Nick Rattner

A Dot Not What I Thought: Gregory Corso’s The Golden Dot and the Problem of Attachment 

What is a poet’s legacy? Is it the gestalt of a career? Or can legacy be something smaller, a single poem, or what Rilke dubbed “ten golden lines?” Can a poet’s legacy be not their work but an idea about their identity?

These are the questions Gregory Corso’s The Golden Dot (2022) suggest. The posthumous collection, released by Lithic Press more than twenty years after the poet died from prostate cancer, presents, more-or-less as-is, the paper bag full of poems Corso left behind, albeit in the form of a beautifully bound and typeset edition. Editor Raymond Foye introduces the work, which he assembled and shepherded to publication, much as he did with the collected poetry of another Beat poet, Bob Kaufman (New Directions published The Ancient Rain in 2019).

Language expresses obsession, lyrical obsession in the case of a poet, and the differences between Kaufman and Corso’s work exhibited in the two collections have much to tell us about legacy, specifically the legacy of the Beat generation, and the way it might coincide with and shape contemporary lyric preoccupations. While The Ancient Rain and The Golden Dot each owe their existence to the efforts of family and friends, the former is an act of recovery for a poet whose spontaneous synthesis of Black history, Buddhist thought, jazz, satire, and longing connects in surprising and challenging ways to the past, present and future of poetry; the latter, however, strikes me as something akin to a vanity project, reflecting the desire of its editor to enshrine the work of a friend[i], a friend whose syncretic vision tends toward self-obsession, and is potentially a root cause of contemporary poetry that centers identity for its own sake, rather than opening personal experience toward sharable concerns.

Given Dot’s heft (176 pages, including introduction and front- and backmatter), its proportionally narrow tonal and linguistic band proves surprising. Repetition here is not recursion, reimagination, or rebirth (to draw on an appropriately Catholic Corso-ian trope), but rather relapse (another Corso-ian trope, dope use and its discontents). That the book takes the form a diary, with most poems dated and presented in chronological sequence, thwarts progression, as each day/poem presents laments and concerns (death, personal publishing narrative, boredom with fame, autobiography) often in the same language and tone, reiterated again and again. The repeated reminiscences of a writing career are particularly tough: “I was writing to the world / –that’s why I called them poems / and had them published–”; “I have near a decade of poems / I’m prepared to volume”; “Dopey people who rumored I lost America’s greatest publisher of poetry, New Directions,”; “Now that I’ve given up reading in public”; “A poem published in an all but non-existent / 8th issue of a college magazine”. These quotations are all pulled from a randomly selected ten-page segment of the book. Simply put, Dot’s a dud.

If my critique of this poet’s final collection comes across as harsh, it’s because decades ago Corso’s poems changed my life. I say this without hyperbole. Like many high schoolers, my world outlook was shaped by a resentment toward authority that was difficult to name, a substance no more definable for its many forms. I found some solace with a misfit crew of weedheads, punks, band nerds, and pickup basketball partners, bonded by shared distrust, but beyond drugs, verbal sparring, and games of 21, I had no expressive outlet. One day, one of the weedheads, an upperclassman with some literary leanings, told me to read this. This was Elegiac Feelings American, Corso’s fifth or sixth (depending on how you do the math) full-length poetry collection, published in 1970 by New Directions. This was one of those crystalizing moments in which all one’s chemicals (endogenous and exogenous) organize themselves around a singular expression: shit, man, I need to read more of this stuff.

I’ve long since lost touch with my weedhead friend so have no way of finding out how he happened to possess a copy of Elegiac. I don’t think I asked. And I can only guess at his inspiration, but thirty years later, I get it. Especially rereading Elegiac’s titular poem, a ten-page paean to Jack Kerouac, Corso’s dear friend and literary North Star, which opens the book. As with Milton[ii]’s “Lycidas,” Corso’s elegy is occasioned by a friend’s death but quickly becomes an opportunity to outline a poetics. The poem, in other words, is less about the flesh and more about the spirit, fitting for Corso, who remained a reverent (if idiosyncratically so) Catholic throughout his life. Indeed, in the opening stanza, the speaker sets up the poem’s guiding metaphor of tree and ground, similar in many ways to the body-as-host relationship. “you and America, like the / tree and the ground, are one and the same,” Corso writes. Two pages later, Corso dips into liturgical anachronistic speech, underscoring the catechistic relationship, writing, “and as long as America shall live, though ye old Kerouac body hath died, yet shall you live.” In the poem’s finale, Kerouac becomes “a Beat Christ-boy” behind who “came a-following / the children of flowers.”

Paradoxically, it is the subject’s difference from America and his absence through which flourishing may take place: “So like yet unlike the ground from which you stemmed; / you stood upon America like a rootless / flat-bottomed tree.” This free-standing-yet-entwined-ness is what allows the poet, recalling earlier times, to declare “ours was a time of prophecy without death,” a time of flowering that the poem’s recursive, oracular structure will ultimately return to. Yet this journey toward Easter, as it were, follows a road that travels through the cantons of loneliness and desperation. As the spirit and flesh are coextensive, so are prophecy and despair, and to embody America is to possess “an infernal ego” and to see “hope for the America” turn to “the very same alcohol that disembodied / your brother redman of his America.” It is to see America’s deadly colonialism, past and present, and its “Laugh-in,” anaesthetized polis, and ask “WHY?”

There’s much more to “Elegiac,” a poem that proceeds by revolution, looping in and out of its own discoveries in a cycle of death and rebirth, but what spoke to me in high school and what continues to speak to me now is the way the poem seeks and finds historical sources for personal suffering, and the way this consciousness leads directly to rage. Rage and funereal despair borne of shared trauma must be enumerated in the calculus of flowers. As such, the poems’ commitment to “the human spirit in the name of beauty and truth” sanctions earnestness and candor. This poem’s lyric rawness and its built-up defiance, suffused with a historical consciousness, exists within reach, for in naming the nation’s hypocrisy as the “stain” on the American soul, Corso draws upon what Williams termed “the American Grain.” Or, at any rate, an American grain. That is, Corso’s language exists close to speech, a speech inflected by many localities (Little Italy, international Beatnik-landia, French-speaking Northeast). The vocality of “Elegaic” is what provides access to a pure poetic source. Before my friend gave me the book, I’d never read anything that felt both knowable and prophetic.

Despite the grand ambitions of “Elegiac”, the poem remains intimate, developing its meanings around a “lyric you”, Kerouac. Direct engagement with an other, a beloved, sets the poem apart from most poems in the book, which have their roots firmly planted in the experience of a “lyric I”, who is clearly an avatar for Corso. Of course, part of the Beat program was to risk being yourself, ideally a lyric self, flying one’s freak flag in defiance of state-sanctioned New Critical stuffiness and Nixon-era materialist self-mummification. Yet while poems in Elegiac as well as those in The Happy Birthday of Death (1960) don’t sound Dot’s signature curmudgeonly note, for the most part they turn on an assumed interest in the poet-as-poet, or, more to the point, the poet-as-Gregory Corso, thus presenting far less of a challenge to bourgeoise selfhood than it may have seemed at the time.

Corso’s regrettable self-reflexiveness pertains as much to autobiographical poems as it does to the poet’s more esoteric work, including the nearly illegibly scrawled folio of drawings in the middle of Elegiac in which the author presents his personal reordering of Egyptian symbology. Indeed, inscrutable personal experience and iconography forms the hazy ground of much of Elegiac. Take, for example, “Paris–1960”, a page-length poem in the last fourth of the book. In the first line, Corso sets up a musing on death and the Eternal City writing, “Paris seems the loveliest of all this world-death”. From here, however, the poem becomes a list of people, namely historical figures, primarily authors the poet has read, who have in common the fact that they lived in Paris and died. Consider these stanzas:

            Baudelaire is always home

            There’s a light in Sartre’s Plutonian room yet

                        Sartre is never home

            The ghost of Schwitters contemplates neo-Merz in Tzara’s

                        room

            Michaux has no home.

George Sand the Madonna Rimbaud the Child

Artaud the man in the Transylvanian bathtub.

            The tomb of Napolean encircled by grim caryatids

            is a human tribute to Death

            Voltaire’s tomb is in jail

            Hugo’s tomb is bothered by Zola’s tomb

            Rosseau’s tomb is a flower of wood.

One stanza later, the poem concludes in a short list of notable places, before two more author names, one in each of the final two lines. This style of associative grabbing is meant, I think, to mimic the intoxication of encountering in real life the tombs of authors one has encountered only in books. The lack of context to link these authors could be seen as a challenge to bookish gatekeeping, the value in the bombast of encounter and the romance of a pilgrimage rather than in a considered thesis. But the poem, at least to my ears and eyes, works harder to establish the author’s literary bona fides than it does to create a particular idea or feeling about writing and belonging. In that sense, it’s mostly about Corso. What a far cry from “Elegiac”!

I’m willing to be that “Paris–1960” is better taken in as performance than as page. The same may go for a significant portion of poems in Elegiac and Happy Birthday, especially those of the bebop-inspired word salad variety (from another Paris poem, this one in Happy Birthday: “The harp of carp, the flute of fluke, / the brass of bass / the kettle of turtle / the violin of marlin / the tuba of barracuda / hail whale !”). It’s not hard to imagine that what seems silly or self-involved in print might be raucous fun in person. It makes me think that much of Corso’s work[iii] would live on more happily as recorded performances than as well-wrought book. The work requires embodiment to be activated. It needs the context of a New York accent, Italian-American hand gestures, a wry, knowing look, maybe even a middle finger for an impertinent critic.

Perhaps this reliance on performance is why Foye’s introduction focuses on Corso the man rather than on placing Corso’s work in context, either in the poet’s canon or in poetry writ large. “One of my favorite things about hanging out with Gregory over the years was watching how he dealt with fans,” Foye recalls in one of many anecdotes in what is a collage of recollections that attempt to give the reader the picture of what it was like to be in Corso’s presence. While the several nostalgic reminiscences elicit eyerolls, they also highlight one of the book’s central deficiencies: one needs to have known Corso to get what these poems are doing. And that, finally, may be one of the great deficiencies of the Beat legacy. Without the direct presence of the author or of the authority that much of their poetry and cultural provocation responds to, the Beat posture of the innate prophetic gift of an individual has come to seem, decades later, as invested in the bourgeoise selfhood it sought to refute. For all their avowed iconoclasm, the Beats solidified the Artist as Great Man (it was not exclusively a boy’s club as is often said, and recovery of several key woman authors is ongoing) archetype. Yes, the personal is political. But it can also be tedious.

Dot is, if nothing else, a cautionary tale when it comes to the apotheosis of the artist-as-individual; it is too easy to track Corso’s dim worldview with his personal circumstances, and so the final work reads often as a bitter, dying man’s last grievances and haphazard recollections. That isn’t fair to Corso nor does it offer any lure or value for a those unfamiliar with this work. Foye’s introduction is so baked in nostalgia that one suspects his admiration for the poet obscured editorial judgment. These poems should have been left for scholars to discover.

Still, for me the visionary promise and everyday language of “Elegiac” stoked poetic flames that burn decades later. And yet, for whatever reason, it took the disappointment of Dot to prompt a return. Ironically, it was a friend who sent me a copy. But that gesture, rather than recreating the excitement of the first encounter, highlighted the way Corso’s poems, for the most part, owe their effectiveness to a particular era or a particular age.

Corso’s work deserves to be read, but the work of a more discerning and less personally involved editor is needed. Frankly, I’m not sure we need another book of Corso poems. What would be lovely to see is an edition that presents selections from a variety of the Beat writers, especially the underread Leonore Kandel, Joyce Johnson, Helene Dorn, and Hettie Jones as well as some of their counterparts in neighboring literary camps, including those poets they influenced and upon whose influence they drew. I’m thinking of everything from Keats to Rukeyser to Adkins to Meyer. Surely, “Elegiac Feelings America” has a place in such a compendium. The elegy, like the best of Corso’s work, exalts the individual with American graininess and through joy and suffering locates a place of shared resistance. It lives more spaciously than in The Golden Dot. It takes root as Corso’s elegiac tree and flourishes in Kaufman’s “Ancient Rain”. It ramifies strangely as Kerouac’s “Mexico City Blues” and in Rockdrigo González’s “Huapanguero.” The source is justice, a lyric justice, communal and personal. As Corso noted in 1970, “From justice stems a variable god.”

[i] The most insightful critique I’ve read concerning the Woodstock ’99 concert is that it represented an effort on the part of the promoters to foist their Baby Boom experience of transcendence onto a new generation: you have to experience music the way we did.

[ii] Corso was turned on to poetry in prison and became a formidable scholar. Foye’s introduction touches on this aspect of the poet’s background. You can sample Corso’s auto-didactic firepower at the Internet Archive, which has made available eight of the lectures he gave at the Naropa Institute. The Center for the Humanties has also bound two editions of lectures he gave at Naropa in 1981. Corso was most profoundly steeped in Keats and Shelly, but Milton, who he references in poems and lectures, was also an influence.

[iii] I’m clearly giving Corso a bad rap. He wrote many excellent poems, in Elegiac, Birthday and in other of his books. “Bomb” in particular deserves to be read for its beautiful sentences and for the way it develops the ode into a mode of protest, its expression of dread in the face of annihilation at once ironic and harrowingly raw. “Dream of a Baseball Star” turns a dream, that most private and usually most boring of human experiences to share, into a graceful pastoral that presents a vision of death in terms of boyhood love of a game. Its final stanza reads:

              And I screamed in my dream :

              God ! throw thy merciful pitch !

              Herald the crack of bats !

              Hooray the sharp liner to left !

              Yea the double, the triple !

              Hosannah the home run !