The Poetry of Gregory Corso

I have to admit that I was not only unfamiliar with the poetry of Gregory Corso (1930-2001) but I also had never heard of him. That is, until I walked into an exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum and saw a monumental painting (roughly 30 feet tall), with its title written into the top of the painting: “For Gregory Corso.” 

I pulled out my phone and Googled him. A Beat poet, an associate of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Neil Cassady, and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore, among several others. That clicked; it placed him in the 1950s in counter-culture San Francisco, a decade before the hippies. Allen Ginsburg’s famous Howl. Beatniks. Cool, man.

Some Thursday Readings

 

We Have Butterflies to See: Four Walks in Central Park – Geoffrey Smagacz at Front Porch Republic.

 

Top 10 Dip into Poetry – Every Day Poems.

 

“The Watchers,” poem by William Stanley Braithwaite – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Finding Poetry in an Anselm Kiefer Art Exhibition

In 2014, I was in London, and I’d just recovered from my back going out that I spent a good 24 hours immobilized on the floor of our hotel room. A house doctor was called in, and he gave me a muscle relaxant via hypodermic. My back “felt like a solid brick,” he said. It took about 10 hours to work, but I could finally start moving around again.  

The floor of a hotel room is not the way to experience London. The maids were, however, very polite as they vacuumed around me. 

 

Two days later, I was moving normally again, and I went to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’d heard of the German artist Anselm Kiefer; the St. Louis Art Museum has two of his works. One is a massive painting called “Fuel Rods.” The other is a sculpture, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels,” comprised of a huge shelf of burned books and thousands of pieces of glass scattered on the floor. It commemorates “Kritstallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when German Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, buildings, homes, and people across Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.

 

The London exhibition was simply entitled “Anselm Kiefer.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: One of the Anselm Kiefer paintings in Sculpture Hall at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Winter penance – poem by Franco Amati at Garnage Notes.

 

The Kreutzer Sonata – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.

 

Into the Wasteland – Malcolm Guite at The Rabbit Room (video).

 

“The Shadow on the Stone,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.