Allen Ginsberg & Gregory Corso

 

The last time I saw Gregory Corso was in a liquor store at the corner of Columbus & Union in San Francisco. He and the clerk behind the counter were engaged in a furious tug of war over a credit card, which the clerk was attempting to wrest from Corso’s hands in order to cut it up. “I am Norman!” thundered Corso, to no avail. The clerk got the card & snipped it in twain to Corso’s howls. I exited quietly so as not to have to venture the words, “Hello, Gregory.”

Little events like that have a lot to do with why there isn’t more reasoned discourse about Corso’s poetry. Or like the time when, having been told at Naropa that he should teach what he knew, Corso offered a workshop on stealing valium. Just as Jack Spicer’s reputation seems to have benefited greatly from a generation of readers who didn’t have to wade through a problematic personality to get to the work, it may take another decade or so before people start to emerge who can sort through Corso’s work dispassionately, presumably to his benefit.

Kirby Olson has written “I wish Ron would reply to the Matt Merlino question regarding why Beats are in the post-avant group.”

It’s because the question itself struck me as preposterous. Remember, these categories are not, repeat NOT, like identifying which position on an imaginary baseball team your poet should play (In my league, Corso would be the bullpen coach, or maybe a bench coach in the mold of The Gerbil). The School of Quietude is an actual literary movement, self-selecting & ongoing now in the U.S. for at least 160 years. One of its primary features is that it doesn’t believe that it is a movement – it thinks it’s the unmarked case. Like white males who imagine they have no ethnicity, no gender. Like heterosexuals who think only gays have sexual orientation. Like any majoritarian speaker in a culture who imagines that he, or she, has no accent.

When the Beats suddenly emerged in the mid-1950s (they’d been studiously ignored previously, save for the appearance of Ginsberg as the author of a letter incorporated into William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Kerouac’s critically acclaimed, but mostly unread, first novel), the School of Quietude consisted primarily of a core group of Boston Brahmins around Robert Lowell at Harvard, with a second – and far less institutionally powerful – pole that centered around Auden & was only starting to emerge as a conscious counter-balance to the Brahmins in Iowa City. The Brahmins at that moment were still the darlings of the New Critics (most of whom were poets associated with the agrarians of the 1930s, it should be noted). And the New Critics were profoundly anti-romantic. They thought the romantics were too over-the-top to focus on the well-wrought urn, literally. Their focus was more the sonneteers of the 17^th century.

The howls of protest when the Beats arrived were loud & unmistakable – even at ten years old & still several years from really getting into poetry, I could hear the rumbles of thunder as it spilled over into Life and Time & onto the pages of the daily paper. They were unlettered, unwashed, not interested in academic (or any other, it was implied) careers. They sneared at the squares & the straights. They took their inspiration from Walt Whitman, himself a disgraceful etc. etc. This echoed in part some of the same dismissal that Pound & Stein & Joyce had received in the previous decades, from earlier SoQ types like Robert Silliman Hillyer, the sonnet hack who won the 1934 Pulitzer. The loudest and most famous protest, of course, was Norman Podhoretz’ ”The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Podhoretz & the other protestors, confident in the lasting value of their institutions, predicted that the Beats & their kind would soon disappear from view. Podhoretz was wrong about that, and his subsequent role as one of the founding fathers of neoconservativism isn’t much to be proud of, either. But at least he knew where he stood.

When Anchor Books published A Controversy of Poets, jointly edited by Paris Leary (for the SoQ) & Robert Kelly (for the New Americans), Corso was clearly on the team that today would be characterized as post-avant. In fact, it should be remembered that the two editors agreed on only one poet for their volume – and that this one poet refused to participate – Robert Duncan.

It is true that the SoQ has generally been characterized by an anglophilia that can seem a tad pathological, but historically it hasn’t been just any Brit whose writing they happened to like. People like Basil Bunting, David Jones & Shelley tended not to show up on their list. Today, Tom Raworth, J.H. Prynne, Allen Fisher, Tom Pickard, Lee Harwood, and the late Douglas Oliver tend not to appear on SoQ reading lists.¹ Instead it’s Geoffrey Hill, Andrew Motion (whose nickname, were he ever to be drafted by a fantasy baseball team, would have to be “Slow”), Simon Armitage, Glyn Maxwell & any of several Irish conservatives. The distinction is a phenomenon that extends beyond U.S. shores. Its class & political implications may be clearer in the United Kingdom than here, tho Podhoretz’ role amid the neocons seems perfectly consistent with the emergence of a rag like The New Criterion.

Characterizing the Beats as SoQ because they represented a return to romanticism in American letters, and because some used traditional forms on occasion, is like calling Chomsky a Republican because he teaches at a science school. It makes me want to twitch with its ahistoricity.

I’m going to let Corso have the last word, with his poem “I am 25”:

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton       Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
            has gone from ear to ear:
            I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying: – I did those then
              but that was then
              than was then –
O I would quiet old men
say to them: – I am your friend
                 what you once were, thru me
                 you’ll be again –
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
                 and steal their poems.

 

¹ Which is why Thom Gunn’s championing of Briggflats as the finest poem ever written is so noteworthy. Gunn may have been a Brit who trained in the New Critical stronghold of Stanford, but he integrated himself mostly into the lifestyle of San Francisco’s gay community, and continued teaching at Berkeley even after Louis Simpson’s well-publicized resignation from that school on the grounds that the local scene’s fascination with all things New American made it impossible for an SoQ poet to continue.