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Corso Gregory
Gasoline (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)
 List Price: Price: $4.67 You Save: $4.28 (48%) DescriptionGregory Corso was born on March 26, 1930 in New York City. His first book of poetry was published by City Lights Press in 1955.
The Happy Birthday of Death
 List Price: Price: $6.46 You Save: $5.49 (46%) DescriptionGregory 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.
Mindfield: New and Selected Poems
 List Price: Price: $9.32 You Save: $6.63 (42%) DescriptionRepublished with a new cover and a new introduction by David Amram, this publication includes forewords by two legendary Beat writers, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
A Clown in a Grave: The Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso
 List Price: Price: $39.97 You Save: $0.03 (%) DescriptionUsing a number of critical approaches, Michael Skau examines Gregory Corso's complex imagination, his humor, and his poetic techniques in dealing with America, the Beat generation, and death. Skau covers the complete works of Corso, one of the four major Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs) who attempted to provide an alternative to what they saw as the academic forms of literature dominating American writing through the 1940s and 1950s. The Beat option focused on ordinary people, spurning the cultural pretensions of the intelligentsia and using common language as well as the rhythms of actual speech. Corso, abandoned as a child by his mother, subjected to a variety of foster homes, and imprisoned as an adolescent, became an authentic voice of America's neglected streetwise youth. He embodies much of the tension, confusion, and rebellion that emerged in America after World War II and eventually crested in the 1960s. Corso emphasizes social issues, yet risks undermining this significance by using wit, wordplay, and humor. While conceding mortality, he is adamant in refusing to acknowledge death's power. Even as he rebels against conventional literature, he still is enchanted by classicism and romanticism, often borrowing their techniques and idioms. Skau examines these complexities and seeming contradictions throughout Corso's career, showing that Corso finds value in inconsistency and vacillation. For him, as illustrated in the poems "Hair" and "Marriage," contradiction and ambivalence suggest the foundations of freedom of imagination. In spite of Corso's significance as an American poet, Skau's is the first extensive study of his work, including his fiction. Skau also provides the first complete bibliography of Corso's published work in more than thirty years.
Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist
 List Price: Price: $47.06 DescriptionGregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson’s Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist is that it is the first book to place all of Corso’s work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist.
While Corso is a subject of great controversyhis work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comicOlson argues that Corso’s poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early Catholicism. Although many critics have attempted to read his poetry, and some have done so brilliantly, Olsonin his approach and focusis the first to attempt to give a holistic understanding of the oeuvre as essentially one not of entertainment or hilarity but of a deep spiritual and philosophical quest by an important and profound mind.
In nine chapters, Olson addresses Corso from a broad philosophical perspective and shows how Corso takes on particular philosophical issues and contributes to new understandings. Corso’s concerns, like his influence, extend beyond the Beat generation as he speaks about concerns that have troubled thinkers from the beginning of the Western tradition, and his answers offer provocative new openings for thought.
Corso may very well be the most important Catholic poet in the American literary canon, a visionary like Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose work illuminated a generation. Written in a lively and engaging style, Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist seeks to keep Corso’s memory alive and at last delve fully into Corso’s poetry.
The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs & Corso in Paris, 1957-1963
 List Price: Price: $8.45 You Save: $5.55 (40%) DescriptionThe Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was Paris, where the Beats took awestruck audiences with Duchamp and Celine, and where some of their most important work came to fruition--Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "To Aunt Rose"; Corso's The Happy Birthday of Death; and Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Based on firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at an era of spirit, dreams, and genius.
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