five different homes. His father rarely visited him. When he did, Corso was often abused: "I'd spill jello, and the foster home people would beat me. Then my father would visit, and he'd beat me again—a double whammy." As a foster child, Corso was among thousands that the Church aided during the Depression, with the intention of reconstituting families as the economy picked up. Corso went to Catholic parochial schools, was an altar boy and a gifted student. His father, in order to avoid the military draft, brought Gregory home in 1941. Nevertheless, Sam Corso was drafted[3] and sent overseas. Corso, then alone, became a homeless child on the streets of Little Italy. For warmth he slept in subways in the winter, and then slept on rooftops during the summer. He continued to attend Catholic school, not telling authorities he was living on the streets. With permission, he took breakfast bread from a bakery in Little Italy. Street food stall merchants would give him food in exchange for running errands. Adolescence At age 13, Corso was asked to deliver a toaster to a neighbor. While he was running the errand, a passerby offered money (around 94 dollars) for the toaster, and Corso sold it. He used the money to buy a tie and white shirt, and dressed up to see The Song of Bernadette, a movie about the mystical appearance of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. On returning from the movie, the police apprehended him. Corso claimed he was seeking a miracle, namely to find his mother.[2] Corso had a lifelong affection for saints and holy men: "They were my only heroes." Nonetheless, he was arrested for petty larceny and incarcerated in The Tombs, New York's infamous jail. Corso, though only 13 years old, was celled next to an adult, criminally insane murderer who had stabbed his wife repeatedly with a screwdriver. The exposure left Corso traumatized. Neither Corso's stepmother nor his paternal grandmother would post his $50 bond. With his own mother missing and unable to make bail, he remained in the Tombs. Later, in 1944 during a New York blizzard, a 14-year-old freezing Corso broke into his tutor's office for warmth, and fell asleep on a desk. He slept through the blizzard and was arrested for breaking and entering and booked into the Tombs for a second time with adults. Terrified of other inmates, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital Center and later released.[2] On the eve of his 18th birthday, Corso broke into a tailor shop and stole an oversized suit to dress for a date. Police records indicate he was arrested two blocks from the shop. He spent the night in the Tombs and was arraigned the next morning as an 18-year-old with prior offenses. No longer a "youthful offender," he was given a two to three years sentence to Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, New York. Corso always has expressed a curious gratitude for Clinton making him a poet. Gasoline, his second book of poems, is dedicated to "the angels of Clinton Prison who, in my seventeenth year, handed me, from all the cells surrounding me, books of illumination."[4] Corso at Clinton Correctional While being transported to Clinton, Corso, terrified of prison and the prospect of rape, concocted a story of why he was sent there. He told hardened Clinton inmates he and two friends had devised the wild plan of taking over New York City by means of walkie-talkies, projecting a series of improbable and complex robberies. Communicating by walkie-talkie, each of the three boys took up an assigned position—one inside the store to be robbed, one outside on the street to watch for the police, and a third, Corso, the master-planner, in a small room nearby dictating the orders. According to Corso, he was in the small room giving the orders when the police came. In light of Corso's youth, his imaginative yarn earned him bemused attention at Clinton. Richard Biello, a capo, asked Corso who he was connected with, that is what New York crime family did he come from, talking such big crimes as walkie-talkie robberies. "I'm independent!" Corso shot back, hoping to keep his distance from the mob inmates. A week later, in the prison showers, Corso was grabbed by a handful of inmates, and the 18-year-old was about to be raped. Biello happened in and commented, "Corso! You don't look so independent right now." Biello waved off the would-be rapists, who were afraid of mafia reprisals. Thus Corso fell under the protection of powerful Mafioso inmates, and became something of a mascot because he was the youngest inmate in the prison, and he was entertaining. Corso would cook the steaks and veal brought from the outside by mafia underlings in the "courts", 55-gallon-barrel barbecues and picnic tables, assigned to the influential prisoners. Clinton also had a ski run right in the middle of "the yards," and Corso learned to downhill ski and taught the mafiosi. He entertained his mobster elders as a court jester, quick with ripostes and japes. Corso would often cite the three propositions given him by a mafia capo: "1) Don't serve time, let time serve you. 2) Don't take your shoes off because with a two to three you're walking right out of here. 3) When you're in the yard talking to three guys, see four. See yourself. Dig yourself." Corso was jailed in the very cell just months before vacated by Charles "Lucky" Luciano. While imprisoned, Luciano had donated an extensive library to the prison. (Poet's Work, Poet's Play: Essays on the Practice and the Art. 2008).[citation needed] The cell was also equipped with a phone and self-controlled lighting as Luciano was, from prison, cooperating with the U.S. government's wartime effort, providing mafia aid in policing the New York waterfront, and later helping in Naples, Italy through his control of the Camorra. In this special cell, Corso read after lights-out thanks to a light specially positioned for Luciano to work late. Corso was encouraged to read and study by his Cosa Nostra mentors, who recognized his genius. There, Corso began writing poetry. He studied the Greek and Roman classics, and voraciously absorbed encyclopedia and dictionary entries. He credited The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant's ground-breaking compendium of history and philosophy, for his general education and philosophical sophistication. Release and return to New York City In 1951, 21-year-old Gregory Corso worked in the garment center by day, and at night was a mascot yet again, this time at one of Greenwich Village's first lesbian bars, the Pony Stable Inn. The women gave Corso a table at which he wrote poetry. One night a Columbia College student, Allen Ginsberg, happened into the Pony Stable and saw Corso... "he was good looking, and wondered if he was gay, or what." Corso, who was not gay, was not uncomfortable with same sex come-ons after his time in prison, and thought he could score a beer off Ginsberg. He showed Ginsberg some of the poems he was writing, a number of them from prison, and Ginsberg immediately recognized Corso as "spiritually gifted." One poem described a woman who sunbathed in a window bay across the street from Corso's room on 12th Street. The woman happened to be Ginsberg's erstwhile girl friend, with whom he lived in one of his rare forays into heterosexuality. Ginsberg invited Corso back to their apartment and asked the woman if she would satisfy Corso's sexual curiosity. She agreed, but Corso, still a virgin, got too nervous as she disrobed, and he ran from the apartment, struggling with his pants. Ginsberg and Corso became fast friends. All his life, Ginsberg had a sexual attraction to Corso, which remained unrequited. Corso joined the Beat circle and was adopted by its co-leaders, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw in the young street-wise writer a potential for expressing the poetic insights of a generation wholly separate from those preceding it. At this time he developed a crude and fragmented mastery of Shelley, Marlowe, and Chatterton. Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1821, posthumously published in 1840), with its emphasis on the ability of genuine poetic impulse to stimulate "unapprehended combinations of thought" that led to the "moral improvement of man," prompted Corso to develop a theory of poetry roughly consistent with that of the developing principles of the Beat poets. For Corso, poetry became a vehicle for change, a way to redirect the course of society by stimulating individual will.[5] He referred to Shelley often as a "Revolutionary of Spirit", which he considered Ginsberg and himself to be. Cambridge, Massachusetts In 1954, Corso moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several important poets, including Edward Marshall and John Wieners, were experimenting with the poetics of voice. The center for Corso's life there was not "the School of Boston," as these poets were called, but Harvard University's Widener Library.[6] He spent his days there reading the great works of poetry[6] and also auditing classes in the Greek and Roman Classics. Corso's appreciation of the classics had come from the Durants' books that he had read in prison. At Harvard, he considered becoming a classics scholar. Corso, penniless, lived on a dorm room floor in Elliott house, welcomed by students Peter Sourian, Bobby Sedgwick (brother of Edie), and Paul Grand. He would dress up for dinner and not be noticed. Members of the elite Porcellian Club reported Corso to the Harvard administration as an interloper. Dean Archibald MacLeish met with Corso intending to expel him, but Corso showed him his poems and MacLeish relented and allowed Corso to be a non-matriculating student—a poet in residence.[citation needed] Corso's first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and his play In This Hung-up Age—concerning a group of Americans who, after their bus breaks down midway across the continent, are trampled by buffalo—was performed by the esteemed Poets' Theater the following year[6] along with T.S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral." Harvard and Radcliffe students, notably Grand, Sourian and Sedgwick, underwrote the printing expenses of Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems. The poems featured in the volume are usually considered apprentice work heavily indebted to Corso's reading. They are, however, unique in their innovative use of jazz rhythms—most notably in "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, musician," which many call the strongest poem in the book—cadences of spoken English, and hipster jargon. Corso once explained his use of rhythm and meter in an interview with Gavin Selerie for Riverside Interviews: "My music is built in—it's already natural. I don't play with the meter." In other words, Corso believed the meter must arise naturally from the poet's voice; it is never consciously chosen. In a review of The Vestal Lady on Brattle for Poetry, Reuel Denney asked whether "a small group jargon" such as bop language would "sound interesting" to those who were not part of that culture. Corso, he concluded, "cannot balance the richness of the bebop group jargon... with the clarity he needs to make his work meaningful to a wider-than-clique audience." Ironically, within a few years, that "small group jargon", the Beat lingo, became a national idiom, featuring words such as "man," "cool," "dig," "chick," "hung up," etc. Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet, described by Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation as "an urchin Shelley." Biographer Carolyn Gaiser suggested that Corso adopted "the mask of the sophisticated child whose every display of mad spontaneity and bizarre perception is consciously and effectively designed"—as if he is in some way deceiving his audience. But the poems at their best are controlled by an authentic, distinctive, and enormously effective voice that can range from sentimental affection and pathos to exuberance and dadaist irreverence toward almost anything except poetry itself.[7] Marian Janssen, in her biography of Isabella Gardner, details the relationships that Corso established with the more traditional literary society at the onset of his career. During his time at Cambridge, Corso met Robert Gardner, a member of the elite upper class “Boston Brahmins.” Gardner became a sponsor of sorts to Corso and briefly provided him with financial support. It was Robert Gardner who suggested to Corso that he send one of his poems to his sister, Isabella, who was a noted poet and the assistant editor of Poetry Magazine. Isabella liked the poem and asked Corso to send her three or four more before she took the poems to the editor, Karl Shapiro. Shapiro rejected Corso's poetry and he never appeared in Poetry Magazine while Shapiro was the editor. Gardener sent a letter back to Corso that managed to “salve his poetic pride” and began a lasting but difficult correspondence between the two poets.[8] San Francisco, "Howl", and the Beat Phenomenon Corso and Ginsberg decided to head to San Francisco, separately. Corso wound up temporarily in Los Angeles and worked at the L.A. Examiner news morgue. Ginsberg was delayed in Denver. They were drawn by reports of an iconoclast circle of poets, including Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. An older literary mentor, the socialist writer Kenneth Rexroth, lent his apartment as a Friday-night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth's, had given him an introductory letter). Wally Hedrick wanted to organize the famous Six Gallery reading, and Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve as master of ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations. Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend John Hoffman. At his first public reading Ginsberg performed the just-finished first part of "Howl." Gregory Corso arrived late the next day, missing the historic reading, at which he had been scheduled to read. The Six Gallery was a success, and the evening led to many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets. It was also a marker of the beginning of the West Coast Beat movement, since the 1956 publication of Howl (City Lights Pocket Poets, no. 4) and its obscenity trial in 1957 brought it to nationwide attention. Ginsberg and Corso hitchhiked from San Francisco, visiting Henry Miller in Big Sur, and stopped off in Los Angeles. As guests of Anaïs Nin and writer Lawrence Lipton, Corso and Ginsberg gave a reading to a gathering of L.A. literati. Ginsberg took the audience off-guard, by proclaiming himself and Corso as poets of absolute honesty, and they both proceeded to strip bare naked of clothes, shocking even the most avant-garde of the audience. Corso and Ginsberg then hitchhiked to Mexico City to visit Kerouac who was holed up in a room above a whorehouse, writing a novel, "Tristessa." After a three-week stay in Mexico City, Ginsberg left, and Corso waited for a plane ticket. His lover, Hope Savage, convinced her father, Henry Savage Jr., the mayor of Camden, S.C.,[9] to send Corso a plane ticket to Washington, D.C. Corso had been invited by the Library of Congress poet (precursor to U.S. Poet Laureate) Randall Jarrell and his wife Mary, to live with them, and become Jarrell's poetic protege. Jarrell, unimpressed with the other Beats, found Corso's work to be original and believed he held great promise. Corso stayed with the Jarrells for two months, enjoying the first taste of family life ever. However, Kerouac showed up and crashed at the Jarrells', often drunk and loud, and got Corso to carouse with him. Corso was disinvited by the Jarrells and returned to New York. To Paris and the "Beat Hotel" In 1957, Allen Ginsberg traveled with Peter Orlovsky to visit William S. Burroughs in Morocco. They were joined by Kerouac, who was researching the French origins of his family. Corso, already in Europe, joined them in Tangiers and, as a group, they made an ill-fated attempt to take Burroughs' fragmented writings and organize them into a text (which later would become Naked Lunch). Burroughs was strung out on heroin and became jealous of Ginsberg's unrequited attraction for Corso, who left Tangiers for Paris. In Paris, Corso introduced Ginsberg and Orlovsky to a Left Bank lodging house above a bar at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur, that he named the Beat Hotel. They were soon joined by William Burroughs and others. It was a haven for young expatriate painters, writers, and musicians. There, Ginsberg began his epic poem Kaddish, Corso composed his poems Bomb and Marriage, and Burroughs (with Brion Gysin's help) put together Naked Lunch from previous writings. This period was documented by the photographer Harold Chapman, who moved in at about the same time, and took pictures of the residents of the hotel until it closed in 1963.[10] Corso's Paris sojourn resulted in his third volume of poetry, The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), Minutes to Go (1960, visual poetry deemed "cut-ups") with William S. Burroughs, Sinclair Beiles, and Brion Gysin, The American Express (1961, an Olympia Press novel), and Long Live Man (1962, poetry). Corso fell out with the publisher of Gasoline, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, who objected to "Bomb," a position Ferlinghetti later rued and for which he apologized. Corso's work found a strong reception at New Directions Publishing, founded by James Laughlin, who had heard of Corso through Harvard connections. New Directions was considered the premier publisher of poetry, with Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Merton, Denise Levertov, James Agee, and ironically, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Corso also wrote again to Isabella Gardner while in Paris after he read her book of poems, Birthdays from the Ocean. Corso's extreme enthusiasm for her work was returned with indifference. Gardner was in the midst of an affair with Allen Tate, one of the leading members of the New Criticism, and his negative opinion of Beat poets influenced Gardner's response to Corso. While in Europe Corso searched for his lover, Hope Savage, who had disappeared from New York, saying she was headed to Paris. He visited Rome and Greece, sold encyclopedias in Germany, hung out with jazz trumpeter Chet Baker in Amsterdam, and with Ginsberg set the staid Oxford Union in turmoil with his reading of "Bomb," which the Oxford students mistakenly believed was pro-nuclear war (as had Ferlinghetti), while they and other campuses were engaged in "ban the bomb" demonstrations. A student threw a shoe at Corso, and both he and Ginsberg left before Ginsberg could read "Howl." Corso returned to New York in 1958, amazed that he and his compatriots had become famous, or notorious, emerging literary figures. Return to New York – The "Beatniks" In late 1958, Corso reunited with Ginsberg and Orlovsky. They were astonished that before they left for Europe they had sparked a social movement, which San Francisco columnist Herb Caen called "Beat-nik," combining "beat" with the Russian "Sputnik," as if to suggest that the Beat writers were both "out there" and vaguely Communist. San Francisco's obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti for publishing Ginsberg's "Howl" had ended in an acquittal, and the national notoriety made "The Beats" famous, adored and ridiculed. Upon their return, Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac and Burroughs were published in the venerable Chicago Review, but before the volume was sold, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins deemed it pornographic and had all copies confiscated. The Chicago editors promptly resigned and started an alternative literary magazine, Big Table. Ginsberg and Corso took a bus from New York for the Big Table launch, which again propelled them into the national spotlight. Studs Terkel's interview of the two was a madcap romp which set off a wave of publicity. Controversy followed them and they relished making the most of their outlaw and pariah image. Time and Life magazines had a particular dislike of the two, hurling invective and insult that Corso and Ginsberg hoped they could bootstrap into yet more publicity. The Beat Generation (so named by Kerouac) was galvanized and young people began dressing with berets, toreador pants, and beards, and carrying bongos. Corso would quip that he never grew a beard, didn't own a beret, and couldn't fathom bongos. Corso and Ginsberg traveled widely to college campuses, reading together. Ginsberg's "Howl" provided the serious fare and Corso's "Bomb" and "Marriage" provided the humor and bonhomie. New York's Beat scene erupted and spilled over to the burgeoning folk music craze in the Village, Corso's and Ginsberg's home ground. An early participant was a newly arrived Bob Dylan: "I came out of the wilderness and just fell in with the Beat scene, the Bohemian, the Be Bop crowd. It was all pretty connected." "It was Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti... I got in at the tail end of that and it was magic." -Bob Dylan in America. Corso also published in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s. During the early 1960s, Corso married Sally November, an English teacher who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and attended Shaker High School, and graduated from the University of Michigan. At first, Corso mimicked "Marriage" and moved to Cleveland to work in Sally's father's florist shop. Then the couple lived in Manhattan and Sally was known to Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Larry Rivers and others in the beat circle at that time. The marriage, while a failure, did produce a child, Miranda Corso. Corso maintained contact with Sally and his daughter sporadically during his lifetime. Sally, who subsequently remarried, resides on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and has kept contact with one of the iconic females associated with the Beat movement, Hettie Jones. Corso married two other times and had sons and a daughter. As the Beats were supplanted in the 1960s by the Hippies and other youth movements, Corso experienced his own wilderness years. He struggled with alcohol and drugs. He later would comment that his addictions masked the pain of having been abandoned and emotionally deprived and abused. Poetry was his purest means of transcending his traumas, but substance abuse threatened his poetic output. He lived in Rome for many years, and later married in Paris and taught in Greece, all the while traveling widely. He strangely remained close to the Catholic Church as critic and had a loose identification as a lapsed Catholic. His collection Dear Fathers was several letters commenting on needed reforms in the Vatican. In 1969, Corso published a volume, Elegiac Feelings American, whose lead poem, dedicated to the recently deceased Jack Kerouac, is regarded by some critics as Corso's best poem. In 1981 he published poems mostly written while residing in Europe, entitled Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. In 1972, Rose Holton and her sister met Corso on the second day of their residence at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City: He sold us on the Chelsea and sold us on himself. Everything that life can throw at you was reflected in his very being. It was impossible for him to be boring. He was outrageous, always provocative, alternately full of indignation or humor, never censoring his words or behavior. But the main thing is that Gregory was authentic. He could play to the audience, but he was never a phony poseur. He was the real deal. He once explained the trajectory of creative achievement: 'There is talent, there is genius, then there is the divine.' Gregory inhabited the divine.[11] While living at the Chelsea, Corso encountered Isabella Gardner once again. She had moved there after her relationship with Tate ended. In one of the most curious events of his life, Corso blamed her for his lack of writing as his career progressed. He claimed that Gardner had stolen two suitcases from him while they were both at the Chelsea. Corso claimed that the suitcases contained two books of new poetry and all his correspondence between himself and the other Beat poets. Although his claims were clearly false, he valued the suitcases at two thousand dollars and extorted this money from Gardner. Poetry 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. Later years In later years, Corso disliked public appearances and became irritated with his own "Beat" celebrity. He never allowed a biographer to work in any "authorized" fashion, and only posthumously was a volume of letters published under the specious artifice of An Accidental Autobiography. He did, however, agree to allow filmmaker Gustave Reininger to make a cinema vérité documentary, Corso: The Last Beat, about him. Corso had a cameo appearance in The Godfather III where he plays an outraged stockholder trying to speak at a meeting. After Allen Ginsberg's death, Corso was depressed and despondent. Gustave Reininger convinced him to go "on the road" to Europe and retrace the early days of "the Beats" in Paris, Italy and Greece. While in Venice, Corso expressed on film his lifelong concerns about not having a mother and living such an uprooted childhood. Corso became curious about where in Italy his mother, Michelina Colonna, might be buried. His father's family had always told him that his mother had returned to Italy a disgraced woman, a whore. Filmmaker Gustave Reininger quietly launched a search for Corso's mother's Italian burial place. In an astonishing turn of events, Reininger found Corso's mother Michelina not dead, but alive; and not in Italy, but in Trenton, New Jersey. Corso was reunited with his mother on film. He discovered that she at the age of 17 had been almost fatally brutalized (all her front teeth punched out) and was sexually abused by her teenage husband, his father. On film, Michelina explained that, at the height of the Depression, with no trade or job, she had no choice but to give her son into the care of Catholic Charities. After she had established a new life working in a restaurant in New Jersey, she had attempted to find him, to no avail. The father, Sam Corso, had blocked even Catholic Charities from disclosing the boy's whereabouts. Living modestly, she lacked the means to hire a lawyer to find her son. She worked as a waitress in a sandwich shop in the New Jersey State Office Building in Trenton. She eventually married the cook, Paul Davita, and started a new family. Her child Gregory remained a secret between Michelina and her mother and sisters, until Reininger found them. Corso and his mother quickly developed a relationship which lasted until his death, which preceded hers. They both spent hours on the phone, and the initial forgiveness displayed in the film became a living reality. Corso and Michelina loved to gamble and on several occasions took vacations to Atlantic City for blackjack at the casinos. Corso always lost, while Michelina fared better and would stake him with her winnings. Corso's grave, in Rome (Italy) Corso claimed that he was healed in many ways by meeting his mother and saw his life coming full circle. He began to work productively on a new, long-delayed volume of poetry, The Golden Dot. Shortly thereafter, Corso discovered he had irreversible prostate cancer. He died of the disease in Minnesota on January 17, 2001. Around two hundred people were present in the "Non-Catholic Cemetery" in Rome, Italy, on Saturday morning, May 5, to pay their last respects to Gregory Corso. In the tranquility of this small and lovely cemetery full of trees, flowers and well-fed cats, with the sun's complicity, more than a funeral, it seemed to be a reunion of long-lost friends, with tales, anecdotes, laughter and poetry readings. The urn bearing Corso's ashes arrived with his daughter Sheri Langerman who had assisted him during the last seven months of his life. Twelve other Americans came with her, among them Corso's old friends Roger Richards and the lawyer Robert Yarra. The cemetery had been closed to newcomers since the mid-century and Robert Yarra and Hannelore deLellis made it possible for Corso to be buried there. His ashes were deposited at the foot of the grave of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Cimitero Acattolico, and not far from John Keats.[24] He wrote his own epitaph: Spir't is Life It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea Quotes "…a tough young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the roof tops and sang Italian song as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words.… Amazing and beautiful, Gregory Corso, the one and only Gregory, the Herald."—Jack Kerouac – Introduction to Gasoline "Corso's a poet's Poet, a poet much superior to me. Pure velvet... whose wild fame's extended for decades around the world from France to China, World Poet.—Allen Ginsberg, "On Corso's Virtues" "Gregory's voice echoes through a precarious future.... His vitality and resilience always shine through, with a light that is more than human: the immortal light of his Muse.... Gregory is indeed one of the Daddies."—William S. Burroughs "The most important of the beat poets... a really true poet with an original voice"—Nancy Peters, editor of City Lights "Other than Mr. Corso, Gregory was all you ever needed to know. He defined the name by his every word or act. Always succinct, he never tried. Once he called you 'My Ira' or 'My Janine' or 'My Allen,' he was forever 'Your Gregory'."—Ira Cohen "...It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within." – Gregory Corso, How Poetry Comes to Me (epigraph of Gasoline) "They, that unnamed "they", they've knocked me down but I got up. I always get up-and I swear when I went down quite often I took the fall; nothing moves a mountain but itself. They, I've long ago named them me." – Gregory Corso Filmography Pull My Daisy (1959) Me and My Brother (1969) What Happened to Kerouac? (1986) The Godfather Part III (1990) – Unruly Stockholder What About Me (1993) – Hotel Desk Clerk (final film role) Corso: The Last Beat (2009) Bibliography The Vestal Lady and Other Poems (1955, poetry) This Hung-Up Age (1955, play) Gasoline (1958, poetry) Bomb (1958, poetry) The Happy Birthday of Death (1960, poetry) Minutes to Go (1960, visual poetry) with Sinclair Beiles, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin. The American Express (1961, novel) Long Live Man (1962, poetry) There is Yet Time to Run Back through Life and Expiate All That's been Sadly Done (1965, poetry) Elegiac Feelings American (1970, poetry) The Night Last Night was at its Nightest (1972, poetry) Earth Egg (1974, poetry) Writings from OX (1979, with interview by Michael Andre) Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981, poetry) Mind Field (1989, poetry) Mindfield: New and Selected Poems (1989, poetry) King Of The Hill: with Nicholas Tremulis (1993, album)[25] Bloody Show: with Nicholas Tremulis (1996, album)[26] Brink of the World by Stephen R. Pastore and Gregory Corso (2008) The Whole Shot: Collected Interviews with Gregory Corso (2015) Sarpedon: A Play by Gregory Corso (1954) (2016) Melted Parchment (2019) Collected Plays (2021) The Beat Generation was a literary subculture movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-World War II era.[1] The bulk of their work was published and popularized by Silent Generationers in the 1950s, better known as Beatniks. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.[2][3] Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) are among the best-known examples of Beat literature.[4] Both Howl and Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in the United States.[5][6] The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. The core group of Beat Generation authors—Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien Carr, and Kerouac—met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures, except Burroughs and Carr, ended up together in San Francisco, where they met and became friends of figures associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. In the 1950s, a Beatnik subculture formed around the literary movement, although this was often viewed critically by major authors of the Beat movement. In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie and larger counterculture movements. Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey's bus Furthur, was the primary bridge between these two generations. Ginsberg's work also became an integral element of early 1960s hippie culture, in which he actively participated. The hippie culture was practiced primarily by older members of the following generation. Etymology Although Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation" in 1948 to characterize a perceived underground, the anti-conformist youth movement in New York, fellow poet Herbert Huncke is credited with first using the word "beat".[7] The name arose in a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes. Kerouac allows that it was Huncke, a street hustler, who originally used the phrase "beat", in an earlier discussion with him. The adjective "beat" could colloquially mean "tired" or "beaten down" within the African-American community of the period and had developed out of the image "beat to his socks",[8][9][10] but Kerouac appropriated the image and altered the meaning to include the connotations "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat", and "the Beat to keep" from the Beat Generation poem.[11] Significant places Columbia University The origins of the Beat Generation can be traced to Columbia University and the meeting of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carr, Hal Chase and others. Kerouac attended Columbia on a football scholarship.[12] Though the beats are usually regarded as anti-academic,[13][14][15] many of their ideas were formed in response to professors like Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren. Classmates Carr and Ginsberg discussed the need for a "New Vision" (a term borrowed from W. B. Yeats), to counteract what they perceived as their teachers' conservative, formalistic literary ideals.[16][17] Times Square "underworld" Ginsberg was arrested in 1949. The police attempted to stop Jack Melody (a.k.a. "little Jack") while he was driving a car in Queens with Priscella Arminger (alias, Vickie Russell or "Detroit Redhead") and Allen Ginsberg in the back seat. The car was filled with stolen items Little Jack planned to fence. Jack Melody crashed while trying to flee, rolled the car and the three of them escaped on foot. Allen Ginsberg lost his glasses in the accident and left incriminating notebooks behind. He was given the option to plead insanity to avoid a jail term and was committed for 90 days to Bellevue Hospital, where he met Carl Solomon.[18] Solomon was arguably more eccentric than psychotic. A fan of Antonin Artaud, he indulged in self-consciously "crazy" behavior, like throwing potato salad at a college lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon was given shock treatments at Bellevue; this became one of the main themes of Ginsberg's "Howl", which was dedicated to Solomon. Solomon later became the publishing contact who agreed to publish Burroughs' first novel, Junkie, in 1953.[19] Greenwich Village Beat writers and artists flocked to Greenwich Village in New York City in the late 1950s because of low rent and the "small town" element of the scene. Folksongs, readings and discussions often took place in Washington Square Park.[20] Allen Ginsberg was a big part of the scene in the Village, as was Burroughs, who lived at 69 Bedford Street.[21] Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and other poets frequented many bars in the area, including the San Remo Cafe at 93 MacDougal Street on the northwest corner of Bleecker, Chumley's, and Minetta Tavern.[21] Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and other abstract expressionists were also frequent visitors of and collaborators with the Beats.[22] Cultural critics have written about the transition of Beat culture in the Village into the Bohemian hippie culture of the 1960s.[23] In 1960, a presidential election year, the Beats formed a political party, the "Beat Party," and held a mock nominating convention to announce a presidential candidate: the African-American street poet Big Brown, won a majority of votes on the first ballot but fell short of the eventual nomination.[24] The Associated Press reported, "Big Brown's lead startled the convention. Big, as the husky African American is called by his friends, wasn't the favorite son of any delegation, but he had one tactic that earned him votes. In a chatterbox convention, only once did he speak at length, and that was to read his poetry."[25] San Francisco and the Six Gallery reading See also: San Francisco Renaissance Ginsberg had visited Neal and Carolyn Cassady in San Jose, California in 1954 and moved to San Francisco in August. He fell in love with Peter Orlovsky at the end of 1954 and began writing Howl. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the new City Lights Bookstore, started to publish the City Lights Pocket Poets Series in 1955. Lawrence Ferlinghetti Kenneth Rexroth's apartment became a Friday night literary salon (Ginsberg's mentor William Carlos Williams, an old friend of Rexroth, had given him an introductory letter). When asked by Wally Hedrick[26] To organize the Six Gallery reading, Ginsberg wanted Rexroth to serve as master of ceremonies, in a sense to bridge generations. Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City). Lamantia read poems of his late friend John Hoffman. At his first public reading, Ginsberg performed the just finished first part of Howl. It was a success and the evening led to many more readings by the now locally famous Six Gallery poets.[citation needed] It was also a marker of the beginning of the Beat movement since the 1956 publication of Howl (City Lights Pocket Poets, no. 4), and its obscenity trial in 1957 brought it to nationwide attention.[27][28] The Six Gallery reading informs the second chapter of Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, whose chief protagonist is "Japhy Ryder", a character who is based on Gary Snyder. Kerouac was impressed with Snyder and they were close for several years. In the spring of 1955, they lived together in Snyder's cabin in Mill Valley, California. Most Beats were urbanites and they found Snyder almost exotic, with his rural background and wilderness experience, as well as his education in cultural anthropology and Oriental languages. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation."[citation needed] As documented in the conclusion of The Dharma Bums, Snyder moved to Japan in 1955, in large measure to intensively practice and study Zen Buddhism. He would spend most of the next 10 years there. Buddhism is one of the primary subjects of The Dharma Bums, and the book undoubtedly helped to popularize Buddhism in the West and remains one of Kerouac's most widely read books.[29] Pacific Northwest The Beats also spent time in the Northern Pacific Northwest including Washington and Oregon. Kerouac wrote about sojourns to Washington's North Cascades in The Dharma Bums and On the Road.[30] Reed College in Portland, Oregon was also a locale for some of the Beat poets. Gary Snyder studied anthropology there, Philip Whalen attended Reed, and Allen Ginsberg held multiple readings on the campus around 1955 and 1956.[31] Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen were students in Reed's calligraphy class taught by Lloyd J. Reynolds.[32] Significant figures External videos video icon Discussion of biographies of Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and others, October 22, 1996, C-SPAN Burroughs was introduced to the group by David Kammerer. Carr had befriended Ginsberg and introduced him to Kammerer and Burroughs. Carr also knew Kerouac's girlfriend Edie Parker, through whom Burroughs met Kerouac in 1944. On August 13, 1944, Carr killed Kammerer with a Boy Scout knife in Riverside Park in what he claimed later was self-defense.[33] He waited,[citation needed] then dumped the body in the Hudson River, later seeking advice from Burroughs, who suggested he turn himself in. He then went to Kerouac, who helped him dispose of the weapon.[34] Carr turned himself in the following morning and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Kerouac was charged as an accessory, and Burroughs as a material witness, but neither were prosecuted. Kerouac wrote about this incident twice in his works: once in his first novel, The Town and the City, and again in one of his last, Vanity of Duluoz. He wrote a collaboration novel with Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, concerning the murder.[34] Participants Women Beat Generation women who have been published include Edie Parker; Joyce Johnson; Carolyn Cassady; Hettie Jones; Joanne Kyger; Harriet Sohmers Zwerling; Diane DiPrima; Bonnie Bremser; Lenore Kandel; and Ruth Weiss, who also made films. Carolyn Cassady wrote her detailed account of life with her husband Neal Cassady which also included details about her affair with Jack Kerouac. She titled it Off the Road, and it was published in 1990. Poet Elise Cowen took her own life in 1963. Poet Anne Waldman was less influenced by the Beats than by Allen Ginsberg's later turn to Buddhism. Later, female poets emerged who claimed to be strongly influenced by the Beats, including Janine Pommy Vega in the 1960s, Patti Smith in the 1970s, and Hedwig Gorski in the 1980s.[35][36] African Americans Although African Americans were not widely represented in the Beat Generation, the presence of some black writers in this movement did contribute to the movement's progression. While many of the Beats briefly discussed issues of race and sexuality, they spoke from their perspectives—most being white. However, black people added a counterbalance to this; their work supplied readers with alternative views of occurrences in the world. Beats like the poet Robert "Bob" Kaufman and the writer LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) provide through their work distinctly Black perspectives on the movement. Kaufman wrote about a number of his experiences with the racist institutions of the time. Following his time in the military, he had trouble with police officers and the criminal justice system. Like many of the Beats, Kaufman was also a fan of jazz and incorporated it into his work to describe relationships with others. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) married Beat writer, Hettie Cohen, who became Hettie Jones, in 1958. Together with Diane di Prima, they worked to develop Yūgen magazine, named for the Japanese concept of yūgen. Mr. and Mrs. Jones were associated with several Beats (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso). That is, until the assassination of the Civil Rights leader, Malcolm X. During this time, LeRoi Jones branched off from the other Beat writers, including his wife, to find his identity among the African-American and Islamic communities. The change in his social setting along with awakening influenced his writing and brought about the development of many of his most notable works, like Somebody Blew Up America, in which he reflected on the attacks of 9/11 and America's reaction to this incident about other occurrences in America. Culture and influences Sexuality One of the key beliefs and practices of the Beat Generation was free love and sexual liberation,[37] which strayed from the Christian ideals of American culture at the time.[38] Some Beat writers were openly gay or bisexual, including two of the most prominent (Ginsberg[39] and Burroughs[40]). However, the first novel does show Cassady as frankly promiscuous. Kerouac's novels feature an interracial love affair (The Subterraneans), and group sex (The Dharma Bums). The relationships among men in Kerouac's novels are predominately homosocial.[41] Drug use The original members of the Beat Generation used several different drugs, including alcohol, marijuana, benzedrine, morphine, and later psychedelic drugs such as peyote, Ayahuasca, and LSD.[42] They often approached drugs experimentally, initially being unfamiliar with their effects. Their drug use was broadly inspired by intellectual interest, and many Beat writers thought that their drug experiences enhanced creativity, insight, or productivity.[43] The use of drugs was a key influence on many of the social events of the time that were personal to the Beat generation.[44] Romanticism Gregory Corso considered English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley a hero, and he was buried at the foot of Shelley's grave in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. Ginsberg mentions Shelley's poem Adonais at the beginning of his poem Kaddish, and cites it as a major influence on the composition of one of his most important poems. Michael McClure compared Ginsberg's Howl to Shelley's breakthrough poem Queen Mab.[45] Ginsberg's main Romantic influence was William Blake,[46] and studied him throughout his life. Blake was the subject of Ginsberg's self-defining auditory hallucination and revelation in 1948.[47] Romantic poet John Keats was also cited as an influence.[citation needed] Jazz Writers of the Beat Generation were heavily influenced by jazz artists like Billie Holiday and the stories told through Jazz music. Writers like Jack Kerouac (On the Road), Bob Kaufman ("Round About Midnight," "Jazz Chick," and "O-Jazz-O"), and Frank O'Hara ("The Day Lady Died") incorporated the emotions they felt toward jazz. They used their pieces to discuss feelings, people, and objects they associate with jazz music, as well as life experiences that reminded them of this style of music. Kaufman's pieces listed above "were intended to be freely improvisational when read with Jazz accompaniment" (Charters 327). He and other writers found inspiration in this genre and allowed it to help fuel the Beat movement. Early American sources The Beats were inspired by early American figures such as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville and especially Walt Whitman, who is addressed as the subject of one of Ginsberg's most famous poems, "A Supermarket in California". Edgar Allan Poe was occasionally acknowledged, and Ginsberg saw Emily Dickinson as having an influence on Beat poetry. The 1926 novel You Can't Win by outlaw author Jack Black was cited as having a strong influence on Burroughs.[48] French surrealism In many ways, Surrealism was still considered a vital movement in the 1950s. Carl Solomon introduced the work of French author Antonin Artaud to Ginsberg, and the poetry of André Breton had direct influence on Ginsberg's poem Kaddish.[citation needed] Rexroth, Ferlinghetti, John Ashbery and Ron Padgett translated French poetry. Second-generation Beat Ted Joans was named "the only Afro-American Surrealist" by Breton.[49] Philip Lamantia introduced Surrealist poetry to the original Beats.[50] The poetry of Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman shows the influence of Surrealist poetry with its dream-like images and its random juxtaposition of dissociated images, and this influence can also be seen in more subtle ways in Ginsberg's poetry. As the legend goes, when meeting French Surrealist Marcel Duchamp, Ginsberg kissed his shoe and Corso cut off his tie.[51][page needed] Other influential French poets for the Beats were Guillaume Apollinaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire.[citation needed] Modernism Gertrude Stein was the subject of a book-length study by Lew Welch. Admitted influences for Kerouac include Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.[52] Buddhism and Daoism Gary Snyder defined wild as "whose order has grown from within and is maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation". "The wild is not brute savagery, but a healthy balance, a self-regulating system.". Snyder attributed wild to Buddhism and Daoism, the interests of some Beats. "Snyder's synthesis uses Buddhist thought to encourage American social activism, relying on both the concept of impermanence and the classically American imperative toward freedom."[53] Topics A section devoted to the beat generation at a bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden While many authors claim to be directly influenced by the Beats, the Beat Generation phenomenon itself has had an influence on American culture leading more broadly to the hippie movements of the 1960s.[citation needed] In 1982, Ginsberg published a summary of "the essential effects" of the Beat Generation:[54] Spiritual liberation, sexual "revolution" or "liberation," i.e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, and Gray Panther activism. Liberation of the world from censorship. Demystification and/or decriminalization of cannabis and other drugs. The evolution of rhythm and blues into rock and roll as a high art form, as evidenced by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and other popular musicians influenced in the later fifties and sixties by Beat generation poets and writers' works. The spread of ecological consciousness, emphasized early by Gary Snyder, Jack Loeffler, and Michael McClure, the notion of a "Fresh Planet." Opposition to the military-industrial machine civilization, as emphasized in the writings of Burroughs, Huncke, Ginsberg, and Kerouac. Attention to what Kerouac called (after Spengler) a "second religiousness" developing within an advanced civilization. Return to an appreciation of idiosyncrasy vs. state regimentation. Respect for land and indigenous peoples and creatures, as proclaimed by Kerouac in his slogan from On the Road: "The Earth is an Indian thing." "Beatniks" Main article: Beatnik The term "beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958, blending the name of the recent Russian satellite Sputnik and Beat Generation. This suggested that beatniks were (1) "far out of the mainstream of society" and (2) "possibly pro-Communist."[55] Caen's term stuck and became the popular label associated with a new stereotype—the man with a goatee and beret reciting nonsensical poetry and playing bongo drums while free-spirited women wearing black leotards dance.[citation needed] An early example of the "beatnik stereotype" occurred in Vesuvio's (a bar in North Beach, San Francisco) which employed the artist Wally Hedrick to sit in the window dressed in full beard, turtleneck, and sandals, creating improvisational drawings and paintings. By 1958 tourists who came to San Francisco could take bus tours to view the North Beach Beat scene, prophetically anticipating similar tours of the Haight-Ashbury district ten years later.[56] A variety of other small businesses also sprang up exploiting (and/or satirizing) the new craze. In 1959, Fred McDarrah started a "Rent-a-Beatnik" service in New York, taking out ads in The Village Voice and sending Ted Joans and friends out on calls to read poetry.[57] "Beatniks" appeared in many cartoons, movies, and TV shows of the time, perhaps the most famous being the character Maynard G. Krebs in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963). While some of the original Beats embraced the beatniks, or at least found the parodies humorous (Ginsberg, for example, appreciated the parody in the comic strip Pogo[58]) others criticized the beatniks as inauthentic poseurs. Jack Kerouac feared that the spiritual aspect of his message had been lost and that many were using the Beat Generation as an excuse to be senselessly wild.[59] "Hippies" Main article: Hippie During the 1960s, aspects of the Beat movement metamorphosed into the counterculture of the 1960s, accompanied by a shift in terminology from "beatnik" to "hippie".[60] Many of the original Beats remained active participants, notably Allen Ginsberg, who became a fixture of the anti-war movement. Notably, however, Jack Kerouac broke with Ginsberg and criticized the 1960s politically radical protest movements as an excuse to be "spiteful".[61] There were stylistic differences between beatniks and hippies—somber colors, dark sunglasses, and goatees gave way to colorful psychedelic clothing and long hair. The Beats were known for "playing it cool" (keeping a low profile).[62] Beyond style, there were changes in substance: The Beats tended to be essentially apolitical, but the hippies became actively engaged with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.[63] Literary legacy Among the emerging novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, a few were closely connected with Beat writers, most notably Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Though they had no direct connection, other writers considered the Beats to be a major influence, including Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)[64] and Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues). William S. Burroughs is considered a forefather of postmodern literature; he also inspired the cyberpunk genre.[65][66][67] One-time Beat writer LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka helped initiate the Black Arts movement.[68] As there was a focus on live performance among the Beats, many Slam poets have claimed to be influenced by the Beats. Saul Williams, for example, cites Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman as major influences.[69] The Postbeat Poets are direct descendants of the Beat Generation. Their association with or tutelage under Ginsberg at The Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics[70] and later at Brooklyn College stressed the social-activist legacy of the Beats and created its own body of literature. Known authors are Anne Waldman, Antler, Andy Clausen, David Cope, Eileen Myles, Eliot Katz, Paul Beatty, Sapphire, Lesléa Newman, Jim Cohn, Thomas R. Peters Jr. (poet and owner of beat book shop), Sharon Mesmer, Randy Roark, Josh Smith, David Evans.[citation needed] Rock and pop music The Beats had a pervasive influence on rock and roll and popular music, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. The Beatles spelled their name with an "a" partly as a Beat Generation reference,[71] and John Lennon was a fan of Jack Kerouac.[72] The Beatles even put Beat writer William S. Burroughs on the cover of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.[73] Ginsberg was a close friend of Bob Dylan[74] and toured with him on the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. Dylan cites Ginsberg and Kerouac as major influences.[citation needed] Jim Morrison cites Kerouac as one of his biggest influences, and fellow Doors member Ray Manzarek has said "We wanted to be beatniks."[75] In his book Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Manzarek also writes "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." Michael McClure was also a friend of members of The Doors, at one point touring with Manzarek. Ginsberg was a friend of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, a group of which Neal Cassady was a member, which also included members of the Grateful Dead. In the 1970s, Burroughs was a friend of Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Patti Smith.[citation needed] The musical group Steely Dan is named after a steam-powered dildo in Burroughs' Naked Lunch. British progressive rock band Soft Machine is named after Burroughs' novel The Soft Machine.[citation needed] Singer-songwriter Tom Waits, a Beat fan, wrote "Jack and Neal" about Kerouac and Cassady, and recorded "On the Road" (a song written by Kerouac after finishing the novel) with Primus.[76] He later collaborated with Burroughs on the theatrical work The Black Rider. Jazz musician/film composer Robert Kraft wrote and released a contemporary homage to Jack Kerouac and Beat Generation aesthetics entitled "Beat Generation" on the 1988 album Quake City.[citation needed] Musician Mark Sandman, who was the bass guitarist, lead vocalist, and a former member of the alternative jazz rock band Morphine, was interested in the Beat Generation and wrote a song called "Kerouac" as a tribute to Jack Kerouac and his philosophy and way of life.[77] The band Aztec Two-Step recorded "The Persecution & Restoration of Dean Moriarty (On the Road)" in 1972.[78] There was a resurgence of interest in the beats among bands in the 1980s. Ginsberg worked with the Clash and Burroughs worked with Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Kurt Cobain, and Ministry, among others.[citation needed] Bono of U2 cites Burroughs as a major influence,[79][80] and Burroughs appeared briefly in a U2 video in 1997.[81] Post-punk band Joy Division named a song "Interzone" after a collection of stories by Burroughs. Laurie Anderson featured Burroughs on her 1984 album Mister Heartbreak and in her 1986 concert film, Home of the Brave.[citation needed] The band King Crimson produced the album Beat inspired by the Beat Generation.[82][83] More recently, American artist Lana Del Rey references the Beat movement and Beat poetry in her 2014 song "Brooklyn Baby".[citation needed] In 2021, rapper R.A.P. Ferreria released the album Bob's Son: R.A.P. Ferreira in the Garden Level Cafe of the Scallops Hotel, named for Bob Kaufman and containing many references to the work of Kaufman, Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, and other beat poets.[citation needed] Criticism The Beat Generation was met with scrutiny and assigned many stereotypes. Several magazines, including Life and Playboy, depicted members of the Beat Generation as nihilists and as unintellectual. This criticism was largely due to the ideological differences between American culture at the time and the Beat Generation, including their Buddhist-inspired beliefs.[38] Norman Podhoretz, a student at Columbia with Kerouac and Ginsberg, later became a critic of the Beats. His 1958 Partisan Review article "The Know-Nothing Bohemians" was a vehement critique primarily of Kerouac's On the Road and The Subterraneans, as well as Ginsberg's Howl.[84] His central criticism is that the Beat's embrace of spontaneity is bound up in an anti-intellectual worship of the "primitive" that can easily turn toward mindlessness and violence. Podhoretz asserted that there was a link between the Beats and criminal delinquents.[citation needed] Ginsberg responded in a 1958 interview with The Village Voice,[85] specifically addressing the charge that the Beats destroyed "the distinction between life and literature". In the interview, he stated that "the bit about anti-intellectualism is a piece of vanity, we had the same education, went to the same school, you know there are 'Intellectuals' and there are intellectuals. Podhoretz is just out of touch with twentieth-century literature, he's writing for the eighteenth-century mind. We have a personal literature now—Proust, Wolfe, Faulkner, Joyce."[86] Internal criticism In a 1974 interview,[87] Gary Snyder comments on the subject of "casualties" of the Beat Generation:[88] Kerouac was a casualty too. And there were many other casualties that most people have never heard of, but were genuine casualties. Just as, in the 60s, when Allen and I for a period there were almost publicly recommending people to take acid. When I look back on that now I realize there were many casualties, and responsibilities to bear. When the Beats initially set out to "construct" new communities that shirked conformity and traditionalism, they invoked the symbols of the most marginalized ethnic identities of their time. As the reality set in, of racial self-identity lost within the communal constructs of their own making, most of the Beat writers altered their message drastically to acknowledge the social impulse to marginalize the self in the conflict between isolationism and absorption of self by communal instincts seeking belonging. They began to deeply engage with new themes such as the place of the white man in America and declining patriarchal institutions.[89] Quotes Three writers do not make a generation. — Gregory Corso[90] (sometimes also attributed to Gary Snyder) Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose. — Allen Ginsberg[91] Films D.O.A. (1949) — a film noir, set in San Francisco, which includes one of the earliest (fictional) depictions of the Beat culture Jack Kerouac (wrote), Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie (directed) Pull My Daisy (1958) Bell, Book and Candle* (1958) (motion picture) The Beat Generation* (1959) (motion picture) A Bucket of Blood* (1959) Roger Corman Production The Subterraneans* (1960) (motion picture) Visit to a Small Planet (1960) (motion picture) Greenwich Village Story* (1961) Next Stop, Greenwich Village* (1976) Heart Beat (1980) (motion picture) What Happened to Kerouac? (1986) (documentary) Absolute Beginners (1986) (motion picture) Naked Lunch (1991) (motion picture) Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg (1993) (documentary) So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993) (motion picture) Allen Ginsberg Live in London (1995) (documentary) The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) The Source (1999) (documentary) Beat (2000) (motion picture) American Saint (2001) (dramatic motion picture) Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road (2007) Neal Cassady* (2007) Crazy Wisdom: The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (2008) (documentary) Howl (2010) (motion picture) William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010) (documentary) Magic Trip (2011) (documentary) Big Sur (2012) (motion picture) Corso: The Last Beat (2012) (documentary) On the Road (2012) (motion picture) The Beat Hotel (2012) (documentary) Kill Your Darlings (2013) (motion picture) Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder (2013) (documentary) Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) (motion picture) See also Beat Scene Beatdom Literary Journal European Beat Studies Network (EBSN) Literary Kicks San Francisco Oracle Leonard Cohen, Canadian Beat Generation poet & songwriter Christopher Felver Silent Generation Generation gap Beatniks were members of a social movement in the mid 20th century, who subscribed to an anti-materialistic lifestyle. They rejected the conformity and consumerism of mainstream American culture and expressed themselves through various forms of art, such as literature, poetry, music, and painting. They also experimented with spirituality, drugs, sexuality, and travel. The term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in 1958, as a derogatory label for the followers of the Beat Generation, a group of influential writers and artists who emerged during the era of the Silent Generation's maturing, from as early as 1946 to as late as 1963, but the subculture was at its most prevalent in the 1950s. The name was inspired by the Russian suffix "-nik", which was used to denote members of various political or social groups. The term "beat" originally was used by Jack Kerouac in 1948 to describe his social circle of friends and fellow writers, such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. Kerouac said that "beat" had multiple meanings, such as "beaten down", "beatific", "beat up", and "beat out". He also associated it with the musical term "beat", which referred to the rhythmic patterns of jazz, a genre that influenced many beatniks. Beatniks often were stereotyped as wearing black clothing, berets, sunglasses, and goatees, and speaking in hip slang that incorporated words like "cool", "dig", "groovy", and "square". They frequented coffeehouses, bookstores, bars, and clubs, where they listened to jazz, read poetry, discussed philosophy, and engaged in political activism. Some of the most famous beatnik venues were the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where Ginsberg first read his poem "Howl" in 1955; the Gaslight Cafe in New York City, where many poets performed; and the City Lights Bookstore, also in San Francisco, where Kerouac's novel On the Road was published in 1957. Beatniks also traveled across the country and abroad, seeking new experiences and inspiration. Some of their destinations included Mexico, Morocco, India, Japan, and France. Beatniks had a significant impact on American culture and society as they challenged the norms and values of their time. They influenced many aspects of art, literature, music, film, fashion, and language. They also inspired many social movements and subcultures that followed them, such as the hippies, the counterculture, the New Left, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the environmental movement, and the LGBT movement. Some of the more notable figures who were influenced by or associated with beatniks include Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Andy Warhol, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Beatniks have been portrayed or parodied in many works of fiction, such as The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, A Charlie Brown Christmas, The Munsters, The Flintstones, The Simpsons, and SpongeBob SquarePants. History Poster for The Beat Generation (1959) In 1948, Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase "Beat Generation", generalizing from his social circle to characterize the underground, anti-conformist youth gathering in New York City at that time. The name came up in conversation with John Clellon Holmes, who published an early Beat Generation novel titled Go (1952), along with the manifesto This Is the Beat Generation in The New York Times Magazine.[1] In 1954, Nolan Miller published his third novel Why I Am So Beat (Putnam), detailing the weekend parties of four students. "Beat" came from underworld slang—the world of hustlers, drug addicts, and petty thieves—from which Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac sought inspiration. "Beat" was slang for "beaten down" or "downtrodden". However, to Kerouac and Ginsberg, it also had a spiritual connotation, as in "beatitude". Other adjectives discussed by Holmes and Kerouac were "found" and "furtive". Kerouac felt he had identified (and was the embodiment of) a new trend analogous to the influential Lost Generation.[2][3] In "Aftermath: The Philosophy of the Beat Generation", Kerouac criticized what he saw as a distortion of his visionary, spiritual ideas: The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word "beat" spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer. It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization ...[4][5] Kerouac explained what he meant by "beat" at a Brandeis Forum, "Is There A Beat Generation?", on November 8, 1958, at New York's Hunter College Playhouse. The seminar's panelists were Kerouac, James A. Wechsler, Princeton anthropologist Ashley Montagu and author Kingsley Amis. Wechsler, Montagu, and Amis wore suits, while Kerouac was clad in black jeans, ankle boots and a checkered shirt. Reading from a prepared text, Kerouac reflected on his beat beginnings: It is because I am Beat, that is, I believe in beatitude and that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to it ... Who knows, but that the universe is not one vast sea of compassion actually, the veritable holy honey, beneath all this show of personality and cruelty?[6] Kerouac's statement was later published as "The Origins of the Beat Generation" (Playboy, June 1959). In that article, Kerouac noted how his original beatific philosophy had been ignored amid maneuvers by several pundits, among them San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen, to alter Kerouac's concept with jokes and jargon: I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"...the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific...People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, buggies, and finally, I was called the "avatar" of all this. In light of what he considered beat to mean and what beatnik had come to mean, Kerouac said to a reporter "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying "You know who painted that? Me." Stereotype Stereotypical beatnik woman In her memoir Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson described how the stereotype was absorbed into American culture: "Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other's wives.[7] Kerouac biographer Ann Charters noted that the term "Beat" was appropriated to become a Madison Avenue marketing tool: The term caught on because it could mean anything. It could even be exploited in the affluent wake of the decade's extraordinary technological inventions. Almost immediately, for example, advertisements by "hip" record companies in New York used the idea of the Beat Generation to sell their new long-playing vinyl records.[8] Lee Streiff, an acquaintance of many members of the movement who went on to become one of its chroniclers, believed that the news media saddled the movement for the long term with a set of false images: Reporters are not generally well-versed in artistic movements, or the history of literature or art. And most are certain that their readers, or viewers, are of limited intellectual ability and must have things explained simply, in any case. Thus, the reporters in the media tried to relate something that was new to already preexisting frameworks and images that were only vaguely appropriate in their efforts to explain and simplify. With a variety of oversimplified and conventional formulas at their disposal, they fell back on the nearest stereotypical approximation of what the phenomenon resembled, as they saw it. And even worse, they did not see it clearly and completely at that. They got a quotation here and a photograph there—and it was their job to wrap it up in a comprehensible package—and if it seemed to violate the prevailing mandatory conformist doctrine, they would also be obliged to give it a negative spin as well. And in this, they were aided and abetted by the Poetic Establishment of the day. Thus, what came out in the media: from newspapers, magazines, TV, and the movies, was a product of the stereotypes of the 30s and 40s—though garbled—of a cross between a 1920s Greenwich Village bohemian artist and a Bop musician, whose visual image was completed by mixing in Daliesque paintings, a beret, a Vandyck beard, a turtleneck sweater, a pair of sandals, and set of bongo drums. A few authentic elements were added to the collective image: poets reading their poems, for example, but even this was made unintelligible by making all of the poets speak in some kind of phony Bop idiom. The consequence is, that even though we may know now that these images do not accurately reflect the reality of the Beat movement, we still subconsciously look for them when we look back to the 50s. We have not even yet completely escaped the visual imagery that has been so insistently forced upon us.[9] Etymology The origin of the word "beatnik" is traditionally ascribed to Herb Caen from his column in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2, 1958, where he wrote "Look magazine, preparing a picture spread on S.F.'s Beat Generation (oh, no, not AGAIN!), hosted a party in a No. Beach house for 50 Beatniks, and by the time word got around the sour grapevine, over 250 bearded cats and kits were on hand, slopping up Mike Cowles' free booze. They're only Beat, y'know, when it comes to work ..."[10] It is claimed that Caen coined the term by adding the Yiddish suffix -nik to Beat as in the Beat Generation. Nik, a suffix was also due to Sputnik craze, the first satellite orbiting the planet and fired up in 1957. Became used in many colloquial synthetics, as in Nogoodnik, etc. However, an earlier source from 1954, or possibly 1957 after the launch of Sputnik, is ascribed to Ethel (Etya) Gechtoff, the well-known owner of a San Francisco Art Gallery.[11][12][13] Objecting to the term, Allen Ginsberg wrote to The New York Times to deplore "the foul word beatnik", commenting, "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man."[14] Beat culture In the vernacular of the period, "Beat" referred to Beat culture, attitude and literature; while "beatnik" referred to a stereotype found in cartoon drawings and (in some cases at worst) twisted, sometimes violent media characters. In 1995, film scholar Ray Carney wrote about the authentic beat attitude as differentiated from stereotypical media portrayals of the beatnik: Much of Beat culture represented a negative stance rather than a positive one. It was animated more by a vague feeling of cultural and emotional displacement, dissatisfaction, and yearning, than by a specific purpose or program ... It was many different, conflicting, shifting states of mind.[15] Posing before a sample of beatnik art are Miss Beatnik of 1959 contestants in Venice, California Since 1958, the terms Beat Generation and Beat have been used to describe the antimaterialistic literary movement that began with Kerouac in the 1940s and continued into the 1960s. The Beat philosophy of antimaterialism and soul searching influenced 1960s musicians such as Bob Dylan, the early Pink Floyd and The Beatles. However, the soundtrack of the beat movement was the modern jazz pioneered by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, which the media dubbed bebop. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg spent much of their time in New York jazz clubs such as the Royal Roost, Minton's Playhouse, Birdland and the Open Door, "shooting the breeze" and "digging the music". Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis rapidly became what Ginsberg dubbed "secret heroes" to this group of aesthetes. The Beat authors borrowed much from the jazz/hipster slang of the 1940s, peppering their works with words such as "square", "cats", "cool" and "dig". At the time the term "beatnik" was coined, a trend existed among young college students to adopt the stereotype. Men emulated the trademark look of bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie by wearing goatees, horn-rimmed glasses and berets, rolling their own cigarettes, and playing bongos. Fashions for women included black leotards and long, straight, unadorned hair, in a rebellion against the middle-class culture of beauty salons. Marijuana use was associated with the subculture, and during the 1950s, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception further influenced views on drugs. By 1960, a small "beatnik" group in Newquay, Cornwall, England (including a young Wizz Jones) had attracted the attention and abhorrence of their neighbours for growing their hair beyond shoulder length, resulting in a television interview with Alan Whicker on BBC television's Tonight series.[16] The Beat philosophy was generally countercultural and antimaterialistic, and stressed the importance of bettering one's inner self over material possessions. Some Beat writers, such as Gary Snyder, began to delve into Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Taoism. Politics tended to be liberal, left-wing and anti-war, with support for causes such as desegregation (although many of the figures associated with the original Beat movement, particularly Kerouac, embraced libertarian and conservative ideas). An openness to African American culture and arts was apparent in literature and music, notably jazz. While Caen and other writers implied a connection with communism, no obvious or direct connection occurred between Beat philosophy, as expressed by the literary movement's leading authors, and that of the communist movement, other than the antipathy both philosophies shared towards capitalism. Those with only a superficial familiarity with the Beat movement often saw this similarity and assumed the two movements had more in common. The Beat movement introduced Asian religions to Western society. These religions provided the Beat generation with new views of the world and corresponded with its desire to rebel against conservative middle-class values of the 1950s, old post-1930s radicalism, mainstream culture, and institutional religions in America.[17] By 1958, many Beat writers published writings on Buddhism. This was the year Jack Kerouac published his novel The Dharma Bums, whose central character (whom Kerouac based on himself) sought Buddhist contexts for events in his life. Allen Ginsberg's spiritual journey to India in 1963 also influenced the Beat movement. After studying religious texts alongside monks, Ginsberg deduced that what linked the function of poetry to Asian religions was their mutual goal of achieving ultimate truth. His discovery of Hindu mantra chants, a form of oral delivery, subsequently influenced Beat poetry. Beat pioneers who followed a Buddhism-influenced spiritual path felt that Asian religions offered a profound understanding of human nature and insights into the being, existence and reality of mankind.[17] Many of the Beat advocates believed that the core concepts of Asian religious philosophies had the means of elevating American society's consciousness, and these concepts informed their main ideologies.[18] Notable Beat writers such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder were drawn to Buddhism to the extent that they each, at different periods in their lives, followed a spiritual path in their quests to provide answers to universal questions and concepts. As a result, the Beat philosophy stressed the bettering of the inner self and the rejection of materialism, and postulated that East Asian religions could fill a religious and spiritual void in the lives of many Americans.[17] Many scholars speculate that Beat writers wrote about Eastern religions to encourage young people to practice spiritual and sociopolitical action. Progressive concepts from these religions, particularly those regarding personal freedom, influenced youth culture to challenge capitalist domination, break their generation's dogmas, and reject traditional gender and racial rules.[18] Beatnik art Beatnik art is the direction of contemporary art that originated in the United States as part of the beat movement in the 1960s.[19] The movement itself, unlike the so-called "lost generation" did not set itself the task of changing society, but tried to distance itself from it, while at the same time trying to create its own counter-culture. The art created by artists was influenced by jazz, drugs, occultism, and other attributes of beat movement.[19] The scope of the activity was concentrated in the cultural circles of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and North Carolina. Prominent representatives of the trend were artists Wallace Berman, Jay DeFeo, Jess Collins, Robert Frank, Claes Oldenburg and Larry Rivers. The culture of the beat generation has become a kind of intersection for representatives of the creative intellect of the United States associated with visual and performing art, which are usually attributed to other areas and trends of artistic expression, such as assemblage, happening, funk art and neo-dadaism. They made efforts to destroy the wall between art and real life, so that art would become a living experience in cafes or jazz clubs, and not remain the prerogative of galleries and museums. Many works of artists of the movement were created on the verge of various types of art.[20] Artists wrote poetry and poets painted, something like this can describe the processes taking place within the framework of the movement. Performances were a key element in the art of beats, whether it was the Theatrical Event of 1952 at Black Mountain College or Jack Kerouac typing in 1951 the novel On the Road on a typewriter in a single session on a single roll of 31 meter long paper.[19] Representatives of the movement were united by hostility to traditional culture with its conformism and brightly degenerate commercial component. They also did not like the approach of traditional culture to hushing up the dark side of American life - violence, corruption, social inequality, racism. They tried through art to create a new way of life based on the ideals of rebellion and freedom.[19] Critics highlight the artist Wallace Berman as the main representative of the movement. In his work concentrated many of the characteristic features of hipsters, especially in his collages made on photocopied photographs, which are a mixture of elements of pop art and mysticism. Among other artists and works, one can single out the work The Rose by the artist Jay DeFeo, the work on which was carried out for seven years, a huge painting-assembly weighing about a ton with a width of up to 20 centimeters.[21] Beatniks in media Poster for The Beatniks (1960) A scene from Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood (1959) in which a character recites poetry in a beatnik coffeehouse. Jules Feiffer's ad art for the Beat musical The Nervous Set was used on the 1959 cast album (reissued in 2002). Possibly the first film portrayal of the Beat society was in the 1950 noir film D.O.A, directed by Rudolph Maté.[citation needed] In the film the main character goes to a loud San Francisco bar, where one woman shouts to the musicians: "Cool! Cool! Really cool!" One of the characters says, "Man, am I really hip", and another replies, "You're from nowhere, nowhere!" Lone dancers are seen moving to the beat. Some are dressed with accessories and have hairstyles that one would expect to see in much later films. Typical 1940s attire is mixed with beatnik clothing styles, particularly in one male who has a beatnik hat, long hair, and a mustache and goatee, but is still wearing a dress suit. The bartender refers to a patron as "Jive Crazy" and talks of the music driving its followers crazy. He then tells one man to "Calm down Jack!" and the man replies, "Oh don't bother me, man. I'm being enlightened!". The scene also demonstrates the connection to and influence of 1940s genres of African American music such as Bebop on the emergence of Beat culture. The featured band "Jive" is all-black, while the customers who express their appreciation for the music in a jargon that would come to characterize the stereotype of Beat culture are young white hipsters. The 1953 Dalton Trumbo film Roman Holiday starring Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck features a supporting character played by Eddie Albert that is a stereotypical beatnik, appearing five years before the term was coined.[22] He has an Eastern European surname, Radovich, and is a promiscuous photographer who wears baggy clothes, a striped T-shirt and a beard, which is mentioned four times in the screenplay.[23] The 1954 film White Christmas features a beatnik-themed dance number titled "Choreography". Stanley Donen brought the theme to the film musical in Funny Face (1957) with one Audrey Hepburn production number revamped into a Gap commercial in 2006. One of Jerry Yulsman's photographs of Kerouac was altered for use in a Gap print ad, in which Joyce Johnson was omitted from the image. Another film involving beatnik culture is Roger Corman's 1959 black comedy A Bucket of Blood, written by Charles B. Griffith. In the film, a coffee house busboy longs for acceptance by the beatnik patrons, so he develops a style of sculpture using dead animals and people. An influential character in the film is the beatnik poet, who convinces the group to accept the busboy as a significant artist. The character Maynard G. Krebs, played on TV by Bob Denver in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–63), solidified the stereotype of the indolent non-conformist beatnik, which contrasted with the aggressively rebellious Beat-related images presented by popular film actors of the early and mid-1950s, notably Marlon Brando and James Dean. High School Confidential (1958) features a beatnik girl played by Phillipa Fallon who recites a nihilistic beat poem, High School Drag. The Beat Generation (1959) made an association of the movement with crime and violence, as did The Beatniks (1960). An episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, titled A Night with the Boys, broadcast 10 May 1959, features Hitchcock's introducing and closing the episode dressed as a beatnik, and using beat slang. The 1960 Jerry Lewis film Visit to a Small Planet, based on a satirical Gore Vidal play, features Lewis as an alien who entrances beatniks at a nightclub ("We don't use floors...we use fog") and who appears to understand a scat song as being in an intelligible language. A beatnik named Nick appears in the 1961 Dick Tracy cartoon. He never speaks, but he assists Heap O'Calorie by giving "word on the street" in the form of coded messages on his bongos. The Looney Tunes cartoon character Cool Cat often is portrayed as a beatnik as is the banty rooster in the 1963 Foghorn Leghorn short Banty Raids. Similarly, the Beany and Cecil cartoon series also had a beatnik character, Go Man Van Gogh (aka "The Wildman"), who often lives in the jungle and paints various pictures and backgrounds to fool his enemies, first appearing in the episode, "The Wildman of Wildsville". Hanna Barbera's series Top Cat features Spook, a beatnik cat, and its series Scooby-Doo features a beatnik character Shaggy. Two beatniks (played by Ric Ocasek of The Cars and Pia Zadora) painted furiously and played bongos in John Waters' 1988 Hairspray. An episode of The Addams Family, titled :The Addams Family Meets a Beatnik:, broadcast 1 January 1965, features a young biker/beatnik who injures himself in an accident, and ends up staying with the Addams Family. Beat coffeehouses are depicted in The Flower Drum Song (1961), Take Her, She's Mine (1964), American Pop (1981), Absolute Beginners (1986), So I Married an Axe Murderer (1993), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), An Extremely Goofy Movie (2000) and episode six, "Babylon", of Mad Men (2007). Two Beatnik-related films were riffed on the cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000: 1960's The Beatniks and 1959's The Rebel Set.[24][25] Carolyn Jones in A Hole in the Head (1959) played a beatnik character. Harry Connick Jr. portrays Dean, a beatnik, in Brad Bird's film The Iron Giant (1999).[26] An episode of The Detectives, titled "Tobey's Place" broadcast 29 September 1961, features Adam West's character, Sgt. Steve Nelson, fraternising with beatniks at a waterfront hang-out, where he also reads aloud his own poetry. For this, he receives admonishments and mockery from his colleagues on the police force. In the Season 9 episode of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic titled "Sweet and Smokey", Spike's dragon bully Garble is revealed to be a Beatnik poet. In the Season 8 episode of The Simpsons titled "Hurricane Neddy", Ned Flanders' parents are depicted as beatniks. In the HBO Family series Crashbox, the character Sketch is depicted as a beatnik. Beatnik books Alan Bisbort's survey Beatniks: A Guide to an American Subculture was published by Greenwood Press in 2009 as part of the series Greenwood Press Guides to Subcultures and Countercultures. The book includes a timeline, a glossary and biographical sketches. Others in the Greenwood series: Punks, Hippies, Goths and Flappers.[27] Tales of Beatnik Glory: Volumes I and II by Ed Sanders is, as its name suggests, a collection of short stories, and a definitive introduction to the beatnik scene as lived by its participants.[28] The author, who went on to found The Fugs, lived in the beatnik epicenter of Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Among the humor books, Beat, Beat, Beat was a 1959 Signet paperback of cartoons by Phi Beta Kappa Princeton graduate William F. Brown, who looked down on the movement from his position in the TV department of the Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn advertising agency.[29] Suzuki Beane (1961), by Sandra Scoppettone with Louise Fitzhugh illustrations, was a Bleecker Street beatnik spoof of Kay Thompson's Eloise series (1956–1959). In the 1960s comic book, the Justice League of America's sidekick Snapper Carr was portrayed as a stereotypical beatnik, down to his lingo and clothes. The DC Comics character Jonny Double is portrayed as a beatnik. Museums In San Francisco, Jerry and Estelle Cimino operate their Beat Museum, which began in 2003 in Monterey, California and moved to San Francisco in 2006.[30] Ed "Big Daddy" Roth used fiberglass to build his Beatnik Bandit in 1960. Today, this car is in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada.[31] See also Beat Generation Beatitude (magazine) Cool Hippie Moody Street Irregulars Silent Generation Subcultures of the 1950s Yves Saint Laurent (designer) A subculture is a group of people within a cultural society that differentiates itself from the conservative and standard values to which it belongs, often maintaining some of its founding principles. Subcultures develop their own norms and values regarding cultural, political, and sexual matters. Subcultures are part of society while keeping their specific characteristics intact. Examples of subcultures include BDSM, hippies, hipsters (which include 1940s original parent subculture and nipster), goths, steampunks, bikers, punks, skinheads, gopnik, hip-hoppers, metalheads, cosplayers, otaku, otherkin, furries, and more. The concept of subcultures was developed in sociology and cultural studies.[1] Subcultures differ from countercultures. Definitions The Oxford English Dictionary defines subculture, in regards to sociological and cultural anthropology, as "an identifiable subgroup within a society or group of people, esp. one characterized by beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger group; the distinctive ideas, practices, or way of life of such a subgroup."[2] As early as 1950, David Riesman distinguished between a majority, "which passively accepted commercially provided styles and meanings, and a 'subculture' which actively sought a minority style ... and interpreted it in accordance with subversive values".[3] In his 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige argued that a subculture is a subversion to normalcy. He wrote that subcultures can be perceived as negative due to their nature of criticism to the dominant societal standard. Hebdige argued that subculture brings together like-minded individuals who feel neglected by societal standards and allow them to develop a sense of identity.[4] In 1995, Sarah Thornton, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, described "subcultural capital" as the cultural knowledge and commodities acquired by members of a subculture, raising their status and helping differentiate themselves from members of other groups.[5] In 2007, Ken Gelder proposed to distinguish subcultures from countercultures based on the level of immersion in society.[6] Gelder further proposed six key ways in which subcultures can be identified through their: often negative relations to work (as 'idle', 'parasitic', at play or at leisure, etc.); negative or ambivalent relation to class (since subcultures are not 'class-conscious' and do not conform to traditional class definitions); association with territory (the 'street', the 'hood', the club, etc.), rather than property; movement out of the home and into non-domestic forms of belonging (i.e. social groups other than the family); stylistic ties to excess and exaggeration (with some exceptions); refusal of the banalities of ordinary life and massification.[6] Sociologists Gary Alan Fine and Sherryl Kleinman argued that their 1979 research showed that a subculture is a group that serves to motivate a potential member to adopt the artifacts, behaviors, norms, and values characteristic of the group.[7] History of studies The evolution of subcultural studies has three main steps:[8] Subcultures and deviance The earliest sociological studies on subcultures came from the so-called Chicago School, who interpreted them as forms of deviance and delinquency. Starting with what they called Social Disorganization Theory, they claimed that subcultures emerged on one hand because of some population sectors’ lack of socialization with the mainstream culture and, on the other, because of their adoption of alternative axiological and normative models. As Robert E. Park, Ernest Burgess, and Louis Wirth suggested, by means of selection and segregation processes, there thus appear in society "natural areas" or "moral regions" where deviant models concentrate and are re-inforced; they do not accept objectives or means of action offered by the mainstream culture, proposing different ones in their place—thereby becoming, depending on circumstances, innovators, rebels, or retreatists (Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin). Subcultures, however, are not only the result of alternative action strategies but also of labelling processes on the basis of which, as Howard S. Becker explains, society defines them as outsiders. As Cohen clarifies, every subculture's style, consisting of image, demeanour and language becomes its recognition trait. And an individual's progressive adoption of a subcultural model will furnish him/her with growing status within this context but it will often, in tandem, deprive him/her of status in the broader social context outside where a different model prevails.[9] Cohen used the term 'Corner Boys' which were unable to compete with their better secured and prepared peers. These lower-class youths didn't have equal access to resources, resulting in the status of frustration, marginalization, and search for a solution.[10] Subcultures and resistance A goth couple attending the Whitby Goth Weekend festival, dressed in typical Gothic Victorian and Elizabethan styles In the work of John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts of the Birmingham CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies), subcultures are interpreted as forms of resistance. Society is seen as being divided into two fundamental classes, the working class and the middle class, each with its own class culture, and middle-class culture being dominant. Particularly in the working class, subcultures grow out of the presence of specific interests and affiliations around which cultural models spring up, in conflict with both their parents' culture and mainstream culture. Facing a weakening of class identity, subcultures are then new forms of collective identification, expressing what Cohen defined "symbolic resistance" against the mainstream culture and developing imaginary solutions for structural problems. As Paul Willis and Dick Hebdige underline, identity and resistance in subcultures are expressed through the development of a distinctive style which, by a re-signification and "bricolage" operation, use cultural goods and services as standardized products to buy and consume, in order to communicate and express one's own conflict. Yet the culture industry is often capable of re-absorbing the components of such a style and once again transforming them into consumer goods for the mass society. At the same time the mass media, while they participate in building subcultures by broadcasting their images, also weaken subcultures by depriving them of their subversive content or by spreading a socially stigmatized image of them and their members.[11] Subcultures and distinction The most recent interpretations see subcultures as forms of distinction. In an attempt to overcome the idea of subcultures as forms of deviance or resistance, they describe subcultures as collectivities which, on a cultural level, are sufficiently homogeneous internally and heterogeneous with respect to the outside world to be capable of developing, as Paul Hodkinson points out, consistent distinctiveness, identity, commitment and autonomy. Defined by Sarah Thornton as taste cultures, subcultures are endowed with elastic, porous borders, and are inserted into relationships of interaction and mingling, rather than independence and conflict, with the cultural industry and mass media, as Steve Redhead and David Muggleton emphasize. The very idea of a unique, internally homogeneous, dominant culture is explicitly criticized. Thus forms of individual involvement in subcultures are fluid and gradual, differentiated according to each actor's investment, outside clear dichotomies. The ideas of different levels of subcultural capital (Sarah Thornton) possessed by each individual, of the supermarket of style (Ted Polhemus) and of style surfing (Martina Böse) replace that of the subculture's insiders and outsiders – with the perspective of subcultures supplying resources for the construction of new identities going beyond strong, lasting identifications. Identifying Members of the seminal punk rock band Ramones wearing early punk fashion items such as Converse sneakers, black leather jackets, and blue jeans The study of subcultures often consists of the study of symbolism attached to clothing, music, hairstyles, jewellery, and other visible affectations by members of subcultures, and also of the ways in which these same symbols are interpreted by members of the dominant culture. Dick Hebdige writes that members of a subculture often signal their membership through a distinctive and symbolic use of style, which includes fashions, mannerisms, and argot.[12] Trekkies are a subculture of Star Trek fans. Subcultures can exist at all levels of organizations, highlighting the fact that there are multiple cultures or value combinations usually evident in any one organization that can complement but also compete with the overall organisational culture.[13] In some instances, subcultures have been legislated against, and their activities regulated or curtailed.[14] British youth subcultures had been described as a moral problem that ought to be handled by the guardians of the dominant culture within the post-war consensus.[14] Relationships with mainstream culture Potato chip packages featuring hip hop subcultural designs in a case of mainstream commercial cultural merging It may be difficult to identify certain subcultures because their style (particularly clothing and music) may be adopted by mass culture for commercial purposes. Businesses often seek to capitalize on the subversive allure of subcultures in search of Cool, which remains valuable in the selling of any product.[15] This process of cultural appropriation may often result in the death or evolution of the subculture, as its members adopt new styles that appear alien to mainstream society.[16] Music-based subcultures are particularly vulnerable to this process; what may be considered subcultures at one stage in their histories – such as jazz, goth, punk, hip hop, and rave cultures – may represent mainstream taste within a short period.[17] Some subcultures reject or modify the importance of style, stressing membership through the adoption of an ideology which may be much more resistant to commercial exploitation.[18] The punk subculture's distinctive (and initially shocking) style of clothing was adopted by mass-market fashion companies once the subculture became a media interest. Dick Hebdige argues that the punk subculture shares the same "radical aesthetic practices" as the Dadaist and Surrealist art movements: Like Duchamp's 'ready mades' - manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items - a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion ... Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip ... fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.[19] Urban tribes "Urban tribe" redirects here. For the American musician, see Urban Tribe. In 1985, French sociologist Michel Maffesoli coined the term urban tribe or neotribalism. It gained widespread use after the publication of his The Time of the Tribes (1988).[20] In 1996, this book was published in English.[21] According to Maffesoli, urban tribes are microgroups of people who share common interests in urban areas. The members of these relatively small groups tend to have similar worldviews, dress styles and behavioral patterns.[22] Their social interactions are largely informal and emotionally laden, different from late capitalism's corporate-bourgeoisie cultures, based on dispassionate logic. Maffesoli claims that punks are a typical example of an "urban tribe".[23] In the context of consumer culture, the notion of consumer tribes indicate ephemeral groups of individuals that often share a common interest and a share a subculture,[24] they often fluctuate around a common hobby or interest but lack permanent social bonds to become a brand community.[25] Sexual and gender identity-based subcultures Main article: Sexuality and gender identity-based cultures Further information: Sexual fetishism and Sexual roleplay The Stonewall Inn in the gay village of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, is adorned with rainbow pride flags.[26][27][28] The sexual revolution of the 1960s led to a countercultural rejection of the established sexual and gender norms in the Western world, particularly in the urban areas of Europe, North and South America, Australia, and white South Africa. A more permissive social environment in these areas led to a proliferation of sexual subcultures—cultural expressions of non-normative sexuality. As with other subcultures, sexual subcultures adopted certain styles of fashion and gestures to distinguish themselves from mainstream Western culture.[29] Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people express themselves through the LGBT culture, considered the largest sexual subculture of the 20th and 21st centuries. With the ever-increasing acceptance of homosexuality in the early 21st century, including its expressions in fashion, music, and design, the gay culture can no longer be considered a subculture in many parts of the world, although some aspects of gay culture like leathermen, bears, and chubs are considered subcultures within the gay movement itself.[29] The butch and femme identities or roles among some lesbians also engender their own subculture with stereotypical attire, for instance drag kings.[29] A late 1980s development, the queer movement can be considered a subculture broadly encompassing those that reject normativity in sexual behavior, and who celebrate visibility and activism. The wider movement coincided with growing academic interests in queer studies and queer theory. Aspects of sexual subcultures can vary along other cultural lines. For instance, in the United States, down-low is a slang term specifically used within the African-American community[30] to refer to Black men who usually identify as heterosexual but actively seek sexual encounters and relations with other men, practice gay cruising, and frequently adopt a specific hip-hop attire during these activities.[29][31] They avoid sharing this information even if they have female sexual partner(s), they are married to a woman, or they are single.[32][33][34][35] Social media Further information: Internet culture In a 2011 study, Brady Robards and Andy Bennett said that online identity expression has been interpreted as exhibiting subcultural qualities. However, they argue it is more in line with neotribalism than with what is often classified as subculture. Social networking websites are quickly becoming the most used form of communication and means to distribute information and news. They offer a way for people with similar backgrounds, lifestyles, professions or hobbies to connect. According to a co-founder and executive creative strategist for RE-UP, as technology becomes a "life force," subcultures become the main bone of contention for brands as networks rise through cultural mash-ups and phenomenons.[36] Where social media is concerned, there seems to be a growing interest among media producers to use subcultures for branding. This is seen most actively on social network sites with user-generated content, such as YouTube. Subcultures can be and have been successfully targeted by firms commercially. A stream of academic research in consumer culture shows the multiple ways in which companies and firms target subcultures with commercial offerings.[37][38] Discrimination Further information: Hate crime and Hate group Discrimination-based harassment and violence are sometimes directed towards a person or group based on their culture or subculture.[39][40][41][42] In 2013, the Greater Manchester Police in the United Kingdom began to classify attacks on subcultures such as goths, emos, punks, and metalheads as hate crimes, in the same way they record abuse against people because of their religion, race, disability, sexual orientation or transgender identity.[42] The decision followed the murder of Sophie Lancaster and beating of her boyfriend in 2007, who were attacked because they were goths.[41] In 2012, human rights activists have denounced the occurrence of emo killings in Iraq, which consisted of between at least 6 and up to 70 teenage boys who were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, due to being targeted because they dressed in a "Westernized" emo style.[39][40] See also icon Society portal Alternative lifestyle Art world Brandalism Culture Cultural identity Culture jamming Far-right subcultures Folk culture Heterosociality High culture History of Western subcultures in the 20th century Intercultural competence List of subcultures Low culture Neotribalism Popular culture Subcultural theory Underclass Underground culture Urban culture Urban sociology Youth subculture Gregory Corso was a key member of the Beat movement, a group of convention-breaking writers who were credited with sparking much of the social and political change that transformed the United States in the 1960s. Corso's spontaneous, insightful, and inspirational verse once prompted fellow Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to describe him as an "awakener of youth." Although Corso enjoyed his greatest level of popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, he continued to influence contemporary readers and critics late into the twentieth century. Writing in the American Book Review, Dennis Barone remarked that Corso's 1989 volume of new and selected poems was a sign that "despite doubt, uncertainty, the American way, death all around, Gregory Corso will continue, and I am glad he will." Born in 1930 to teenaged parents who separated a year after his birth, Corso spent his early childhood in foster homes and orphanages. At the age of eleven, he went to live with his natural father, who had remarried. A troubled youth, Corso repeatedly ran away and was eventually sent to a boys' home. One year later he was caught selling a stolen radio and was forced to testify in court against the dealer who purchased the illegal merchandise. While he was held as a material witness in the trial, the twelve-year-old boy spent several months in prison where, as he wrote in a biographical sketch for The New American Poetry, the other prisoners "abused me terribly, and I was indeed like an angel then because when they stole my food and beat me up and threw pee in my cell, I . . . would come out and tell them my beautiful dream about a floating girl who landed before a deep pit and just stared." He later spent three months under observation at Bellevue Hospital. When Corso was sixteen, he returned to jail to serve a three-year sentence for theft. There he read widely in the classics, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Chatterton, and Christopher Marlowe. 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, the Beat poet with whom he was most closely associated. The pair met in a Greenwich Village bar in 1950 while Corso was working on his first poems. Until then he had read only traditional poetry, and Ginsberg introduced him to contemporary, experimental work. Within a few years Corso was writing in long, Whitmanesque lines similar to those Ginsberg had developed in his own work. The surreal word combinations that began to appear in Ginsberg's work about the same time may in turn suggest Corso's reciprocal influence. In 1954 Corso moved to Boston where several important poets, including Edward Marshall and John Wieners, were experimenting with the poetics of voice. The center for Corso's life there was not "the School of Boston," as these poets were called, but the Harvard University library, where he spent his days reading the great works of poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate in 1954, and his play In This Hung-up Age—concerning a group of Americans who, after their bus breaks down midway across the continent, are trampled by buffalo—was performed by students at the university the following year. Harvard and Radcliffe students underwrote the expenses of Corso's first book, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, and Other Poems. The poems featured in the volume are usually considered apprentice works heavily indebted to Corso's reading. They are, however, unique in their innovative use of jazz rhythms—most notably in "Requiem for 'Bird' Parker, Musician," which many call the strongest poem in the book—cadences of spoken English, and hipster jargon. Corso once explained his use of rhythm and meter in an interview with Gavin Selerie for Riverside Interviews: "My music is built in—it's already natural. I don't play with the meter." In other words, Corso believes the meter must arise naturally from the poet's voice; it is never consciously chosen. In a review of The Vestal Lady on Brattle for Poetry, Reuel Denney asked whether "a small group jargon" such as bop language would "sound interesting" to those who were not part of that culture. Corso, he concluded, "cannot balance the richness of the bebop group jargon . . . with the clarity he needs to make his work meaningful to a wider-than-clique audience." Ironically, within a few years, that "small group jargon" became a national idiom. Despite Corso's reliance on traditional forms and archaic diction, he remained a street-wise poet, described by Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation as "an urchin Shelley." Gaiser suggested that Corso adopted "the mask of the sophisticated child whose every display of mad spontaneity and bizarre perception is consciously and effectively designed"—as if he is in some way deceiving his audience. But the poems at their best are controlled by an authentic, distinctive, and enormously effective voice that can range from sentimental affection and pathos to exuberance and dadaist irreverence toward almost anything except poetry itself. When Corso moved to San Francisco in 1956 he was too late to participate in the famous reading at the Six Gallery, at which Ginsberg read "Howl" and which, since it was widely noted in newspapers and popular magazines, is conventionally cited as the first major public event in the rise of the Beat movement. However, Corso was soon identified as one of the major figures of the movement and that notoriety undoubtedly contributed much to the fame of his poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. With Ginsberg, he also coauthored "The Literary Revolution in America," an article in which they declared that America now had poets who "have taken it upon themselves, with angelic clarions in hand, to announce their discontent, their demands, their hope, their final wondrous unimaginable dream." From 1957 to 1958 Corso lived in Paris where, he once told Michael Andre in an Unmuzzled Ox interview, "things burst and opened, and I said, 'I will just let the lines go. . . .'" The poems that resulted from this effort were published in Gasoline, his first major book. Gasoline also contains poems written while Corso was traveling with Ginsberg in Mexico, and Ginsberg's influence is evident in much of the work. Here Whitman's long poetic line is adopted by Corso, much as it had been adopted by Ginsberg, and the diction is occasionally reminiscent of Ginsberg as well. "Ode to Coit Tower," for example, echoes "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," on which Ginsberg was then working, and "Sun" utilizes structural devices and incantatory effects used in "Howl." However influential Ginsberg may have been, Corso always maintained his own distinctive voice. In an essay collected in The Beats: Essays in Criticism, Geoffrey Thurley summarized some of the principal characteristics that differentiated Corso from Ginsberg: "Where Ginsberg is all expression and voice, Corso is calm and quick, whimsical often, witty rather than humourous, semantically swift rather than prophetically incantatory." The influence of bop is far more evident in Gasoline than in The Vestal Lady on Brattle. In his introduction, Ginsberg quotes Corso as saying that his poems were written the way Charlie Parker and Miles Davis played music. He would start with standard diction and rhythm but then be "intentionally distracted diversed sic into my own sound." The result is an intricate linguistic pattern involving extremely subtle modulations of sound and rhythm. "For Corso," Neeli Cherkovski wrote in Whitman's Wild Children: Profiles of Ten Contemporary American Poets, "poetry is at its best when it can create a totally unexpected expression," and many of these linguistic fusions suggest the pleasure in invention for its own sake. Corso shaped his poems from 1970 to 1974 into a book he planned to call Who Am I—Who I Am, but the manuscript was stolen, and there were no other copies. Aside from chapbooks and a few miscellaneous publications, he did not issue other work until 1981 when Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit appeared. Shorter than any of his major books since Gasoline, it contains several critically acclaimed poems, many of them written in clipped, almost prosaic lines more reminiscent of William Carlos Williams than of Whitman. "Return" deals with barren times in which there had been no poems but also asserts that the poet can now write again and that "the past is my future." The new poems, however, are generally more subdued than the earlier ones, though there are surreal flights, as in "The Whole Mess . . . Almost," in which the poet cleans his apartment of Truth, God, Beauty, Death, and essentially everything but Humor. By the early 1980s, when Corso's Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit was published, language-centered writing, in which the conventions of language themselves become the subjects of poems, had long since surpassed the poetics of voice as the center of attention for many younger poets working outside academic traditions. Thus Corso's book was not widely reviewed, even though it contains some of the poet's best work. If the voice that shaped these poems was quieter than it had been a generation before, it nonetheless continued to affirm Kenneth Rexroth's characterization of Corso as "a real wildman." "At his worst," Rexroth added, "he is an amusing literary curiosity; at his best, his poems are metaphysical hotfoots and poetic cannon crackers." In 1991 Corso published Mindfield: New and Selected Poems. The book consists of selections from five previously published books and close to sixty pages of previously unpublished poems, including one almost thirty pages long. Barone declared that the volume "provides for new readers the opportunity to be awakened and for those familiar with Corso's work a chance to be reawakened." Although Corso greatly reduced his output in the years leading up to his death in 2001, he continued to believe in the power of poetry to bring about change. He once explained his Utopian vision to Contemporary Authors: "I feel that in the future many many poets will blossom forth—the poetic spirit will spread and reach toward all; it will show itself not in words—the written poem—but rather in man's being and in the deeds he enacts. . . . A handful of poets in every country in the world can and have always been able to live in the world as well as in their own world; . . . and when such humankind becomes manifold, when all are embraced by the poetic spirit, by a world of poets, not by the written word but by deed and thought and beauty, then society will have no recourse but to become suitable for them and for itself. I feel man is headed in such a direction; he is fated and due to become aware of and knowledgeable about his time; his good intelligence and compassion will enable him to cope with almost all the bothersome, distracting difficulties that may arise—and when he becomes so, 'poet' will not be his name, but it will be his victory." Time, cosmic and terrestrial, was one of Gregory Corso’s great subjects. He saw the decades as distinct parcels, the centuries as larger ones, and millennia more so. Throughout the 1990s he had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the millennium, exploring in his poems themes of Armageddon and apocalypse, ecological cataclysm, Revelations, and the promise of a New Age. But as the momentous date approached, personal tragedies mounted: the death of his closest friend and literary champion, Allen Ginsberg, in the spring of 1997, followed four months later by the death of William Burroughs, his second-oldest friend and the person he considered most incorruptible in life. Then came news of liver, heart, and lung disease, and finally inoperable prostate cancer. He managed to see the new millennium, but only just. He left his beloved Greenwich Village for the care of his daughter’s home in Minnesota in 2000, and died there shortly thereafter, on January 17, 2001. Corso had struggled with his final manuscript, The Golden Dot, for the last twenty years of his life. It went through countless visions and revisions, both textual and conceptual. He knew it would be his poetical last will and testament. It had to be precisely on the mark, a summation of the many literary and philosophical themes that preoccupied him in life. Even more daunting than the personal hardships (which were nothing new to him), he had changed his fundamental approach to the poem, casting off an elaborate stylistic toolkit that no longer served his purpose. The rudiments of the poem were what mattered now, a direct and elemental relationship with the Muse. Frustratingly, throughout the 1990s, the project continually collapsed under its own weight . . . until. Following Ginsberg’s funeral at New York’s Shambhala Meditation Center, Corso returned to his small apartment at 26 Horatio Street in the West Village and composed “Elegium Catullus/Corso, for Allen Ginsberg.” It is modeled on a funeral ode by the Latin poet Catullus, as he sits next to and addresses the “unspeaking ashes” (alloquerer cinerem) of his brother. Corso lightens Catullus’s famous final line, Ave atque vale (Hail and farewell), with the salutation he and Ginsberg always used on each other, “Tootel loo”—a bit of ’50s camp silliness. With this short and simple poem, the floodgates opened. Over the next three and a half years Corso rewrote the entire manuscript of The Golden Dot, two hundred-plus pages, beginning that evening with this simple elegy. Gregory Corso, “Elegium Catullus/Corso, for Allen Ginsberg,” 1997, holograph manuscript from The Golden Dot. Courtesy Downtown Collection at the Fales Library at New York University The Golden Dot is framed by Ginsberg’s death on one end and Corso’s own death on the other. It is, among other things, the story of a lifelong friendship between two of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Corso is now alone, left to argue with his mentor and rival, pleading his case and making amends. His insecurities lead him to question the very reasons Allen befriended him in 1950 in a Greenwich Village bar in the first place: Was it just his good looks and street smarts? But he comes to trust and accept Allen’s estimation of his work, so succinctly stated on the dedication page of Planet News (1968), some of the only serious recognition he ever got for his poetry in his lifetime: “Dedicated to the Pure Imaginary poet Gregory Corso,” and once again in Ginsberg’s Selected Poems 1947–1995: “To Gregorio Nunzio Corso, Wisdom Maestro, American Genius of Antique and Modern Idiom, Father Poet of Concision.” Allen always told anyone who would listen that Gregory was the greater poet, and often lamented the lack of serious critical evaluations of Corso’s work. Corso did not like to overpublish, and by the 1960s one book per decade became his general rule, usually at the turn of the decade, with each book expressing something of what he felt to be the zeitgeist of the moment: The Happy Birthday of Death in 1960; Elegiac Feelings American in 1970; Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit in 1981. Another rule was that the books should be brief: these were 92, 120, and 66 pages respectively. But by the time 1990 arrived, Corso chose not to publish. He turned fifty that year, and while his reasons for not publishing were never clearly stated, profound changes were taking place in his life and work since “Hitting the Big 5-0,” as he called it in a poem marking the occasion. Corso’s relationship to poetry had been a trajectory from intensely private to famously public, sometimes reading to audiences of a thousand or more. He complained to me often, “I began writing poetry alone, after midnight, just me and the poem, by candlelight. The next thing I know I’m onstage reading to hundreds of people. It messed me up.” This led Corso to favor humorous poems, crowd pleasers with punchlines. He’d come to see himself as a performer, a clown, even, in his own words. He had been on the reading circuit for twenty-five years, often touring with Ginsberg—they were public poets in a way that is almost unimaginable today, and they both took that role very seriously. But Corso’s brash persona and drunken antics at readings masked a painful shyness, and he longed to escape that grind. As he so memorably put it in a poem of the time, “I feel like an old mangy bull crashing through the red rag of an alcoholic day.” He’d come to see this public face of poetry as a routine, a job, an act. And while he may have had many shortcomings, being dishonest with himself was not one. Slowly, he withdrew. These had been hard years. The drinking itself was no longer sustainable, and that necessitated an increasing withdrawal from society. More profoundly, the half-century mark awoke in him the need to confront the many traumas that haunted his adult life: abandonment by his mother shortly after his birth due to domestic abuse by his father; six cruel Catholic foster homes; frequent prison time, starting in the Tombs at the age of thirteen. The orphanages and prisons had always been part of his personal mythology, but until this point the painful details had never been publicly examined or revealed. And once that door was opened in his writing, it could not be closed. Gregory Corso and Patti Smith at Allen Ginsberg’s loft, April 5, 1997, with a painting by Corso in the background. Photo: Greg Masters Corso was a native New Yorker, born on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Streets. It annoyed him when people talked about the Beats hanging out in Greenwich Village: “I wasn’t hanging out. I was born there.” Gangsters frequented the cafés and restaurants, and the culture of organized crime was hard to resist. From individual acts of petty theft, Corso eventually became the ringleader of his own larceny gang, whom he organized with walkie-talkies. At the age of seventeen he was sentenced to three years in upstate New York’s brutal Clinton Correctional Facility, known as Dannemora. Ever the prodigy, he often noted that he was the youngest inmate to enter that prison and the youngest to leave. There’s a remarkable film of Corso on a return visit to Dannemora Prison (as he always called it) two years before his death, speaking with prisoners about writing poetry. He recounts the advice an old inmate gave him the day he arrived: “Don’t serve time, make time serve you.” The prison library held few books but they were choice: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the Bible, the Encyclopedia Britannica (eleventh edition), Bulfinch’s Mythology, and a 1925 anthology titled Ideas and Forms in English and American Literature, edited by Homer Watt and James Munn. I recently ordered a copy of the latter for a few dollars on the Internet, after finding Corso’s reference to the book in the manuscript of The Golden Dot. It’s a fascinating selection and explains a great deal about his penchants for early epics such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and for the ballads of the British Isles, such as “The Twa Sisters” and “Sir Patrick Spens.” Running through all of Corso’s work is a healthy mistrust of literacy and the written word, which he considered latecomers to his profession. The stories and beliefs handed down from ancient times were his true guides, and he always said his favorite author was Anonymous. He loved Sanskrit and Akkadian epics, chronicles of dynastic Egypt, the myths of ancient Greece. His sense of history was synchronous: ideas, events, and subjects rhymed and interconnected inside his head like the gears of a clock. I first encountered Gregory Corso in April 1973 at a Jack Kerouac symposium at Salem State College in Massachusetts, where he was a featured guest along with Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky. After a certain amount of debate by the school administrators, the honors English class at Lowell High School was allowed to attend. I was still a junior, but since I was the only student who was actually reading Kerouac, I was allowed to accompany them. The Beats were controversial, but several of the teachers and headmasters at Lowell High had known Kerouac, many had gone to school with him, and personally he was very much liked. The excursion was the idea of our English instructor, Miss Rita Sullivan, a proper elder New Englander—a quality that did not exclude open-mindedness. Alas, the weekend proved a shocking revelation as it quickly dawned on everyone that the poet on the page and the poet in person were two very different things. There was drinking, smoking, cursing, and arguments, and Corso seemed very nearly the devil in the flesh. Were such a thing to take place today, poor Miss Sullivan would be fired and would never get another job as an educator as long as she lived—such is today’s reward for introducing an impressionable youth to the cult of Orpheus. Gregory Corso, “You cannot replicate the soul . . . ,” c. 2000, holograph manuscript from The Golden Dot. Courtesy Downtown Collection at the Fales Library at New York University That weekend, in velvet suit and silver flask of cognac, Corso was on the attack against everyone: Ginsberg, the academics, and Kerouac himself, or at least the myth of Kerouac. (The famed witches of Salem seemed to be the only people he had any respect for.) But then something remarkable happened: the event concluded with an evening poetry reading, and I saw Corso take all of the hostility he had created and suddenly polarize it. (Later I would see performers like Nina Simone and Miles Davis do the same thing.) After ninety minutes of poetry and chanting by Ginsberg and Orlovsky, Corso took center stage and read what I still consider to be his greatest poem, “Elegiac Feelings American (for the Dear Memory of John L. Kerouac).” Suddenly a hushed silence fell on the auditorium as Corso cast his spell; the poem was profound, eloquent, and ravishingly beautiful. At the end of the reading, many in the audience (including Kerouac family members) were weeping, as was Corso himself. There was no question who the heavy was on that stage. From that point on I was determined to know him, which wasn’t easy because he was hard to find and when you did he was usually unfriendly. Four years later I found myself living in the same neighborhood as him in North Beach, San Francisco. We occasionally spoke. One day he asked if I had a record player, which I did. The next morning he was yelling up from the alley, holding a record in his hand. No album cover, that was lost, just the actual piece of vinyl: a Bartók violin sonata played by Yehudi Menuhin. He came upstairs, we put it on the stereo, and he swooned silently. It was a great lesson in how to listen. He returned for dinner that evening, a gathering of half a dozen poets. In the course of the evening he overturned the table not once but twice: he had a talent for taking it out there, and then some. One of my favorite things about hanging out with Gregory over the years was watching how he dealt with fans. He had a lot of them, and since he always looked like Gregory Corso, they often approached him on the street. Depending on his mood he might be gracious, but was more often flatly dismissive or downright confrontational, accusing them of pandering and vicariousness—they were the source of his pain. “Mister Corso, I just want to say how much your work has meant to me down through the years,” someone would say in a heartfelt manner. “Do I bother you with my problems?” he would reply curtly. Other times he was more practical: “Oh that’s great, gimme $5.” I can’t count the number of people who came up to him to say that his poem “Marriage” was read at their wedding—a true epithalamium for our times if there ever was one. (The poem is heavily anthologized; Gregory once told me he estimated he’d made over $100,000 from “Marriage”—“Not bad for one poem.”) Especially surprising to me was the number of people who quoted back to him the line “Standing on a street corner doing nothing is power.” Written in 1953, that line somehow represented the quintessentially Beat challenge to authority. And as Gregory often said, one great line is worth an entire book of poems. Gregory Corso, Self-Portrait, c. 1990, Collection of Zachary Wollard Gregory Corso, Portrait of W. S. Burroughs (Nude of a Good-Hearted Sage), c. 1993, Collection of Raymond Foye Whether Gregory was home alone, playing pool in a bar, or sitting in a café, there was never a time when he wasn’t with the poem, turning a line or image over in his head, speaking it aloud to test the sound and cadence, or questioning the inner logic. I never knew anyone who asked himself so many big questions so relentlessly. At any given time, a scholarly issue was on the table, and he was familiar with them all. In a barroom one afternoon he suddenly slammed the table with his fist and shouted, “It was all because of that damn swan!”—and I knew he was back onto the Trojan War. For Corso, the great subjects of ancient times were not past, but alive in the contemporary painting or poem. In 1997, his sixty-seventh year, as he labored over his final book, startling news arrived. A documentary filmmaker had discovered his eighty-year-old mother. She had not returned to Italy immediately after his birth, as he had been told, but had merely fled across the river to Trenton, New Jersey, where she raised another family. Their reunion was captured on film, and a few days later they made their first excursion, to an Atlantic City gambling casino—which seemed to establish matrilineal proof beyond doubt. But joking aside, though initially joyous, the reunion only reexposed painful feelings of abandonment. Corso told me a few years later that he wished the filmmaker had left well enough alone. “I lived sixty-seven years without a mother—how can all that be made up for now?” he said. Meanwhile, his father was dying. Although Corso had hated and feared the man all his life, he made the effort to visit him, only to find that Alzheimer’s disease had turned his father into a gentle and kindhearted soul. They had a poignant reunion, but the encounter ended on a painfully embarrassing note: as he left, his father called him Dominic. Life now seemed a daily succession of bewildering events. These and other remarkable events are recorded in The Golden Dot. One positive development in these years was the emergence of a patron, Hiro Yamagata, a successful visual artist from Japan. His monthly stipend allowed Corso to move out of the apartment of Roger and Irvyne Richards, proprietors of the Rare Book Room on Greenwich Avenue, who had taken him in several years earlier after they learned he’d slept on the subway the night before. When an apartment came vacant next door, Corso had his own living space for the first time in many years. There’s no doubt this helped with the work. Those of us who visited him will recall the floor covered in typed poems, often stained with wine, coffee, blood, and god knows what else. The space also allowed him to begin making art again, which brought in a little money. He was a skilled draftsman with a charming style and a deep knowledge of art history. I regularly commissioned works during this period, requesting portraits of Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Burroughs, and Bob Kaufman. I also commissioned a hand-colored edition of The Geometric Poem, his paean to ancient Egypt, first printed by Ettore Sottsass in Milan in 1966. He had his visitors and admirers and a calm domesticity prevailed. The one vexation was his addiction. A heroin user since the 1950s, now alternating with methadone, he told me it had been almost twenty years since he’d actually gotten high from the drug—it was simply a matter of maintenance. Veins had collapsed and he was losing use of both arms. Infections led to visits to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital. He recounts these events in several poems, always referring to heroin as “the dirty nurse.” Gregory Corso, page from The Geometric Poem (designed and published by Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano at East 128 in Milan, 1966), from a unique hand-colored copy, 1993, Collection of Raymond Foye Corso often spent years revising a poem, and in many respects a poem for him was never finished. Friends who had put him up for days or weeks would later find the books of his in their libraries extensively amended. Poetry readings, especially in later years, often consisted of glosses on the poems; he always seemed to be having a running argument with himself or the poem (they were the same thing). But as the end drew near he seems to have realized these endless revisions would not do, and suddenly we have the rarest of articles in his oeuvre: poems written all at once, in a single stream of thought and inspiration, from start to finish. This is indicated to the reader by the date of composition, and sometimes even the exact time (always in the middle of the night). He called these “diary poems” and he was extremely unsure about them. To me they are the capstones of his career, the works that most show off his extraordinary powers as a poet. To read such poems is to fully enter his mind and to witness the very act of creation. In these last poems he has gone back to the candle, at midnight, writing to himself and the solitary reader. The level of intimacy is exquisite and the effect is ethereal. Another unusual characteristic of The Golden Dot is how very few poems have titles—perhaps only half a dozen out of almost two hundred. I don’t know why this is, except clearly they were superfluous. One is left with the sense that these are not literary “products” or “objects” but instead a kind of unnameable issuance or outflow. It also facilitates Corso’s wish, stated on page 1 of the manuscript, that this work be seen as a “shuffle poem,” a random, nonhierarchical configuration, or, if one were more occult-minded, a method of divination like the shuffling of the tarot or the throwing of the I Ching. Such a book as this may exist somewhere, but I know of none like it. Herbert Huncke, Gregory Corso, and Francesco Clemente listening to John Wieners read, Small Press Book Fair, Mechanics Library, New York, 1990. Photo: Allen Ginsberg, by permission of the Allen Ginsberg Literary Trust Of the many dragons to slay in these last poems, the most pernicious was hubris. “I hate old poet men,” Corso wrote at the outset of his career. Like Pete Townshend’s “Hope I die before I get old,” it was a line he would live to live down. Corso now sees his arrogance (and he was very arrogant) as an obstacle to faith, and to true knowledge. His stance that poetry is the province of the young has had to be exorcised, for he is now an old man and poetry is all he has left. He is emphatic that poetry is for every age. The Golden Dot is a radical coming to terms with old age and failing powers, and Corso’s economy and dispatch are stunning: he knows exactly what to use and what to discard. Dream and myth take over—the places where his Orphic self was most alive. The reader may ask why, if this book was completed twenty years ago, is it only being published now? After the poet’s death the apartment was cleared out and the manuscript was gathered into a paper shopping bag. In his will, Corso left the rights to the book to his friends Roger and Irvyne Richards, for their faithful support in his final years. Roger Richards, a legendary figure in New York’s rare-book world, died on his seventieth birthday, December 18, 2002. In less than two years, Irvyne had lost her two closest companions in life, and she gradually became a recluse. I called numerous times, hoping to obtain a copy of the manuscript, but she always demurred, saying she wanted to edit the book herself—which I knew would never happen. Irvyne was a chain smoker and for years I lived in fear the apartment would burn down and the manuscript with it. Eventually she stopped taking my calls. The original work remained in her possession, a talisman to a life that no longer existed, and she guarded it against the outside world. When I learned of her death, in September 2020, I called her stepdaughter Hillary and soon the manuscript was in hand. Although some pages had been copied and circulated among Corso’s friends over the years, those were clearly fragments. While not without its share of editorial complications, what we came to possess was a carefully shaped final manuscript, with the author’s intentions plainly evident. After close work with George Scrivani—the poet’s lifelong friend, editor, and translator—the book will soon be published by New Directions, the decisive and concluding chapter of a profound career. The life of Gregory Corso reads like a cheap and trashy tragic made-for-TV movie. It was one of heartbreak and irony… Corso was born Nunzio Corso on March 26th 1930, to a sixteen-year-old mother. Michelina Corso had just married Sam Corso before giving birth to Nunzio, and a year later she abandoned him into the care of Catholic charities, his father quickly remarrying and feeding him stories about his mother. Corso selected the name ‘Gregory’ as his confirmation name, and while known to his Italian American community as Nunzio, he dealt with everyone else as ‘Gregory.’ He spent eleven years in five different fosters homes, coming to appreciate the Catholic church’s efforts in helping orphaned and abandoned children through the depression, despite his own depressing isolation. To avoid being drafted for WWII, Corso’s largely absent and uncaring father brought his son home in 1941. Nevertheless, Sam Corso was drafted and Gregory Corso became homeless, now without any family, foster or otherwise. He tried fruitlessly to find his mother over the years, despite the stories his father told him: that she was a disgraced prostitute, cared little for Corso, and had returned to Italy in shame. Alone, Corso took to the streets, sleeping in the subway and on the roofs, running errands for food from street vendors. He became a street child of Little Italy, continuing his education while denying his homelessness to the authorities. When only thirteen years old, Corso stole a toaster, sold it, and used the money to buy a tie and see a movie. The movie was The Song of Bernadette, about the appearance of the Virgin Mary. Corso claimed he thought seeing the movie would bring about a miracle wherein he would be reunited with his mother. But upon leaving the theatre, he was arrested for theft and sent to New York’s infamous prison, the Tombs. With no one to pay his $50 bail, Corso was incarcerated with criminally insane murderers for several months. In 1944, during a blizzard, Corso broke into his tutor’s office and spent the night in the relative warmth. When he woke he was immediately arrested and sent back to the Tombs. He became so traumatised by the brutality of the other inmates that he was sent to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward. (He was not the only Beat writer locked up in a mental hospital.) At seventeen, Corso was sent to Clinton prison, a maximum security facility near the Canadian border, for stealing a suit, and without being given legal representation to defend himself. This was the prison where most electric chair death sentences were carried out. Clinton was kinder to Corso than the Tombs had been. Here, the youngest inmate in the facility was protected by the Mafia and sent to the cell occupied by Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, who had donated his library to the prison and had his own reading light by his bed. Corso spent his nights reading the classics, and upon leaving Clinton, his Mafia friends got him a job in the city. After three years, ending 1950, Corso was back in New York City, writing and reading poetry, and becoming friends with Allen Ginsberg. They met in a lesbian bar, The Pony Stable, and Ginsberg became attracted to Corso and his poetry. Corso showed Ginsberg a poem he’d written about a woman he’d watched lie naked on her windowsill, and it turned out she was a friend of Ginsberg. Ginsberg set the two up, but Corso got scared and literally ran away. Through Ginsberg Corso met Burroughs, Kerouac, and many of New York’s writers and artists. Corso and Kerouac met in 1950, but didn’t become close friends until 1953. In The Subterraneans, Kerouac recalls an incident in which Corso stole a pushcart and caused a fallout between Kerouac and Ginsberg. Corso came to resent his depiction in the book as he believed Kerouac had no right to speak so harshly of him in the early days of their relationship, which had not yet come to be considered even friendship. When Ginsberg, Orlovsky and Burroughs were in Tangiers, Corso came and visited them, and then persuaded them to come live in Paris, and introduced them to a place later to be known as the Beat Hotel. Here, Corso and Ginsberg helped Burroughs edit together The Naked Lunch, and the two poets produced some of the finest work. the beat hotel, paris The Beat Hotel. Photo by David S. Wills. In 1957, Corso returned to New York. He was the youngest member of the ‘inner circle’ of Beats – that small social group that is the only one that can be accurately and honestly considered the Beat Generation. Yet, despite being the youngster of the group, Corso was the first published Beat, having his collection of poetry, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, published in 1952. It was for the publication of Gasoline that he returned, and this coincided with the publication of On the Road and the explosion of the Beat Generation as a cultural phenomenon. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Corso stuck around, posed for photos, answered questions for reporters, and took a constant and ignorant barrage of abuse. Corso played the bad boy of the group, talking up his prison time and unkempt appearance. He began to tour the poetry circuit with Ginsberg, and despite the Beat movement for the most part being considered a fad for dumb kids, playing on the rebellious streak of a few over-popular criminals, Corso began to draw a lot of positive attention for his poetry. Namely, the attention came for Marriage, his long musing on the peculiarities of the institution. Marriage evokes the music and rhythm within Corso, instead of adhering to the structures and conventions of traditional poetry. His idol was Shelley, English Romanticist, yet in Paris Corso hit upon the notion of simply letting sound come from the mean – what he naturally felt inclined to say. The result was a long and witty poem poking fun at conformity, digging the Beat spirit of rejecting tradition that gripped the group and would become satirised itself in years to come. Later in his life, Corso, like so many associated with the Beat Generation, came to resent his label and public perception as a Beatnik, and shunned the limelight they’d all at one stage or another occupied. However, he allowed Gustave Reininger to film Corso – The Last Beat, which showed Corso in Italy lamenting never having known his mother. Reininger secretly launched a search for Michellina Corso, and amazingly found her living in Trenton, New Jersey, and not in Italy, as Corso had always been told by his father. Corso and his mother were reunited on camera, and the truth came out that she had been beaten almost to death by Sam Corso, and had no choice but to leave him and hand her child over to the church. When she’d later been in a position to support a child, she was unable to find Corso. Despite feeling ‘healed’ by finding his mother, Corso was soon diagnosed with prostate cancer and died in January, 2001. He was buried next to Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.
  • Topic: Historical
  • Author: GREGORY CORSO
  • Language: English

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