Six humorous plays written between 1952 and 1968 by Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930-2001), two of which have never before been published. This collection includes the following: Untitled Play (1952), Standing on a Streetcorner (1953), Sarpedon (1954), In This Hung-Up Age (1954), JFK (1960), and That Little Black Door on the Left (1968).

Collected Plays

Literature & Fiction

Corso, Gregory

Dramas & Plays

Tough Poets Press

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

Sarpedon: A Play by Gregory Corso

A book of poems by a renowned member of the Beat Generation's inner circle.Long live Man! sings the poet Gregory Corso―despite atom bombs and computers, cold wars that get hot and togetherness that isn’t, too many cars and too little love…and in these poems he celebrates the wonders (and the laughs and griefs) of being a man alive. Whether he is musing on antic glories amid the ruins of the Acropolis or watching a New York child invent games on the city’s sidewalks, Corso is there in it, putting us into it, with the magic of vision, with the senses―awakening images, that transmute reality into something more―insights that let us share his joy and echo his shout of Long live Man!

Long Live Man

Poetry

New Directions

A collection of poems by the renowned Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Gregory Corso's collection of poems contains works of major proportions. The title poem is a tribute to Jack Kerouac, fusing a memorial to the poet's dead friend with a bitter lament for the present state of America. The second major work, "The Geometric Poem," published previously in a limited edition by Fernanda Pivano in Italy, is a complex visionary restatement of themes from ancient Egyptian religion. Reproduced in facsimile from Corso's handwritten sheets, his marginal decorations, drawings and glyphs are included. The balance of the book is drawn from his shorter poems. Corso's reputation as a leading poet and co-founder of the Beat movement is clearly upheld in these poems. His instinct for integrated lyrical statement, his special contribution to Beat poetry, is as strong as ever; his sense of humor and sexuality have not diminished. But he has added a wider-ranging moral urgency and a new depth of humane solicitude that hold even his strangest visions close to the heart of contemporary feeling.

Elegiac Feelings American: Poetry

Gregory Corso has been much publicized as one of the leading literary spokesmen for the 'Beat Generation, ' together with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. It is true that he has been one of the inner circle of the 'Beats' from the first, but many admirers of his poetry feel that it belongs quite as much to other and older traditions in world literature. One of these is the revival of pure poetry whenever an “original”––be it Rimbaud or Whitman––has broken with current verse conventions to give free rein to the magic of language. Another is that ancient pre-occupation of poets––the sense of the immediacy of death. Like Villon or Dylan Thomas, Corso lives close to the mystery of death. It is, perhaps, his central theme, on which variations ranging from the terrible to the comic are sounded. But Corso is seldom macabre. A bursting vitality always carries him back to the sensations of the living, though always it is the reality behind the obvious which has caught his eye. “How I love to probe life,” Corso has written, “That’s what poetry is to me, a wondrous prober… It’s not the metre or measure of a line, a breath; not ‘law’ music; but the assembly of great eye sounds placed into an inspired measured idea.”

The Happy Birthday of Death

Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit

Corso, Herald of Autoc. Spirit. Poetry heralding "the ivory applecart of tyrannical values"

Herald Of The Autochthonic Spirit

Poems by an original member of the beat generation consider aging, parenthood, art, and mortality

Fabulous letters from the vagabond Beat poet to his friendsamong them Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. For all his charm and intelligence poet Gregory Corso lived a vagabond life. He never held down a regular job. He rarely stayed very long under the same roof. He spent long stretchessome as long as four or five yearsabroad. Many of his letters came from EuropeFrance, England, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Greeceas he kept in touch with his circle of friendsamong them his best friend Allen Ginsberg and a steady supporter, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He left (or was left by) a number of girlfriends and he fathered five children along the way. He was apt to raise a bit of a ruckus at poetry readings and other public events. No one could be sure what he might do next except that he would write poetry and get it published and that it would be widely read. When the idea of a book of selected letters was first proposed, Gregory had some reservations about it. Would the book reveal too much of his private life? But then with typical hubris he said the equivalent of "let it all hang out" and "all" does hang out in An Accidental Autobiography. The book is indeed the next thing to an unplanned self-portrait and gives a lively sense of the life Gregory Corso led, marching to his own drummer and leaving in his wake such marvelous books of Beat poetry as The Happy Birthday of Death, Elegiac Feelings American, Long Live Man, and Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Bill Morgan, who is extremely conversant with the Beats, has done an admirable job collecting letters from libraries and various individuals across the country and then selecting and organizing them in a progression that spans Corso's lifetime. In addition to Morgan's introduction and commentary, the book includes a special foreword by poet and rock star Patti Smith as well as a number of photographs.

An Accidental Autobiography: The Selected Letters

Biographies & Memoirs

Morgan, Bill

Arts & Literature

Gasoline &amp; Vestal Lady on Brattle is volume number 8 in the City Lights Pocket Series.
"Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys, take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere. These combinations are imaginary and pure, in accordance with Corso's individual (therefore universal) desire."—Allen Ginsberg
"Gregory is a gambler. He suffers reverses, like every man who takes chances. But his vitality and resilience always shine through, with a light that is more than human: The immortal light of his muse."—William S. Burroughs
" . . . A touch young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the rooftops and sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra, but in words . . . Amazing and Beautiful Gregory Corso, The one and only Gregory the Herald. Read slowly and see."—Jack Kerouac
"[M]ore than fifty years on from when it was first published in 1958, Gasoline (City Lights, 1958) by Beat poet Gregory Corso is a seminal book in the birth of that particular literary generation."—Paul Stubbs, 3AM Magazine

Gasoline (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

City Lights Publishers

Francesco Clemente has, since the 1980s, been a leading artist in the international revival of expressionist figure painting and sculpture. Clemente's subjects--rooted in both the physical and the surreal, spiritual worlds--create a vast body of work that appeals to diverse audiences. Clemente draws upon a pan-historic web of impulses, mediating among the myriad cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, Byzantium, Europe, India and America. Stylistically his work recalls the Italian Renaissance, Indian miniatures, European Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Clemente's widespread cultural interests and nomadic lifestyle--New York is his home but he spends part of each year in Italy, India and the New Mexico desert--have deeply affected his art. This lavishly produced catalogue accompanies the first major survey devoted to the painter.

Clemente

Arts & Photography

MEHTA, GITA

Jain, Jyotindra

Clemente, Francesco

Ricard, René

Houser, Craig

Van Sant, Gus

CREELEY, Robert

Pellizzi, Francesco

Foye, Raymond

Individual Artists

Guggenheim Museum

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