Frank Beacham's Journal

Remember Poez?

Poez, 2015

Photo by Frank Beacham

Remember Poez?

Only those of a certain age would know of him. He was a James Dean-esque Lord Byron of the poetry scene in 60s New York City. His career trajectory from the mid-70's to the mid-80's led Poez from the sidewalks of Harvard Square to concert engagements in Europe.

"A voice musician ... a young man with a flow of words like a river ... like a jazz instrument" is how The New York Daily News described the young poet in 1979.

Poez’s real name is Paul Mills.

In 1987, Mills attended Columbia University, graduating Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1990, with a double major in Literature-Writing at the Columbia Writing Program, and in French Literature, winning the Lily Palmer French Prize and publishing in Quarto, the Writing Program literary magazine.

From 1992-1995, he attended UCLA Law School, interned with the ACLU and began a civil rights and criminal defense practice in Los Angeles, concentrating on police misconduct homicide and street artist and activist First Amendment cases.

In 2006, he contacted his ex-girlfriend, a songwriter, who still lived in New York, to find out if there might now be interest in his kind of spoken word poetry. Her name was Suzanne Vega. She and Mills were married on February 11, 2006.

 

Bob Kaufman, beat poet and surrealist, was born 96 years ago today

Bob Kaufman at a San Francisco bookstore reading, 1976

Photo by A.D. Winnons

Bob Kaufman, beat poet and surrealist, was born 96 years ago today.

Inspired by jazz, Kaufman was known as the "black American Rimbaud" in France, where he was very popular.

Born in New Orleans, Kaufman was one of fourteen children. He said he was the son of a German-Jewish father and a Roman Catholic Black mother from Martinique and that his grandmother practiced voodoo.

At age eighteen, Kaufman joined the United States Merchant Marine, which he left in the early 1940s to briefly study literature at New York's The New School. There, he met William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

In 1944, Kaufman married Ida Berrocal. They had one daughter, Antoinette Victoria Marie, born in New York City in 1945. She died 2008. Kaufman moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. He married Eileen Singe (1922–2015) in 1958. They had one child, Parker, named for Charlie Parker.

Kaufman, a poet in the oral tradition, usually didn't write down his poems, and much of his published work survives by way of his wife, Eileen, who wrote his poems down as he conceived them. Like many beat writers, Kaufman became a Buddhist.

In 1959, along with poets Allen Ginsberg, John Kelly, A. D. Winans and William Margolis, he was one of the founders of Beatitude magazine. According to the writer Raymond Foye, Kaufman is the person who coined the term "beatnik." His life was filled with a great deal of suffering.

In San Francisco, he was the target of beatings and harassment by the city police, and his years living in New York were filled with poverty, addiction and imprisonment. In 1959, Kaufman had a small role in a movie called The Flower Thief, which was shot in North Beach by Ron Rice.

In 1961, Kaufman was nominated for England's Guinness Poetry Award, but lost to T. S. Eliot. He appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson four times in 1970–1971.

In an interview, Ken Kesey describes seeing Bob Kaufman on the streets of San Francisco's North Beach during a visit to that city with his family in the 1950s: “I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn’t know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long — and all of them made into crosses.

“He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.”

Kaufman’s poetry made use of jazz syncopation and meter. The critic, Raymond Foye, wrote about him: "Adapting the harmonic complexities and spontaneous invention of bebop to poetic euphony and meter, he became the quintessential jazz poet."

Poet Jack Micheline said about Kaufman: "I found his work to be essentially improvisational, and was at its best when accompanied by a jazz musician. His technique resembled that of the surreal school of poets, ranging from a powerful, visionary lyricism of satirical, near dadaistic leanings, to the more prophetic tone that can be found in his political poems."

Kaufman said of his own work: "My head is a bony guitar, strung with tongues, plucked by fingers and nails." After learning of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. He broke his silence by reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never Sailed," the first lines of which are:

All those ships that never sailed
The ones with their seacocks open
That were scuttled in their stalls...
Today I bring them back
Huge and intransitory
And let them sail
Forever

Kaufman died in 1986 at age 61.

Here, Ian Dury reads Kaufman’s Bagel Shop Jazz

Samuel Beckett, Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director and poet, was born 115 years ago today

Samuel Beckett, Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director and poet, was born 115 years ago today.

Beckett lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor.

Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists.

He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd." His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.”

Beckett died in 1989 at age 83.

Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He opened up the possibility of theatre and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of time and place in order to focus on essential components of the human condition.

Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins, Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's influence. He has had a wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s — from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s.

Many major 20th century composers, including Luciano Berio, György Kurtág, Morton Feldman, Pascal Dusapin, Scott Fields, Philip Glass, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Heinz Holliger have created musical works based on his texts.

Beckett's work was also an influence on many visual artists, including Bruce Nauman, Douglas Gordon, Alexander Arotin and Avigdor Arikha.

Short film makers, like Leila Newton-Fox, have been inspired by Beckett’s play “Endgame” in the creation of the short film, “Stalemate.”

Above, Becket at a Paris Cafe

Photo by John Minihan

Charles Baudelaire was born 200 years ago

Charles Baudelaire was born 200 years ago.

Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

His most notable work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century.

Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.

He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Above, Baudelaire in a portrait by Étienne Carjat in 1862

Maya Angelou was born 93 years ago today

Maya Angelou at the memorial service for Odetta, February 4, 2009

Photo by Frank Beacham

Maya Angelou was born 93 years ago today.

A poet and novelist, Angelou was born as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother went to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. When she was eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. When she revealed what happened, her uncles kicked the culprit to death.

Frightened by the power of her own tongue, Angelou chose not to speak for the next five years. From this quiet beginning emerged a young woman who sang, danced and recorded poetry. After moving to San Francisco with her mother and brother in 1940, Angelou began taking dance lessons, eventually auditioning for professional theater.

However, her plans were put on hold when she had a son at age 16. She moved to San Diego, worked as a nightclub waitress, tangled with drugs and prostitution and danced in a strip club. Ironically, the strip club saved her career: She was discovered there by a theater group.

She auditioned for an international tour of Porgy and Bess and won a role. From 1954 to ’55, she toured 22 countries.

In 1959, she moved to New York, became friends with prominent Harlem writers and got involved with the civil rights movement. In 1961, she moved to Egypt with a boyfriend and edited for the Arab Observer.

After leaving her boyfriend, she headed to Ghana, where a car accident severely injured her son. While caring for him in Ghana, she took a job at the African Review, where she stayed for several years.

Her writing and personal development flourished under the African cultural renaissance that was taking place.

When she returned to the U.S., she began publishing her multivolume autobiography, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Four more volumes appeared during the next two decades, as well as several books of poetry.

In 1981, Angelou was appointed Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.

Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014. She was found by her nurse.

Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.

During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son, Guy Johnson, stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension.”

In 2015, a United States Postal Service stamp was issued commemorating Maya Angelou with the Joan Walsh Anglund quote "A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song,” though the stamp mistakenly attributes the quote to Angelou. The quote is from Anglund's book of poem, A Cup of Sun (1967).

Poet Anne Waldman is 76 years old today

Anne Walden reads poetry to the accompaniment of Peter Stampfel at the Imagine No Guns concert, New York City, Dec. 9, 2005

Photo by Frank Beacham

Poet Anne Waldman is 76 years old today.

Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outrider experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat poets.

Born in Millville, New Jersey, Waldman only lived in New Jersey very briefly. She was raised on MacDougal Street in New York City's Greenwich Village and received her B.A. from Bennington College in 1966.

During the 1960s, Waldman became part of the East Coast poetry scene, in part through her engagement with the poets and artists loosely termed the Second Generation of the New York School.

During this time, Waldman also made many connections with earlier generations of poets, including figures such as Allen Ginsberg, who once called Waldman his "spiritual wife." From 1966-1968, she served as Assistant Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's and, from 1968–1978, she served as the Project's Director.

In the early 1960s, Waldman became a student of Buddhism. In the 1970s, along with Allen Ginsberg, she began to study with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

While attending the Berkley Poetry Conference in 1965, Waldman, with poet Lewis Warsh, was inspired to found Angel Hair, a small press that produced a magazine of the same name and a number of smaller books. It was while she was attending this conference that she first committed to poetry after hearing the Outrider poets.

In 1974, with Trungpa, Ginsberg and others, Waldman founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado (now Naropa University), where she remains a Distinguished Professor of Poetics and the Director of Naropa's Summer Writing Program.

In 1976, Waldman and Ginsberg were featured in Bob Dylan's film, Renaldo and Clara. They worked on the film while traveling through New England and Canada with the Rolling Thunder Revue, a concert tour that made impromptu stops, entertaining enthusiastic crowds with poetry and music.

Waldman, Ginsberg and Dylan were joined on these caravans by musicians such as Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Eric Anderson and Joe Cocker. Waldman reveled in the experience, and she often thought of recreating the poetry caravan.

Waldman married Reed Bye in 1980, and their son, Edwin Ambrose Bye, was born on October 21, 1980. The birth of her son proved to be an "inspiring turning point" for Waldman, and she became interested in and committed to the survival of the planet. Her child, she said, became her teacher.

Waldman and Ambrose Bye perform frequently, and the two have created Fast Speaking Music and have produced multiple albums together.

Waldman has been a fervent activist for social change. In the 1970s, she was involved with the Rocky Flats Truth Force, an organization opposed to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility ten miles to the south of Boulder, Colorado.

With Daniel Ellsberg and Allen Ginsberg, she was arrested for protesting outside of the site. She has been a vocal proponent for feminist, environmental and human rights causes and an active participant in Poets Against the War. She has helped organize protests in New York and Washington, D.C.

Although her work is sometimes connected to the Beat Generation, Waldman has never been, strictly speaking, a "Beat" poet. Her work, like the work of her contemporaries in the 1970s New York milieu of which she was a vital part — writers like Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer, to name only two — is more diverse in its influences and ambitions.

Waldman is particularly interested in the performance of her poetry. She considers performance a "ritualized event in time," and she expresses the energy of her poetry through exuberant breathing, chanting, singing and movement.

Waldman credits her poem, Fast Speaking Woman, as the seminal work that galvanized her idea of poetry as performance. Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch and Lawrence Ferlinghetti all encouraged her to continue to perform her poetry.

Waldman has published more than forty books of poetry. Her poems have been translated into French, Italian, German, Turkish, Spanish and Chinese. She is also the editor of several volumes relating to modern, postmodern and contemporary poetry.

Over the course of her career, Waldman has also been a tireless collaborator, producing works with artists Elizabeth Murray, Richard Tuttle, George Schneeman, Donna Dennis and Pat Steir. She has also worked with musicians Don Cherry and Steve Lacy, dancer Douglas Dunn, as well as filmmaker and husband, Ed Bowes, and her son, musician/composer, Ambrose Bye.

With writer and scholar Ammiel Alcalay, Waldman founded the Poetry is News Coalition in 2002. She also won the International Poetry Championship Bout in Taos, New Mexico twice. In 2002, she co-founded the Poetry Is News collective with Alcalay.

Her archive of historical, literary, art, tape and extensive correspondence materials (including many prominent literary correspondents, such as William S. Burroughs, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey) resides at the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

A 55-minute film — Anne Waldman: Makeup on Empty Space — documents the opening of the Anne Waldman Collection at the University of Michigan. The film is by Jim Cohn.

Here, Waldman performs the poem, “Manatee/Humanity”

Gil Scott-Heron was born 72 years ago today

Gil Scott-Heron was born 72 years ago today.

A soul and jazz poet, musician and author, Scott-Heron is known primarily for his work as a spoken word performer in the 1970s and '80s.

His collaborative efforts with the musician, Brian Jackson, featured a musical fusion of jazz, blues and soul, as well as lyrical content concerning social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melismatic vocal styles by Scott-Heron.

His own term for himself was "bluesologist," which he defined as "a scientist who is concerned with the origin of the blues."

His music, most notably on Pieces of a Man and Winter in America in the early 1970s, influenced and helped engender later African-American music genres such as hip hop and neo soul.

Besides influencing contemporary musicians, Scott-Heron remained active until his death at age 62 in 2011.

In 2010, he released his first new album in 16 years — I'm New Here.

A memoir he had been working on for years up to the time of his death, The Last Holiday, was also published, posthumously in January, 2012.

His recording work received much critical acclaim, especially one of his best-known compositions "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." His poetic style has influenced every generation of hip hop.

Here, Scott-Heron performs “The Bottle”

Octavio Paz was born 107 years ago

Octavio Paz was born 107 years ago.

Paz was a Mexican writer, poet and diplomat and the winner of the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Paz was born to Octavio Paz Solórzano and Josefina Lozano. His father was an active supporter of the Revolution against the Díaz regime.

Paz was raised in the village of Mixcoac (now a part of Mexico City) by his mother, Josefina (daughter of Spanish immigrants), his aunt Amalia Paz and his paternal grandfather, Ireneo Paz, a liberal intellectual, novelist, publisher and former supporter of President Porfirio Díaz.

Paz was introduced to literature early in his life through the influence of his grandfather's library, filled with classic Mexican and European literature. During the 1920s, he discovered Gerardo Diego, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Antonio Machado, Spanish writers who had a great influence on his early writings.

As a teenager in 1931, Paz published his first poems, including "Cabellera." Two years later, at the age of 19, he published Luna Silvestre ("Wild Moon"), a collection of poems.

In 1932, with some friends, he founded his first literary review, Barandal. In 1937 at the age of 23, Paz abandoned his law studies and left Mexico City for Yucatán to work at a school in Mérida, set up for the sons of peasants and workers.

By 1939, Paz considered himself first and foremost a poet.

In 1945, he wrote El Laberinto de la Soledad ("The Labyrinth of Solitude"), a groundbreaking study of Mexican identity and thought.

In 1952, he travelled to India for the first time. In the same year he went to Tokyo, as chargé d'affaires, and then to Geneva, Switzerland.

He returned to Mexico City in 1954, where he wrote his great poem "Piedra de sol" ("Sunstone") in 1957 and Libertad bajo palabra (Liberty under Oath), a compilation of his poetry up to that time.

In 1962, he was named Mexico's ambassador to India.

A collection of his poems (written between 1957 and 1987) was published in 1990. In 1990, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

In India, he met the Hungryalist poets and was of immense help to them during their 35 month long trial.

Paz died of cancer in 1998 at age 84.

Paul-Marie Verlaine was born 177 years ago today

Paul-Marie Verlaine was born 177 years ago today.

Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.

The House of Verlaine, Verlaine's birthplace in Metz, is today a museum dedicated to the poet's life and artworks.

Born in Metz, he was educated at the Lycée impérial Bonaparte (now the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris and then took up a post in the civil service.

He began writing poetry at an early age, and was initially influenced by the Parnassien movement and its leader, Leconte de Lisle.

Verlaine's first published poem was published in 1863 in La Revue du progrès, a publication founded by poet Louis-Xavier de Ricard.

Verlaine was a frequenter of the salon of the Marquise de Ricard (Louis-Xavier de Ricard's mother) at 10 Boulevard des Batignolles and other social venues.

There he associated with prominent artistic figures of the day including Anatole France; Emmanuel Chabrier; inventor-poet and humorist Charles Cros; the cynical anti-bourgeois idealist Villiers de l'Isle-Adam; Theodore de Banville; François Coppée; Jose-Maria de Heredia; Leconte de Lisle; Catulle Mendes and others.

Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872.

In July, 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet.

As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.

The poems collected in Romances sans paroles (1874) were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically colored recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other.

Romances sans paroles was published while Verlaine was imprisoned. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French, Latin and Greek and drawing at a grammar school in Stickney in Lincolnshire.

From there he went to teach in Boston, before moving to Bournemouth. While in England he produced another successful collection, Sagesse.

He returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883.

Verlaine's last years saw his descent into drug addiction, alcoholism and poverty. He lived in slums and public hospitals, and spent his days drinking absinthe in Paris cafes.

Fortunately, the French people's love of the arts was able to resurrect support and bring in an income for Verlaine. His early poetry was rediscovered, his lifestyle and strange behavior in front of crowds attracted admiration, and in 1894 he was elected France's "Prince of Poets" by his peers.

His drug dependence and alcoholism caught up with him and took a toll on his life. Paul Verlaine died in Paris at the age of 51 on January, 8 1896.

Bob Dylan, in his 1975 song, "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," sings:

"Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud."

Here is an image Paul-Marie Verlaine drinking absinthe in the Café François in 1892

Above photo by Paul Marsan Dornac

Gregory Corso, Beat poet, was born 91 years ago today

Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, 1994, New York City

Photo by Frank Beacham

It was 1994, a conference on the Beat Generation at New York University, and Corso was to join Allen Ginsberg on a panel.

Corso had done fine the night before, hosting an opening of his art on display at the university. But today he came into the hall drunk and Ginsberg didn’t like it one bit.

Ginsberg’s relationship with Corso suddenly turned into one of a Jewish mother, with Ginsberg lecturing Corso about drinking so much.

Corso, of course, didn’t care and went on with his outrageous drunken business in front of everyone. An unhappy Ginsberg stared in anger.

It was a quick glimpse of beat reality.

———

Gregory Corso was born 91 years ago today.

Corso was a poet and the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs).

Corso's first volume of poetry, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, was published in 1955 (with the assistance of students at Harvard, where he had been auditing classes).

Corso was the second of the Beats to be published (after only Kerouac's The Town and the City), despite being the youngest. His poems were first published in the Harvard Advocate.

In 1958, Corso had an expanded collection of poems published as #8 in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series: Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle.

Of his many notable poems are the following: "Bomb" (a "concrete poem" formatted in typed paper slips of verse, arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud), "Elegiac Feelings American" of the recently deceased Jack Kerouac and "Marriage," a humorous meditation on the institution, perhaps his signature poem. And later in life, "The Whole Mess Almost."

Corso's sometimes surreal word mash-ups — "forked clarinets," "Flash Gordon soap" and "were wolf bathtubs" — caught the attention of many.

It was "Bomb" and "Marriage" that caught the eye of a young Bob Dylan, still in Minnesota.

Dylan said, “The Gregory Corso poem 'Bomb' was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better— a wasted world and totally mechanized — a lot of hustle and bustle — a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn’t going to pin my hopes on that.”

In 1951, Corso, then 21, worked in the garment center by day, and at night was a mascot yet again, this time at one of Greenwich Village's first lesbian bars, the Pony Stable Inn. Corso was given a table at which he wrote poetry.

One night a Columbia College student, Allen Ginsberg, happened into the Pony Stable and saw Corso... "he was good looking, and wondered if he was gay, or what."

Corso, who was definitely not gay, was not uncomfortable with same sex come-ons after spending time in prison, and thought he could score a beer off Ginsberg.

He showed Ginsberg some of the poems he was writing, a number of them from prison, and Ginsberg immediately recognized Corso as "spiritually gifted."

One poem described a woman who sunbathed in a window bay across the street from Corso's room on 12th Street. Astonishingly, the woman happened to be Ginsberg's erstwhile girl friend, with whom he lived in one of his rare forays into heterosexuality.

Ginsberg invited Corso back to their apartment and asked the woman if she would satisfy Corso's sexual curiosity.

She agreed, but Corso, still a virgin, got too nervous as she disrobed, and he ran from the apartment, struggling with his pants.

Ginsberg and Corso became fast friends. All his life, Ginsberg had a sexual attraction to Corso, which remained unrequited.

Corso joined the Beat circle and was adopted by its co-leaders, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who saw in the young street-wise writer a potential for expressing the poetic insights of a generation wholly separate from those preceding it.

In later years, Corso disliked public appearances and became irritated with his own "Beat" celebrity.

He never allowed a biographer to work in any "authorized" fashion, and only posthumously was a volume of letters published under the specious artifice of An Accidental Autobiography.

Corso discovered he had irreversible prostate cancer. He died at age 70 of the disease in Minnesota on January 17, 2001.

Here, Corso discusses Jack Kerouac in an interview

A good selection of memories of Gregory Corso. I’m glad to have participated in this project.