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How else to feel other than I am,
a young man who often thinks Flash
    Gordon soap —

These lines from a long poem, ‘Marriage’, give us perhaps the essential Corso, not so much ‘the Dead End kid who fell in love with beauty’ as a natural idealist coming to terms with a real, if often absurd, world of human objects and behaviour. Thus he uses ‘think’ plainly and rather naïvely as both ‘notice’, ‘remember’ and as ‘imagine’: the images of his poetry acquire that intensity which is perhaps an inheritance from surrealism, of an equal approval of both created and observed phenomena. If ‘Flash Gordon soap’ is a kind of objet trouvé (there is no satire intended) then ‘miles and miles of dead full-bodied horses’ is the poet’s own assemblage (this from one of a series of ‘Mexican Impressions’, the syntactic form, ‘thinks + image’ is the same). In Corso’s best poems these two implications of ‘think’ are inextricably bound together in the method of writing, as in this opening of ‘This was my Meal’:

In the peas I saw upsidedown letters
    of MONK
And beside it, in the Eyes tares of Wine
I saw Olive & Blackhair

or no. V of ‘Mexican Impressions’:

In the Mexican zoo
    they have ordinary
American cows.

In his worst poems he tries to make the images stand self-consciously on their own, mostly with exclamation marks (as in ‘Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway’, a word-duel between two vagrant poets). One feels that it is this rather more evident verbal quality which led his friend Allen Ginsberg to write ‘Corso is a great wordslinger’ in an introduction to the collection Gasoline. There is this difference between them: Ginsberg writes with vocabulary while Corso writes with language. Ginsberg peps himself up into moralizing ecstacy while Corso simply ‘thinks’ his rare delight in things. One might almost say it is a kind of Shelley/Keats contrast: Corso’s superiority is similarly something very much to do with harmony of sensation and language, not to mention wit and a real, if eclectic, absorption in art and ideas.

     To pursue this distinction into a more concrete instance, one might take the two poets’ use of the general ‘beat’ characteristics, vagrancy, sodomy and dope, in their work. Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ is a sort of litany whose extent and vigour nearly belies its supposed attitude; that is to say, the eloquence of certain key-phrases (‘saintly motorcyclists’, for instance, or ‘Everything is holy’) tends to provide opposition to what is overtly a moral attitude, an indictment of the stultification, criminality and decadence of society. The ‘confessions’ of William Burroughs are like this too: there is a muddiness, an ambivalence. Corso, on the other hand, uses these characteristics either autobiographically with a simple acceptance (‘Last Night I Drove a Car’) or self-awareness (‘Hello . . .’) which most beat poets are too hysterical ever to get down to, or he uses it artificially and rhetorically. For instance, in another long poem, ‘Greece’, a characteristic beat persona turns up merely as an image. Here Corso is typically making genuine poetic capital out of a currency largely squandered by other poets of his generation who are too egotistic to objectify their art:

                      a French car
screeching in my ear how real it was!
Behind the wheel Death, a big sloppy
    faggot;
He opened the door I had to get in!

The climax of this poem is Corso’s rejection of Death (‘Stupid subject! Old button! I unsalute you’) in favour of the power and eternity of the human imagination. It is again wholly typical that Corso could make this assertion in a poem which is a rapid and enthusiastic tour of Greece and the islands (think how pedantic an English poet would get). He is not afraid to be boyishly inspired or charmed by a new experience. He ‘thinks’ it all for us vividly:

Is that Poseidon running
flat on the bottom of the sea?
He’s ten times the size of man
and though the waves break like fireworks
his long black beard is neatly flowed.

     In a similar earlier poem, ‘Paranoia in Crete’, Corso had successfully used the persona of Minos in a fantastic monologue (‘. . . my wife! that wood-cow brothel!’). The monologue is not a mode much attempted by the beat poets, but already Corso has it to a witty perfection, whether he becomes Rembrandt (‘Get me the saddest man! . . . Get me gold linen! cold jewels!’) or an old yak, imagining himself about to be made into buttons:

Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my
       uncle,
    he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his —
    I never saw that muffler before.

Perhaps this bizarre humour is Corso’s happiest mood. It is well illustrated by ‘Italian Extravaganza’, his best-known poem (it owes nothing to the sick joke, being not cruel but childlike: wow gives the game away — and the clue to the tone of Corso’s ubiquitous exclamation-mark):

Mrs Lombardi’s month-old son is dead.
I saw it in Rizzo’s funeral parlour,
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.

     This striking directness can be seen in other beat writers, for instance in Peter Orlovsky (whose poem ‘Morris’ in Beatitude Anthology is a notably moving, though naïve, expression of love for a fellow creature, here a bed-wetting mental case) and in this monologue (103rd Chorus of ‘Mexico City Blues’) by Jack Kerouac:

I’d rather be thin than famous
I don’t want to be fat,

And a woman throws me outa bed
Calm me Gordo, & everytime
   I bend
   to pick up
   my suspenders
   from the davenport
   floor I explode
   loud huge grunt-o
   and disgust
   every one
   in the familio

I’d rather be thin than famous
But I’m fat

Paste that in yr. Broadway show.

At first glance the Orlovsky and the Kerouac could hardly seem further apart, the elegy and the satire, but both these poems seem to me expressions of that curious feeling which keeps the poet both near to his subject and detached from it; and above all the attitudes are lively, interested and focused on real life. The poetical area compassed by these poems is exactly where the best beat poetry lives, and is where Corso lives a good deal of the time. Not the misguided notions of Ginsberg (who began a poem in the TLS for November 6, 1959: ‘Poet is Priest’), nor the energetic mediocrity of William Margolis or Philip Lamantia, nor the high-school badness of Bob Kaufman, but the real world of humanity, art, sense and imagination.

     Corso is not averse to the Ginsbergian manner, however: his poems ‘Bomb’ and ‘Power’ evoked an embarrassingly stern and critical response when read by the poet to a small audience of Leftwing intellectuals at Oxford two or three years ago. Indeed, he did almost make politics into so much Flash Gordon soap. But if he is not always a rational poet, he is at least not an ignorant one. He is fascinated by the European cultural tradition (there are several poems inspired by Italian Renaissance painters) though this is not to say that he does not feel such a tradition to be moribund. He is neither apathetic nor anarchistic about such a feeling, but it emerges as a sad assumption. How could he marry and have a child, he asks in ‘Marriage’, when all he could bring to it would be the fragments of civilizations, Roman coin soup, broken Bach records, the Greek alphabet, a roofless Parthenon? These fragments are interesting but ultimately crazy as the phrases he shouts in denial of honeymoon, or leaves in his imagination in a bottle for the milkman: ‘Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust —.’

     It has been said that the beat cult of immediacy leaves no room for moral attitudes, that the drive for pleasure apparently typical of the post-war generation is rigorously anti-conformist. Corso provides some clues as to the real hopes and fears of this generation. Arrived in Rotterdam, in ‘Vision of Rotterdam’, with ‘Two suitcases filled with despair’ he thinks about the war, concluding not unexpectedly perhaps but nevertheless with a sentiment rarer than it might be: ‘Mercy leans against her favourite bombardment/and forgives the bomb.’ The poem ends with a future:

Alone
Eyes on the antique diagram
   I wander down the ruin and see
      amid a madness of coughing bicycles
the scheme of a new Rotterdam hum-
   ming in the vacancy.

This optimism is paralleled, I believe, by a yearning for social normality. The final lines of ‘Marriage’ are all the more signfficant if we take the poem as an allegory of the possibility of conformity not merely of one young poet to one social institution, but of a whole generation to a complete society:

Because 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!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible
as I am possible
then marriage would be possible —
like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
So I wait — bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.