Gregory Corso; Poet Influenced Fellow Writers in Beat Generation

Gregory Corso, a streetwise poet who was a central member of the Beat movement along with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, died Wednesday in a hospital in suburban Minneapolis.

He was 70 and had been suffering from prostate cancer.

Corso, who had a disastrous childhood and discovered literature while incarcerated, saw poetry as an ethical act that could change society. The Beat movement that embraced him presaged the social and political unrest of the 1960s.

“Sometimes Allen Ginsberg used to say that he was a fraud and that Gregory was the true great poet of the Beat generation,” said poet Lewis MacAdams. “He was the real Beat, a street-singing genius. He lived the life and died the death of a poet who had given his entire life to that arcane and magnificent art.”

Corso wrote or contributed to more than 20 books of poetry, the most notable of which include “Bomb,” “Elegiac Feelings American” and “Gasoline.”

He moved to San Francisco too late to participate in what is often cited as the first major public event in the evolution of the Beat movement--Ginsberg’s reading of his seminal poem, “Howl”--but he wrote with Ginsberg one of its manifestos, an article called “The Literary Revolution in America.”

Corso was an “orphan street kid adopted by the Beats,” said Herbert Gold, novelist and author of “Bohemia: Digging the Roots of Cool,” who spent time with Corso, Ginsberg and other Beat poets in Paris in the late 1950s. “Most of the Beats were middle-class college kids, but Corso came out of real poverty. That made him different.”

Corso was born in New York City to teenage parents who separated soon after his birth. He lived in orphanages and foster homes until he was 11, when his father took him in. His formal education ended at sixth grade.

At 12 he was in trouble with the law for selling a stolen radio and spent several months behind bars. Abused by other prisoners, he later spent three months under observation at Bellevue Hospital.

At 16 he was incarcerated again, this time with a three-year term for theft. He began to read classics by Dostoevsky, Stendahl, Shelley and Marlowe.

After his release, he went to work as a manual laborer in New York, as a reporter for the old Los Angeles Examiner, and as a merchant seaman on ships bound for Africa and South America.

In 1950, he was working on his first poems when he met Ginsberg in a Greenwich Village bar, and Ginsberg encouraged his writing. Corso soon met Kerouac and seduced his girlfriend, which became the plot of Kerouac’s novel “The Subterraneans.”

Critics found echoes of Corso in Ginsberg’s work, but their voices remained distinct. Compared to Ginsberg, Corso was “calm and quick, whimsical often, witty rather than humorous, semantically swift rather than prophetically incantatory,” Geoffrey Thurley wrote in a piece collected in “The Beats: Essays in Criticism.”

Corso’s first poems were published in 1955 in the Harvard Advocate. His first collection, “The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems,” was financed by Harvard and Radcliffe students. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books published his next collection, “Gasoline,” in 1958.

In his early books, images of imprisonment and violence were central. His poetry sometimes provoked violent reactions. When he read “Bomb” at Oxford, members of the college poetry society hurled their shoes at him. That poem was a commentary on atomic weapons that appeared on the printed page in the shape of a mushroom cloud. “O Bomb, I love you I want to kiss your clank, eat your boom . . . “

In “The Literary Revolution,” he declared himself part of a movement of American poets who believed in the power of their words to evoke change. These poets, he and Ginsberg wrote, “have taken it upon themselves, with angelic clarions in hand, to announce their discontent, their demands, their hope, their final wondrous unimaginable dream.”

In “Marriage,” widely considered his finest poem, Corso showed a different side of himself, writing with humor and optimism about a nervous groom on the brink of wedlock, teetering between malicious musings: “I’d sit there the Mad Honeymooner/devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy/a saint of divorce.” And more worrisome thoughts: “Because what if I’m 60 years old and not married/all alone in a furnished room . . . and everybody else is married! all the universe married but me!”

Survivors include five children, seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.