Poet, a leading member in the mid-1950s of the Beat movement, a group of U.S. writers who rebelled against academic and formalist writing and poured their own unmoderated feelings into free and spontaneus forms.
Corso lived in an orphanage and with four foster parents until his remarried father took him to live with him when he was 11.
A repeated runaway, he was placed in juvenile institutions. At 17 he was sentenced to three years in Clinton Prison in Dannemora, N.Y., for theft. While there he was introduced to great literature.
He met the principal Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in Greenwhich Village in 1950 and through him continued his education as a writer and a "noninstitutionalized" man.
He worked in 1951-52 for the Los Angeles Examiner and then travelled to South America and Africa.
Back in the U.S. he lived in Cambridge, Mass., and students at Harvard University and Radcliffe College helped him publish his first volume of verse, The Vestal Lady on Brattle (1955).
In 1956 Corso went to San Francisco and rejoined Ginsberg and the Beat movement was born at public readings in the bars and coffee-houses there.
Off all Corso´s poems, those in Gasoline (1958) are the most typical, using the rhythmic, incantatory style effective in spoken erse. In The Happy Birthday of Death (1960) he returned to an easier, conversational tone and wrote some of his bests poems. Long Live Man appeared in 1962 and The Mutation of the Spirit in 1964. His Selected Poems were published in 1962. Elegiac Feelings American (1970) showed maturity and new power not present before. He also has written a play, This Hung-Up Age (1955) and a fictional work, The American Express (1961).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment