Nicola D'Ugo
had seventy Gregory Corso, the most pro-European poet of the Beat Generation, the movement that the Fifties had opened the way for the youth protest in America. He died in January at the hospital of North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where in September he had moved to the home of his daughter Sheri Langerman, a nurse, for prostate cancer.
self-taught poet (read Dostoyevsky, Russian, French and English Stendhal Percy Shelley in prison), his language is still considered as the dream of the Beat Generation, even the most naive and naive . In order to bring poetry to a colloquial language, street, typical of New York poets of the fifties and sixties, was able to tell directly, as a chronicle extemporaneous speech, events, and the health of Americans. First of all, avoiding the rhetoric of mass of youth claims that, to the extent that they wanted to be revolutionary, ended up being dictated by the schematic again, habits and formal constraints that were in contradiction with the idea of \u200b\u200ba free man as Corso aspired. With his irony has written a provocative anti-Beat, to the extent that, in time, be Beat meant to be fashionable.
Even within the Beat Generation was always included. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Keroack pointed him out as the best poet of America, while another great writer of the Beat movement, the publisher of City Lights Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a publication denied him, believing fascist including only years after he had been wrong, which course did not like the proclamations and the ideologies canonized by a group.
The most famous poem of course, "Bomb" (Bomba, 1958), was the object of misunderstanding. Written in the form of a nuclear mushroom, is an elegy satirical, full of humor and rhythm. After witnessing the demonstration of a nuclear test in England and zealous pacifist against the bomb, if the New York poet grappling with the violent expression of pacifism itself, forming a "love letter" to the atomic bomb against generating human stupidity violence course for the bomb was a product of history, a mentality that was involving all the wrong end, militarists and pacifists alike, who saw being challenged on grounds of violence, which induced expression in the individual and socially shared both sides. The famous film by Stanley Kubrick Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb came eight years later, and took a much less ambiguous language of poetry by Gregory Corso. Moreover, this so ironic to write an elegy against destructive human race had already been used at the end of ten years from the greatest poet of the war and the pity: Wilfred Owen ( Poems of War, Einaudi, Torino 1985). So, in "The American Way" (The American Way), the arrows of Italian-American poet against the 'American dream take the bend of a colloquial speech, in which points out, in line with Walt Whitman, of evil' America the Americans themselves and not their rulers, who are unaware (and managers) of American contradictions. The poetry of course, you can see the parallels with the famous poem "America" \u200b\u200bby Allen Ginsberg, is part of the historical process, not only in their own time and in the current political scenario.
daring writer on language, certainly unusual, sometimes bizarre (like the sea when he says that what you eat is the adoptive mother and not a fish), but also and especially from a reading of life made before the books, the streets, Gregory Corso was born March 26, 1930 in Greenwich Village, the bohemian quarter of New York, where they would be passed, in addition to Keroack and Ginsberg, legendary figures like Dylan Thomas and Henry Miller and, when he became rich, Bob Dylan. Far from being the birthplace of poetry: the two parents were bohemian, but two teenagers of Italian origin of seventeen and sixteen, who left six months after the birth of the poet, and his mother returned to Italy. Since then the child's life was an impressive series of admissions in orphanages, foster care and running away from home of his father, who had taken with him at the age of 11 years. Twelve ends up in reform school, serving three to seventeen years in prison for stealing a radio. That's where he learned the difficulties of prisoners and their humanity, and began writing poems. Released from prison, he met in a Greenwich Village bar frequented by lesbians as Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who introduced him to avant-garde writing, and soon to fame among New York writers. But it is not an easy life. Thirty years moving from one job to another, he embarks for South America and South Africa, and finally lands in Europe. Introduction alla raccolta più celebre di Corso, Gasoline (Benzina), Allen Ginsberg segnala al lettore che Corso è forse il più grande poeta americano, ma di fatto fa la fame in Europa.
Erano anni in cui la Beat Generation subiva attacchi non solo dai circoli letterari tradizionali, ma dalle corti di giustizia, e in cui era facile essere additati come comunisti. Durante gli anni del terrore macarthista in America, Corso preferì abbandonare l’insegnamento della poesia di Shelley all’università piuttosto di sottoscrivere la dichiarazione di non essere un comunista. Più che al comunismo, l’attenzione di Corso era rivolta all’affrancamento dalle regole, attraverso classical culture and Buddhism, not to mention Christianity. According to Ann Douglas, professor of American studies at Columbia University, the poem "Marriage" (marriage) be a source of encouragement for women's empowerment:
"Women looked at Corso and other Beat poets, and wondered "If these same men can be free from gender roles of pre-marriage, working for a corporation and so forth-why not us?" And he followed suit. Corso, who was married three times, ended the essay with: "Ah, yet well I know that if a woman possible as I am possible then marriage be possible. "
unruly, drug addicts and alcoholics in life, even in recent times by ill, had not lost the love of freedom which was known in his youth. The daughter Sheri Langerman said that last September found him in a desperate condition, left to himself in the house, refusing the help of friends:
I dovergli already preparing the funeral, but then it was taken: enough to drink, curse and hold back the poker games.
He had brought with him from New York to Minnesota, where course after an initial "shock cultural, "he began to play with the grandkids and leave the house. And he had lost even the humorous vein:
Once we took him to the casino in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets and flowers, which seemed to Whistler's mother. He took $ 1,200 away from the blackjack table. When the casino employee called him "Lady", he said: "I'll take it as a compliment. It means that I have a beautiful skin."
course has continued to work late last. "Poetry is my paradise," said a boy. The week before he died, he recorded a CD of music and poetry with Marianne Faithfull home of her daughter Sheri. He left five children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Before he died, he expressed the wish that, after the funeral in the church of Our Lady of Pompeii (Our Lady of Pompeii) in Greenwich Village, his ashes were buried in Italy, in Rome's Protestant Cemetery, beside the grave of the English romantic poet Percy Shelley.
Read today's poetry helps us to understand the atmosphere and the reflections of a man who lived and recounted some of the most significant and controversial of the war, in which, alongside the economic boom and the Cold War, were manifested new demands of individual freedom and ideological repression of democracy in the country most famous.
[ you can download and read the original article in the editorial format by clicking -> download PDF]
[posted in: News ... Backlight, No X / 3, March 2001, pp. 20-21. ]
Bibliography:
Bibliography:
- Corso, Gregory , Petrol, Bloomsbury Publishing, Parma 1969. Edited by Gianni Manarini.
- -, Gasoline , City Lights, San Francisco 1958.
- -, Poems, Bloomsbury Publishing, Parma 1976. Edited by Gianni Manarini.
- Owen, Wilfred , Poems of War, Einaudi, Torino 1985. By Sergio Rufino.
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