Posted by Doug in Society at 3:15 am
It is probably one of the most spectacular ways to end a journey as a poet, to be allowed that your ashes be interred with Shelley’s in Rome. Shelley was one of the great Romantics, in the true sense of the word. Broody, delighted, and utterly in love with the world, but also afflicted with personal tragedies. For Shelley, it was TB that led him to an early exit, and for Gregory Corso , it was cancer.
Corso lived one of the perfect poet’s lives. Although it’s not a life that anyone would willingly accept, if they knew the conditions ahead of time, it makes for some fantastic stories, and a biography that only gets better with time. He was born in Manhattan, in Greenwich Village, in 1930, and lived a lot longer than anyone would have suspected he could have. At age 71, the disease took him in his sleep, in what seems to be a rather peaceful ending to a life that was anything but that.
He was considered by many to be a kind of 4th wheel to the Beat generation inner circle. The only reason he never made it in as a full-fledged member was probably because of his age. He was ten years younger than the next youngest, and still green around the gills as a poet. However, his street cred was absolutely solid, with a history of petty theft and break-ins, and time spent in the Tombs, the scariest prison in all of New York. He even spent time in Bellevue , and that, for the Beats, was as good as serving in the Foreign Legion to the New Romantics.
His footprints here are not as easy to find as some of the other poets of his time, but the search makes them all the more beautiful. Visiting the city, staying at a boutique Manhattan hotel , and looking for signs of poetry and roses, the trail of Corso leads somewhere close enough to call it home.


