77 Facts About Gregory Corso

Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement.

Gregory Corso was the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers.

Gregory Corso identified with not only Gabriel but Hermes, the divine messenger.

Gregory Corso was told that she was a prostitute and was "disgraziata" and forced into Italian exile.

Gregory Corso spent the next 11 years in foster care in at least five different homes.

Gregory Corso went to Catholic parochial schools, was an altar boy and a gifted student.

Gregory Corso continued to attend Catholic school, not telling authorities he was living on the streets.

At age 13, Gregory Corso was asked to deliver a toaster to a neighbor.

Gregory Corso 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.

Gregory Corso claimed he was seeking a miracle, namely to find his mother.

Later, in 1944 during a New York blizzard, a 14-year-old freezing Gregory Corso broke into his tutor's office for warmth, and fell asleep on a desk.

Gregory Corso slept through the blizzard and was arrested for breaking and entering and booked into the Tombs for a second time with adults.

Gregory Corso spent the night in the Tombs and was arraigned the next morning as an 18-year-old with prior offenses.

Gregory Corso always has expressed a curious gratitude for Clinton making him a poet.

Gregory 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 had a ski run right in the middle of "the yards," and Gregory Corso learned to downhill ski and taught the mafiosi.

Gregory Corso entertained his mobster elders as a court jester, quick with ripostes and japes.

Gregory Corso was encouraged to read and study by his Cosa Nostra mentors, who recognized his genius.

Gregory Corso studied the Greek and Roman classics, and voraciously absorbed encyclopedia and dictionary entries.

Gregory Corso credited The Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant's ground-breaking compendium of history and philosophy, for his general education and philosophical sophistication.

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.

Gregory Corso agreed, but Corso, still a virgin, got too nervous as she disrobed, and he ran from the apartment, struggling with his pants.

Gregory 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.

Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, 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 Gregory Corso to develop a theory of poetry roughly consistent with that of the developing principles of the Beat poets.

For Gregory Corso, poetry became a vehicle for change, a way to redirect the course of society by stimulating individual will.

Gregory Corso referred to Shelley often as a "Revolutionary of Spirit", which he considered Ginsberg and himself to be.

In 1954, Gregory Corso moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several important poets, including Edward Marshall and John Wieners, were experimenting with the poetics of voice.

Gregory Corso spent his days there reading the great works of poetry and auditing classes in the Greek and Roman Classics.

Gregory Corso, penniless, lived on a dorm room floor in Elliott house, welcomed by students Peter Sourian, Bobby Sedgwick, and Paul Grand.

Marian Janssen, in her biography of Isabella Gardner, details the relationships that Gregory Corso established with the more traditional literary society at the onset of his career.

Isabella liked the poem and asked Gregory Corso to send her three or four more before she took the poems to the editor, Karl Shapiro.

Ginsberg and Gregory Corso hitchhiked from San Francisco, visiting Henry Miller in Big Sur, and stopped off in Los Angeles.

Gregory Corso stayed with the Jarrells for two months, enjoying the first taste of family life ever.

Gregory Corso was disinvited by the Jarrells and returned to New York.

Burroughs was strung out on heroin and became jealous of Ginsberg's unrequited attraction for Gregory Corso, who left Tangiers for Paris.

Gregory 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.

Gregory Corso's work found a strong reception at New Directions Publishing, founded by James Laughlin, who had heard of Gregory Corso through Harvard connections.

Gregory Corso wrote again to Isabella Gardner while in Paris after he read her book of poems, Birthdays from the Ocean.

Gregory Corso returned to New York in 1958, amazed that he and his compatriots had become famous, or notorious, emerging literary figures.

Ginsberg and Gregory Corso took a bus from New York for the Big Table launch, which again propelled them into the national spotlight.

Gregory Corso published in the avant garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s.

At first, Gregory Corso mimicked "Marriage" and moved to Cleveland to work in Sally's father's florist shop.

Gregory Corso maintained contact with Sally and his daughter sporadically during his lifetime.

Gregory Corso married two other times and had sons and a daughter.

Gregory Corso lived in Rome for many years, and later married in Paris and taught in Greece, all the while traveling widely.

In 1969, Gregory Corso published a volume, Elegiac Feelings American, whose lead poem, dedicated to the recently deceased Jack Kerouac, is regarded by some critics as Gregory Corso's best poem.

Gregory Corso sold us on the Chelsea and sold us on himself.

Gregory Corso was outrageous, always provocative, alternately full of indignation or humor, never censoring his words or behavior.

Gregory Corso once explained the trajectory of creative achievement: 'There is talent, there is genius, then there is the divine.

Gregory Corso had moved there after her relationship with Tate ended.

In one of the most curious events of his life, Gregory Corso blamed her for his lack of writing as his career progressed.

Gregory Corso claimed that Gardner had stolen two suitcases from him while they were both at the Chelsea.

Gregory Corso claimed that the suitcases contained two books of new poetry and all his correspondence between himself and the other Beat poets.

Gregory Corso was the second member of the Beats to be published, despite the fact that he was the youngest member of the group.

Ethan Hawke recited the poem in the 1994 film Reality Bites, and Gregory Corso later thanked Hawke for the resulting royalty check.

Gregory 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.

Gregory Corso makes extensive use of onomatopoeia toward the end of the poem, with all-caps font exclaiming "BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM".

The opening lines of the poem tend to lead the reader to believe that Gregory Corso supported the bomb.

Gregory Corso 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.

Kraemer asserts, "Gregory 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".

Gregory Corso had not been in at the start, which was the alliance of the Columbia intellectuals with the Times Square hipsters.

Gregory Corso was a recent adherent, although his credentials were impressive enough to gain him unrestricted admittance.

In later years, Gregory Corso disliked public appearances and became irritated with his own "Beat" celebrity.

Gregory Corso 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.

Gregory Corso did agree to allow filmmaker Gustave Reininger to make a cinema verite documentary, Corso: The Last Beat, about him.

Gregory Corso had a cameo appearance in The Godfather III where he plays an outraged stockholder trying to speak at a meeting.

Gregory Corso became curious about where in Italy his mother, Michelina Colonna, might be buried.

The father, Sam Gregory Corso, had blocked even Catholic Charities from disclosing the boy's whereabouts.

Gregory Corso worked as a waitress in a sandwich shop in the New Jersey State Office Building in Trenton.

Gregory Corso eventually married the cook, Paul Davita, and started a new family.

Gregory Corso always lost, while Michelina fared better and would stake him with her winnings.

Gregory Corso claimed that he was healed in many ways by meeting his mother and saw his life coming full circle.

Gregory Corso began to work productively on a new, long-delayed volume of poetry, The Golden Dot.

Gregory Corso died of the disease in Minnesota on January 17,2001.

The urn bearing Gregory Corso's ashes arrived with his daughter Sheri Langerman who had assisted him during the last seven months of his life.

The cemetery had been closed to newcomers since the mid-century and Robert Yarra and Hannelore deLellis made it possible for Gregory Corso to be buried there.

Gregory Corso's ashes were deposited at the foot of the grave of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Cimitero Acattolico, and not far from John Keats.