In one of the two brief forewords to Mindfield Allen Ginsberg calls Corso an “awakener of youth.” Corso, along with Brautigan and some kindred souls, was the awakener to the word, to the muse in my life. I worked as a landscaper (I cut the grass) in a cemetery. I would recite lines from Corso's most anthologized poem, “Marriage”: “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 … take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone / and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky.” My brother actually did marry someone I introduced him to in the cemetery! During my first year in college I wrote a long poem with long lines in Ginsberg Corso Kerouac Ferlinghetti style attacking the college. Despondent over the injustices of which I wrote, I hitchhiked up to Dartmouth College, where I heard Ferlinghetti read in the chapel.

I have not read Corso in the intervening years. Perhaps I stopped reading him because of one of the charges brought against the Beats: spontaneity and its excess. In the essay “Art,” Emerson said that “art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.” As “awakener of youth” Corso has thrown down the walls a bit and made new artists, and I find in rereading much of his work, reading some of it for the first time, that he has done this precisely because of the spontaneity of the work. Just the other day I read that a young San Francisco poet weary of the extensive theorizing of his near-elders turned to the Beats for poetic inspiration and insight.

Mindfield, then, provides for new readers the opportunity to be awakened and for those familiar with Corso's work a chance to be reawakened. Thunder's Mouth Press presents ample selections from five previously published books and nearly sixty pages of previously unpublished poems, including an almost thirty-page poem written last year. The book also has brief forewords by Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and drawings by Corso.

The selections from the first two books, The Vestal Lady on Brattle (1955) and Gasoline (1958), show a poet exploring form, technique, and voice. The voice that readers most associate with Corso emerges in Gasoline, but not yet as the primary sound for all the work. These early poems try various modes such as dream poem, automatic poem, requiem for four voices. They use a wide range of poetic devices—this is just the first forty-three pages: rhyme, repetition, list, allusion, rhetorical (metaphysical) question, neologism, analogy, alliteration, hyperbole, and different dictions. Through these different dictions it seems as if Corso arrived at his own: a self-consciously elevated one that declares and declaims, that at times mocks itself, as in “In the Fleeting Hand of Time”:

I climb and enter a fiery gathering
          of knights
they unaware of my presence lay
          forth sheepskin plans
and with mailcoated fingers trace
          my arrival
back back back when on the black
          steps of Nero lyre Rome I stood
in my arms the wailing philosopher
the final call of mad history
Now my presence is known
my arrival marked by illuminated
          stains
The great windows of Paradise open

This is the style readers think of as true Corso.

The assumed dictions in some early poems are not merely imitative of past poets, though. They are appropriate, not appropriated. For example, a poem entitled “Puma in Chapultepec Zoo” has lines that ring with the tune of Blake's “The Tyger.” A poem about art and war sounds like another poem of similar theme, Pound's “Canto XLV.” Corso: “not the shades of wolves recruit their hoard like brides of / wheat on all horizons” (“Uccello”). Pound: “seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines / no picture is made to endure nor to live with. …” A poem called “But I Do Not Need Kindness” beats out its lines Prufrock-like: “I have watched them, at night, dark and sad, / pasting posters of mercy / on the stark posts of despair.” Poems such as “Sea Chanty,” “The Wreck of the Nordling,” and “Don't Shoot the Warthog” have the epigrammatic style of Stephen Crane. The latter poem ends: “I screamed the name! and they came / and gnawed the child's bones. / I screamed the name: Beauty / Beauty Beauty Beauty.” These voices are always appropriate to the poem's subject.

The selections from Gasoline also establish the concerns that continue in Corso's writing up to the present. For example, the limits of knowledge: how people can be in the midst of something and not know it precisely because they are in it: “in the driver's seat, a young child / —doomed by his sombrero” (“Mexican Impressions”). Being outside has allowed Corso to see the unnaturalness of the taken-for-granted. In poems of other countries or in poems about America, he remains on the outside. This results in both the poet's loneliness and an urgent desire to assert the self. So on the one hand Corso writes, “what if I'm 60 years old and not married, / all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear / and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!” (“Marriage”—these lines echo in an early eighties poem, “Feelings on Getting Older”), and on the other: “I wanted to drop fire-engines from my mouth!” (“This Was My Meal”). This dual vision from a stance of alienation and bravado has allowed Corso, in “Italian Extravaganza,” to depict the hyperbole of the real:

Mrs. Lombardi's month-old son
          is dead.
I saw it in Rizzo's funeral parlor,
A small purplish wrinkled head.
They've just finished having high
          mass for it;
They're coming out now
… wow, such a small coffin!
And ten black cadillacs to haul it in.

Changing “son” (person) to “it” (object) in the second line and juxtaposing the “small coffins” to the multiple large cars is another example of the insanity of what gets accepted as the rational, natural order of things. It is especially interesting that Corso demonstrates this in poems about Mexico and an Italian neighborhood in the U.S. Often in postwar art the ethnic represents some special nostalgic claim to the ethical. But here, and this is distressing, Corso shows the robot arm of dehumanization reaching beyond suburbia.

In these poems there are moments of transcendence of the banality that results from this dehumanization. In a poem “For Miles,” Corso names this transcendence “some wondrous yet unimaginable score. Sometimes Corso presents the quotidian and then some wondrous thing outside the ordinary, as in “Last Night I Drove a Car”:

Last night I drove a car
          not knowing how to drive
          not owning a car
I drove and knocked down
          people I loved
          … went 120 through one town.
I stopped at Hedgeville
          and slept in the back seat
          … excited about my new life.

The poems that follow in Mindfield either try to wake people up (rather than knock them down) or consider ultimate questions about death and the purpose of life. Most of these poems are in that voice that we most likely hear when we think of Corso. The selections from The Happy Birthday of Death (1960) include many of the poet's most anthologized poems, including “Notes after Blacking Out,” “Hair,” “Bomb,” and “Marriage.” (In his most recent poem Corso tells us, “so far I've earned 30,000 / from 1958 to 1988 / for my MARRIAGE poem / and to think I wanted to call it / EPITHALAMIUM.”) These poems want something even when there may be nothing, desire to continue even when over, desire to be present even when absent. “Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway” ends: “We ended by melting away, / hating the air!” These poems fight against an intellectual existentialist nihilism as well as bourgeois complacency: “The threat of Nothingness renews. … Deny, I deny the tastes and habits of the age” (“1959”).

Of the one-word-title poems “Marriage” and “Bomb” remain my favorites. “Bomb” does not appear in Mindfield as a foldout that accentuates its bomb-like, mushroom cloud typographic shape. Nonetheless, in this time of possible disarmament (or destruction) the poem remains both comic and powerful. Like the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, who in 2001 shows an ape's weapon of bone transform into a space station, Corso, too, believes that “Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you.” In other words, the bomb is within. It's not so much a change in technology that we need (disarmament) but a change in our system of belief (end the thought of war). When Corso writes “ye BANG ye BONG ye BING / the tail the fin the wing” the comedy is tragicomic. For the childlike playwords “bang bong bing” he pairs with an antiquated—perhaps from the time of Lockean rationality—“ye,” and the destruction reaches all of the land (“tail”), the sea (“fin”), and the air (“wing”).

The shortest selection of poems comes from Long Live Man (1962). These may be the weakest poems in a very strong collection. Though “Man” ably discusses the contradictions and uncertainties of being alive, and “Some Greek Writings” has wit and humor in an off-the-cuff tone, sometimes too many lines sound flat and flatly matter of fact: “Oh what responsibility / I put on thee Gregory / Death and God / Hard hard it's hard” or “I remember my 31st year when I cried: / ‘To think that I may have to go another 31 years!’ / I don't feel that way this birthday.”

Poems selected from Elegiac Feelings American (1970) include the title poem, a long elegy for Jack Kerouac, “Spontaneous Requiem for the American Indian,” and “The American Way.” These longer poems written from Europe looking back at the U.S. have flat, straightforward lines like those quoted above, but here they seem to make more sense, a very sad sense. In “The American Way”—and the title might read “The American Hegemony”—Corso says that neither Franklin nor Jefferson speaks for present-day America. Instead, “Bizarre! Frightening! The Mickey Mouse sits on the throne / and Hollywood has a vast supply.” Furthermore, he says all are caught, swept up in the hegemonic way:

The Beats are good example of this
They forsake the Way's habits
          and acquire for themselves their
                    own habits
and they become as distinct and
          regimented and lost
                    as the main flow
                    because the Way has many
                                        outlets
          like a snake of many tentacles

Corso says that “something great and new and wonderful must happen / to free man from this beast.” It is sad that it hasn't yet occurred. Instead, prime time ideology has flourished—even through baby's first Sony. Corso calls for justice and action in the world, not the pieties of formal religion nor the material things of this world. Though the elegy for Kerouac has him as the precursor of “the children of flowers,” the dawn of a new age, the America that Corso and Kerouac wanted is still “an America to be.”

The poems in the selection from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981) turn more personal and less public than earlier ones. “Columbia U Poesy Reading—1975,” “Sunrise,” “Sunset,” “I Met This Guy Who Died,” “Earliest Memory,” “Wisdom,” “Proximity,” “When a Boy …”—there are many fine poems here, and, as some of the titles may indicate, the poems are still about ultimate questions and death but now from the perspective of having traveled much further along life's course. Let me quote one short poem in full, one of several about the origins of the poet and the poem:

When a boy
I monitored the stairs
altar'd the mass
flew the birds of New York City
And in summer camp
I kissed the moon
                                        in a barrel of rain

“When a Boy …”

This poet who says, “I long ago announced myself poet / long before the poem,” is still poet, is still poem making. His writing did not end with those pre-1960 anthologized poems. Nor will it stop with the present new and selected poems. The autobiographical, life-overview long poem, “Field Report,” that concludes this volume ends with the word “STOP,” all caps, but I think that that is “stop for now,” because at the bottom of the page appears the date “1989–90.” Yet the book was published in 1989. I take that as a sign that despite doubt, uncertainty, the American way, death all around, Gregory Corso will continue, and I am glad he will.