Notes after Blacking Out: Some Remarks on Gregory Corso and The Golden Dot


[NOTE: This piece was originally delivered as a lecture on January 20, 2009 in the University of Cincinnati’s Reed Gallery in conjunction with I Gave Away the Sky, a festival celebrating the life and legacy of Gregory Corso. I am grateful to Gustave Reininger for access to The Golden Dot manuscript and for permission to publish certain pieces of it in conjunction with this talk. The poems from that manuscript which accompany the lecture text are reprinted from Forklift, Ohio #20, which contains a special Corso Golden Dot section.]


“…a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he is beside himself, and reason no longer in him.”—Plato from The Ion

“A Friend of S.T. Coleridge’s wrote under a portrait of him ‘A glow-worm with a pin stuck through it, as seen in broad daylight’.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“I ended up finding the disorder of my spirit sacred”—Arthur Rimbaud

“..the old stuff of poetry had a large part in my alchemy of the world.”—Arthur Rimbaud

“My task is the poet human”—Gregory Corso

“Purposelessness is not meaninglessness. I was not put on Earth to explain myself” Dean Young


1.

For someone like myself who’s long been a true believer in the immediacy and enduring contemporary relevance of Gregory Corso’s poetry, it’s difficult to believe that his 6th and final collection of poems, 1981’s Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit was published more than a quarter century ago, and Mindfield his New and Selected volume is twenty years old this year. In all this time little attention has been paid by scholars, and even Beat Generation enthusiasts, to solidifying Corso’s rightful place as a major American poet of the 20th Century. With few critical works, no official biography, and, most significantly, no Collected Poems in sight, one might surmise that Corso was, rather than the significant poet he is, a minor literary anomaly best left to the annals of various Beat anthologies and as a footnote to the careers of his more famous, more prolific peers, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac. On the contrary, I’d argue that Corso’s work merits as much and perhaps more attention than that which has been given to the other Beats.

So what gives? Why the scholarly cold shoulder?

Well, two reasons: 1) 40 years of heroin addiction—which devastated his human relationships and limited his poetic output, and 2) Corso’s poems don’t fit neatly into the Beat literary cannon—as they seem simultaneously wholly of the Present and weirdly antique. Or put another way, he isn’t weird enough for the post-avants and too sloppy for the button-down traditionalists. Indeed, unlike the other Beats, Corso wore the tradition of poetry—esp. the Greeks and the Romantics—on his sleeve. As a result, his poems are a mix of antiquated high diction, “thee” “thy” thou” and “O” and a street-smart verbal tumult, a debacle of slang, invented words, literary allusion and musical wordplay, as in these lines from the end of his poem “Notes after Blacking Out”:

Nothing is a house never bought
Nothing comes after this wildbright joke
Nothing sits on nothing in a nothing of many nothings
a nothing king

Of course, for all its playfulness Corso also here demonstrates how “nothing” can quickly accumulate into a something, an even regal something of great power—which is all the more poignant when one considers that he’s talking about the nothing of the after-life- something. Corso is ever a poet of big ideas, and as such his poems are always a matter of life and death.

Simultaneously his is a poetry of muses, visions, and oracles but with a wholly present alive-in-your-face, often off the cuff, autobiographical freshness. Take for instance these opening lines from “For Homer” a poem that appeared in his final published collection Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit:

There’s rust on the old truths
—Ironclad clichés erode
New lies don’t smell as nice
as new shoes
I’ve years of poems to type up
40 years of smoking to stop
I’ve no steady income
No home
And because my hands are autochthonic
I can never wash them enough
I feel dumb
I feel like an old mangy bull
crashing through the red rag
of an alcoholic day
Yet it’s all so beautiful
isn’t it?

What optimism, what resignation [he’s about to be skewered and alcohol is the matador], what impulse toward inventiveness exists here. And no wonder when one’s so inspired, anything is possible, “The heavens speak through our lips” he concludes, “All’s caught what could not be found/All’s brought what was left behind.”

Whether it’s his more avant-garde impulses or his engagement with poetic tradition, Corso’s writing stands as a testament to the power of poetry to be both artistically challenging and wildly moving, even accessible, to people not poets. He understood intensely that the incursions, sabotage, and newness of the avant-garde always occurs by resistance to the established decorum, values and foundation of past artistic and cultural achievements. What made him different from the other Beats was his obvious refusal to throw out the traditional baby with its avant-holier-than-thou bathwater. And yet, all of this is but preamble to The Golden Dot…

2.

I have been sitting for five weeks now with The Golden Dot, the unpublished manuscript that Corso was working on at his death—thinking it, reading it, watching it slip out from under every page I write about it, watching it dissolve before my eyes and resolve itself (in spite of my best efforts to control it) to tell me everything and nothing same time, refusing to take its place beside the rest of Corso’s books—at the end of the line—making a mess out of anything I could possibly say. And furthermore, defying every attempt I’ve made to analyze its structure, generalize its contents or sum up its massive, dispersive and carnival soul. The Golden Dot’s 250+ disordered (before I got them, by whom and how I do not know) pages of poems, half poems, poems that sputter and poems that nod off the page, not to mention the notes for poems, the scrawl in the margins, the pages of mostly unreadable cursive, the scribbles and cross-outs, the autobiographical prose with paragraphs and pages missing (always with paragraphs and pages missing), will not cooperate and behave, nor come to order and make its case.

Reading The Golden Dot is a little like trying to catalogue the wreckage and debris of a beautiful tornado while it’s still swirling through the air. It’s a little like taking the sirens the muses the fates and the hours, the oracle at Delphi, the collected works of Shelley, the fragments of Coleridge, Whitman’s long lines, Dickinson’s dashes, Gertrude Stein’s Gertrude Stein, America singing and New York City, and putting them all in a room together, then tossing in a fragment bomb. Standing back some distance and watching it explode. The blood goes for miles. It’s carnage, and it’s thrilling. It’s full-throttle electricity and ruined by heroin. The Golden Dot is a manuscript where everything dies and nothing does. Everything’s alive and already expired. It’s barely a manuscript at all. The past and the future shake hands in the parlor. The present is scratching its head with a nailgun. Gregory Corso is nowhere, but present. The poet is certain, but the poetry mostly absent. This was to be Corso’s great punctuation mark, the golden dot at the end of the life sentence—the sentence of life, its weird and often difficult syntax and circumstances, the sentence that defines Corso’s essential I am. However, the great success of The Golden Dot is its failure to complete—or even to launch—its failure to close the door on Corso the poet, even as the man wished to make a last stand. One might say that The Golden Dot and the poet who wrote it denies The End its Ending, happy or otherwise, in spite of Nunzio’s desire to have his final say. “Screw the Golden” he admonished himself in a letter, “put the ‘DOT’ to it” Perhaps fortunately for all of us, he was too late. His un-creation will ensure him his place. Sometimes not to finish is to go on forever, ambiguous and richer for the mystery and defiance. In “Getting to the Poem” Corso puts it in dada like fashion:

I take out my pen
I pee white gold
and on the wall
I write thereon

that’s all there is to it. One writes and in writing one is defined and defines. Always in poetry it’s about getting to the poem—the finish line, and yet (and yet) what’s important is the activity, the doing in the service of. To be writing—even sloppily, or without a goal is not to be dead, “I will live/ and never know my death.” Or as he puts it in one of his letters: “no autobio has death make the dot.” The writer who’s writing is alive in the PRESENT. NOW is the poet as a light and winged thing, and holy…beside himself.”

The end is always waking up (but to what?) and winking out (to all of this!), “was it a vision or a waking dream?/ Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?” says Keats in the shadow of a bird—and Corso in The Golden Dot: “The bird in flight knows me;/it knows I’m in the tree/But you—you have no idea who I am…”

3. [Legendary Biographical detour]


Gregory Corso

—“If you believe you’re a poet, then you’re saved.” (Corso)


Gregory Annunzio Corso, whose name even
sounds poetic, was born in New York
City’s shadow (Greenwich Village to be exact)
March 26th, 1930 to teenage, Italian, immigrant
parents, Michelina (the mother) and Fortunato (the father)
Within a year the former had sailed back to Italy,
abandoning young Gregory with his young father,
who promptly placed the baby in foster care.
By age ten Gregory had lived with four sets of parents,
including the biological one, and was returned into his father’s
household. Fortunato, it seems, had been somewhat fortunate
in the intervening years, had remarried and come calling
for his prodigal Nunzio. But Gregory was troubled
to the point of being foiled by clouds, frequently wetting his bed
ultimately becoming a thief—and some might say, even then,
a poet—and thus guilty as charged for stealing a radio, Gregory
at twelve was sent to reform school. Thus, began his walkabout
to the depths and his teenage tenure as a walk-on criminal,
eventually landing him for a three year stint, at the ripe old age
of sixteen no less, in Clinton State Prison, Dannemora, NY.
Always sentimental, always the clown, Corso made his way
as court jester to mafia inmates, who advised him and kept him
from losing his nerve. While in prison he read widely and began
writing poems. He loved the Greeks and the Romantics, of the latter
especially Shelley. And on his release in 1950, moved back
to NYC, where he was discovered, brooding over
a stack of poems, by Allen Ginsberg. Introductions
to Kerouac, Burroughs and the rest of the gang followed.
Corso, it was soon clear to everyone, was bull-headed
with space dust in his hair. His mouth unqualified w/ rebel-like stars.
Described by many as child-like and unmoored, his passion
for poetry never flagged. He saw his first poems published
in the Harvard Advocate in 1954. And a first collection,
Gasoline, by City Lights Books in 1958—a book which
set the stage for his great 1959 poem “Bomb,” a poem which explodes
on the page and radiates unabashedly, thoroughly
overwhelmingly, the words like fallout for miles to the stars.
The poem achieves a sort of green mystical glow, at one
and the same time Corso’s crowning glory and the terrible
failure of all human kind. It’s atomic collage,
a mushroom cloud in black and white, and so, sadly
a little like news, a little too close to the unadorned fact.
Corso rejoiceth and beateth his wings. Corso belligerent
singing drunk at readings dropping his trousers and mooning
the moon. He made a million enemies. He was always
so sorry, generous, cantankerous, assiduously the poet.
Gregory Corso, though you’d never quite know it
was frailest disaster. Uncouth as youth, remained so
as adult, and yet everyone thinks of him lovely;
everyone mentions him burst. Gregory from early on
was cursed with his Gregory, but traveled extensively
taught briefly and whorled. He married three times,
had five children, eight grandchildren and one great grand
child, perhaps, too, in his chest a parakeet or his stomach a piano.
Gregory Corso died asleep in Minnesota January 17, 2001.
He was 70, and Patti Smith called him a flower.

[End of Detour]



4.


Everybody who encountered Corso during his lifetime has a story about him, something crazy that he said or did, someone he screwed over or interrupted at a reading, money he borrowed and never paid back. Everybody has a version of Corso to tell: contradictory, childish, volatile, cantankerous, mad, beautiful and ultimately lost… And this, lost rather ruined version of Corso gets confused with the poetry and also the poet, both far more complex matters than the one-sided drug-addled caricatures of Corso would have us believe. The stories about Corso are interesting sure, but the power of his work is in its redemptive, oracular, romantic character—its ability to transcend undermine and circumvent the fact of the matter—and all of the stories too. Corso’s poems are important not for what they say (or don’t say) about Gregory Corso, but for the way they transcend him and all of us. In this is the notion everywhere apparent in The Golden Dot that the poet and the poem are different from and sometimes at odds with the individual they’re attached to—the flawed human being at the typewriter. This is nowhere made more clear than in the poem from the The Golden Dot titled “On Poets and Non-Poets”

The spark of poetry is
within us all
The poem is
the within brought without
A poet is born a
human being
A human being is
not born a poet
It’s the spirit
distinguishes the child from
the child Shelley
“He was not as other men
marked his peers”

In other words, Corso was a poet who believed in the idea that poetic inspiration is transformative, that in writing (at least when it’s inspired) the Muse activates the poet via “the spark in all of us,” transforming the human being into a full-throttle meta-being, a singer who is no mere mortal but rather someone charged (like lightning) with the elucidation of what it means to be human itself. As he writes in “A Thoughtful Poem on Questions Asked Me Concerning Poetry” (one of the more finished pieces in The Golden Dot, ‘Poetry is big on breathing and spiritus/Poet is encased in meat”. For Corso, the poet is a person released from the prison of the fact of the matter. As he optimistically put it in a 1984 letter to Allen Ginsberg “My Golden Dot will aright me with those who’ve held to me all these past terrible years.” The Golden Dot was to be his chance at getting out from under the myth of Gregory Corso:

Who was I—
I was a used-up poet
a terrible demolition of a man
[T]was not the flow of poetry stopped,
[t]was the poet
And now I am reborn
Nunzio Corso is my name


6.


In a 1984 letter Corso wrote to New Directions editor Griselda Ohannessian The Golden Dot “…means […] that all my poems since day one unto this book to come, is a serial of a life—an autobiography as it were—of a poet named Gregorio Nunzio Corso. When I put the dot to it, I’ll have my Paterson, my Canto, my epic, I knew that was my fate, to follow Calliope.” In other words, the golden dot is the grand finale, the final perfect mark—the dot—on the “I” of the poetic self—“the autobiography of a poet named Gregorio Nunzio Corso” and the re-invention of the man Gregory Corso in poetic terms.

Later, in the same letter to Griselda Ohannessian quoted above, Corso writes that The Golden Dot as the final book in the serial of Corso the poet’s life will answer the question:

what happens next? Will I make it; will I die; will I be saved, will I see God, will I answer death, will I write a great poem already? Ha! […] I’ve written some outlines how I wish to present Golden Dot; my venturing to poem those occurrences that so marked my life, indelibly, unforgettable; by poetry to portray what makes me tick, what I feel myself to be, to ask, “Who am I?” then answer who I am.

Yet “Poetry is more than portraiting the poet;” he continues, “though there be no one like you or me in life, each of us select and unique like a fingerprint, are nonetheless a common lot. Language binds us…” The poet’s aims, and the aims of poetry, are universal and aesthetic, visionary and transcendent, and may be pursued in spite of—even at the expense of—the individual—his life choices, circumstances, and shortcomings. In poetry, Corso writes “Beauty’s outward proximity/ touches us within/ we feel—poetry is feeling/ when the within is brought without the poem is born”


7.

The Golden Dot’s Table of Contents lists 8 poems, which, it should be emphatically noted, account for only 20 of its 250+ manuscript pages. Beyond these somewhat finished 20 pages, the manuscript seems more like a notebook for a manuscript than a manuscript itself. The re-versions and re-visions are interesting for the way they demonstrate Corso’s process—his constant re-immersion in the same set of ideas and problems, their seemingly infinite shift and swirl—but they also state the obvious: The Golden Dot is wildly unfinished, full of possibility but nowhere near coherent. And yet, there’s something charming and almost appropriate about the wreck of it. To put it bluntly, the manuscript is a marvelous failure—a capstone experience that never seals the deal, refusing to be the final word even as Corso stumbles, starts, and flounders toward the ultimate finish in the flowers.

In general, it’s clear that Corso (over the 20 years he worked on this) was searching for a way to, in the grand sense of man’s—and most especially the poet’s—search for meaning, make it all make sense. Some of the themes Corso takes up here have to do with the nature of poetry and poets, e.g. who or what is a poet? are poets born or made? is it the poet that justifies/anchors the poem, or is it poetry that legitimizes the poet? Also, what is the difference between poets and non-poets? Who is Gregory Corso and what makes him tick? Additionally, and as in all of Corso’s books, Life and Death loom large as subjects in The Golden Dot, perhaps most especially in, “The Day after Humankind”—the manuscript’s central poem and arguably its most finished and substantive work—wherein Corso imagines the world without us, the day after our apocalyptic (read: thermo-nuclear) expiration date. “I sit the day after humankind” he writes

without form
watching the Sphinx
watch nothing


How weirdly to place his speaker in the shadow of one of the great monuments of ancient civilization. The silence is deafening, but clear with regard to the speaker’s willingness to let it all go, to simply forget humankind and enter into the largesse of something inspirited and beautiful and wholly unknown, i.e. “be life formless; clear—” For Corso, a very troubled individual for much of his life, what’s important is the particular, but the absolute, the pure—spirit without form, what remains and rises when it’s all boiled down to essentials—the Human Spirit of which the Sphinx is for Corso a great monument/memorial. The poem ends with Corso’s speaker and everything fading into nothingness:

The memory of human time, without reflection, begins to fade
the elephant has forgotten all—Life fades, human life
becomes like the dream
though dreamt

8.

In the disheveled-coming-to-be-BUT-NOT poems of The Golden Dot, more than in any of Corso’s previous completed, published works, we see the architecture of spirit in process, in crisis, a collage of moving often unrelated parts. Here Corso manages and mis-manages more beautifully than ever the effects of the fitful past on the chaotic present, and proves once and for all what he wrote in the earliest letter that appears in his Accidental Autobiography, “poems are nothing without the poet….they and their works are one and the same, the poet and his poems are a whole.” For Corso, the poet lives through his poems, and the poems are the justification of the poem and ultimately the absolution of the human being who they are an extension of. Of course, this doesn’t mean that one’s poems are merely a conglomeration/enumeration of the facts of one’s life. On the contrary, nothing need be true only real. Corso was never interested in the facts, but in the poet and poem HUMAN—Human with a capital H.

The Golden Dot is a brilliant, if fatally flawed/damaged, final snapshot of splatter. Corso’s lack of finish here is the grandest final non-gesture he could make. His great (if not entirely intentional) achievement is in his—that is, the poet’s—inability in spite of the man’s desire to finish himself off to give the end a shape and let death be the DOT. As he wrote in his poem “Spirit” published in Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit:

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea


*****

(Incidentally, fittingly, “Spirit” also appears as the epitaph on the stone marking Corso’s grave, which is located in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Shelley is also buried.)


9.

Finally, mention the disappointment…as Corso’s work has meant so much to me and yet there’s not much here to salvage going forward.

I had hoped there’d be a slough of amazing final poems. Instead, there’s only the incessant need to conclude to finalize, to make sense of all that’s already been. And even this, in spite of itself, winds up short and wild, unfixed-a-mess.

In my own imagination and vanity, I wanted the DOT to be a concentrated thing, a thing to unpack and marvel at ever after, with density and depths to the ocean and heaven. Yet, what it is instead is a an evermore dispersive emptying out, a thing yet to be filled up and in and out…which is it strikes me suddenly almost magnetic in its power to pull everything else toward it: Plato, Keats, Rimbaud…Coleridge and Shelley, Dickinson and Stein…all the work in this art gallery gloms around it, your own working notebook and mine. The Golden Dot, a black hole, an infinite circling down to the head of a pin and dancing there until we can’t/don’t anymore. It is, in a word, SUBLIME, a thing that, as philosopher Crispin Sartwell might put it “overwhelms us, but at the same time absorbs us…whereas the beautiful conveys to us its fragility, the sublime conveys to us our own.” In the end, Corso’s DOT reflects the whole world, both the days before and after humankind and everything in between—a manuscript more exciting to talk about—and even look at—than it is to actually read. Corso’s last word, last laugh, final dot—his remains—remain to invite us backwards and forwards to the table of our own life sentence, a few words to go out with our own Golden Dot—BIG BANG, question mark, fizzle. What happens next is up to us at our desks. Get to work. Then BLACKOUT.

from THE GOLDEN DOT


Who was I—
I was a used-up poet
a terrible demolition of a man
Was not the flow of poetry stopped,
was the poet
And now I am reborn
Nunzio Corso is my name

from THE GOLDEN DOT


The vast vacancy of the void
has hereby been abolished
A megagalactic pin-dot of light
came into view
changing the eternal scene forever
The farther back into the void
the viewer moved
the smaller the light became
until moving back yet farther
it disappeared
Likewise the closer moved to the viewer
the larger the light became
until moving in yet closer
it appeared myriadical

The proximity of galactic space
and vacant void
is just one step forward
or one step back

ON POETS AND NON-POETS


The spark of poetry is
within us all
The poem is
the within brought without
A poet is born a
human being
A human being is
not born a poet
It’s the spirit
distinguishes the child from
the child Shelley
“He was not as other men”
marked his peers