He gave a push and I rocked.
Being dead didn’t mean much.
I still felt pain where the bullet went through.
God! seeing the two gangsters from this angle was really strang!
They certainly didn’t look like they looked in the papers.
Here they were young and clean shaven and well-shaped.176
That was Gregory’s private insight into the world of gangsters, the difference between Daily News and reality, strange musings on death, curious imagination about what it would be like to be dead, amazing appreciation of the pale bodies of gangsters naked on a morgue table, a little bit sexy even. I saw through that and said [it was] really universal mind. It has a funny kind of compassion, a funny kind of detachment. Pretty straightforward about it, actually. For a young kid it’s amazingly smart. That was the end of it. “I remember seeing their pictures in the papers.” You know, the diction, the cadence is absolutely Greenwich Village born. The pronunciation, as Gregory would pronounce it, indistinguishable from ordinary speech, and yet completely clear ideas, and a little discordant too, although the discord gives birth to a little vibration of beauty. Here they were young and clean shaven and well shaped. I appreciated his Whitmanic appreciation of their well-shaped bodies. There is a masturbatory, strange, and juvenile element in his early work.
Then there’s a picture of himself, “In the Tunnel Bone of Cambridge,” a little fragment. He’s displaying his rough trade, gangster, or jailboy background to the Cambridge aesthetes.
In the Tunnel Bone of Cambridge
1
In spite of voices —
Cambridge and all its regions
Its horned churches with fawns’ feet
Its white-haired young
and ashfoot legions —
I decided to spend the night
But that hipster-tone of my vision agent
Decided to reconcile his sound with the sea
leaving me flat
North of the Charles
So now I’m stuck here —
a subterranean
lashed to a pinnacle
2
I don’t know the better things that people know
All I know is the deserter condemned me to black —
He said: Gregory, here’s two boxes of night
one tube of moon
And twenty capsules of starlight, go an’ have a ball —
He left and the creep took
all my Gerry Mulligan records with him
And it ends:
Far into the tunnel-bone I put my ear to the ear
of the minister—and I could hear
the steel say to the steam
and the steam to the roar: a black ahead
A black ahead a black and nothing more.177
That was his prophecy for himself. He had a lot of funny imaginings, like little archetypal cartoony, fantasy, daydream short movies that made use of images that were culturally common in anybody’s head. He dealt with them in a very lively, complete, intelligent way, making use of them for poems. There’s one here, “In the Early Morning,” in the City Lights Gasoline and The Vestal Lady on Brattle.
In the Early Morning
In the early morning
beside the runaway hand-in-pocket
whistling youth
I see the hopping drooling Desirer
His black legs . . . the corncob pipe and cane
The long greasy coat, and the bloodstained
fingernails
He is waiting
flat against the trees178
It’s some kind of old bogeyman, out of Fritz Lang maybe, out of the movie M or Metropolis, or some early Carl Dreyer, Danish cinema dealing with vampires, Dreyer’s Vampyr perhaps, if you know that film from the 1932, “corncob pipe and cane, who owned greasy coat with bloodstained fingernails.” It’s just a little sketch, but pretty.
Another major poem that he wrote at that time was a “Requiem for Charlie Parker,” a curious, early appreciation for Parker. A lot of poems to Charlie Parker or to Jimmy Dean or even to Kerouac these days have a kind of overblown, romantic rhetoric. They exaggerate everything and make it gushy or creepy or overaggressively angry. Here’s something that’s very straight and flat, like a masque play for several voices. I’m also pointing out that it’s a really young poem, hence the twisty, upside-down toylike imagery that a kid plays with.
Requiem for “Bird” Parker, Musician
this prophecy came by mail:
in the last murder of birds
a nowhere bird shall remain
and it shall not wail
and the nowhere bird shall be a slow bird
a long long bird
somewhere there is a room
in a room
in which an old horn
lies in a corner
like a handful of rice
wondering about BIRD
“An old horn lies in the corner like a handful of rice.” I couldn’t imagine anybody else thinking something like that.
first voice
hey, man, BIRD is dead
they got his horn locked up somewhere
put his horn in a corner somewhere
like where’s the horn, man, where?
second voice
screw the horn
like where’s BIRD?
third voice
gone
BIRD was goner than sound
broke the barrier with a horn’s coo
BIRD was higher than moon
BIRD hovered on a roof top, too
like a weirdy monk he dropped
horn in hand, high above all
lookin’ down on them people
with half-shut weirdy eyes
saying to himself: “yeah, yeah”
like nothin’ meant nothin’ at all
fourth voice
in early nightdrunk
solo in his pent house stand
BIRD held a black flower in his black hand
he blew his horn to the sky
made the sky fantastic! and midway
the man-tired use of things
BIRD piped a varied ephemera
a strained rhythmical rat
That’s Gregory’s own, his disharmonics, “a strained rhythmical rat.”
like the stars didn’t know what to do
then came a nowhere bird
third voice
yeah, a nowhere bird —
while BIRD was blowin’
another bird came
an unreal bird
a nowhere bird with big draggy wings
BIRD paid it no mind; just kept on blowin’
and the cornball bird came on comin’
first voice
right, like that’s what I heard
the draggy bird landed in front of BIRD
looked BIRD straight in the eye
BIRD said: “cool it”
and kept on blowin’
second voice
seems like BIRD put the square bird down
first voice
only for a while, man
the nowhere bird began to foam from the mouth
making all kinds of discords
“man, like make it elsewhere,” BIRD implored
but the nowhere bird paced back and forth
like an old cornball with a nowhere scheme
I like that, “an old cornball with a nowhere scheme.” You can see that this is all written in some kind of early fifties hip talk, maybe one of the first poems written making use of that newborn language. This is the first introduction of Beat or hippie vernacular into poetry that I know of. [Along with] Kerouac�
��s roughly contemporaneous Mexico City Blues, this may be some of the earliest use of that language, which later became very widespread in poetry and imitated badly.
third voice
yeah, by that time BIRD realized the fake
had come to goof
BIRD was about to split, when all of a sudden
the nowhere bird sunk its beady head
into the barrel of BIRD’s horn
bugged, BIRD blew a long crazy note
first voice
it was his last, man, his last
the draggy bird ran death into BIRD’s throat
and the whole building rumbled
when BIRD let go his horn
and the sky got blacker . . . blacker
and the nowhere bird wrapped its muddy wings round BIRD
brought BIRD down
all the way down
fourth voice
BIRD is dead
BIRD is dead
first and second and third voices
yeah, yeah
fourth voice
wail for BIRD
for BIRD is dead
first and second and third voices
yeah, yeah179
That’s where it ends, a pretty strange masque for four voices. Really pretty because it’s not overstated at all. The imagination is very pretty, big bird sinking its beady head into bird’s horn. Bird opposed by the bird of death. Using that kind of fugitive language for playfulness with funny modern concepts, it’s nicely done. Imaginative with real poetic images in it and at the same time flat culturally, not overambitious, poetically just right. It’s down home in a way, “yeah, yeah” being the chorus for many voices. Just the idea of people saying “yeah, yeah” as choruses in itself is odd and original and imaginative for a young kid.
He developed that language through the fifties. In 1955, Corso went out to San Francisco and met everybody. He brought some new poems and wrote a lot of poems while developing a style more and more extravagantly. At the beginning of his book Gasoline, there’s a fantastic long line style, “Ode to Coit Tower,” which ends on the most fantastical Shakespearean line in hippie poetry.
I saw your blackjacketed saints your Zen potsmokers
Athenians and cocksmen
Though the West Wind seemed to harbor there not one
pure Shelleyean dream of let’s say hay-
like universe
golden heap on a wall of fire
sprinting toward the gauzy eradication of
Swindleresque Ink180
I read that and it blew my mind. I thought, that doesn’t make any sense at all, except actually it makes a great deal of sense, if you figure it out. What he’s saying is “I came to San Francisco, but I’m a Shelleyan and I don’t believe all this Zen, pot smoking bullshit, because I didn’t see any pure Shelleyan dream in it.” So what’s swindleresque ink? Disappearing ink. The universe disappearing into itself, a golden universe, the concept of conceptualization erasing itself. Kerouac’s golden ash anyway. “Swindleresque ink” is a perfect characterization of Gregory’s own poetry, where he presents an idea which disappears on itself when you look at it carefully.
Or disharmony contradiction, where one image will contradict another image. It doesn’t seem to make sense, but it does make sense, because he’s playing with words and suggesting something curious. Corso was thinking of some great Shelleyan outburst of pure swindleresque ink language, that is poetics, pure poesie. I thought that was a big touch of genius.
Gregory’s interest was in disharmony. Discord was his method. That is, taking things, turning them inside out, making words contradict each other, or making the image or metaphor clash in a logical way. There is a poem called “This Was My Meal,” or this was my matter, or this was my poetics, or this was my method, this is my way, this is my actuality, this is my beauty.
This Was My Meal
In the peas I saw upside down letters of MONK
Thelonious Monk. Now, how does he do that? Well, he’d look at the peas and say “I saw upside down,” looking at peas he sees something upside down, which is ridiculous to begin with. What? Letters. Of what? Monk?
And beside it, in the Eyestares of Wine
I saw Olive & Blackhair
I decided sunset to dine
I cut through the cowbrain and saw Christmas
& my birthday run hand in hand in the snow
I cut deeper
and Christmas bled to the edge of the plate
I turned to my father
and he ate my birthday
I drank my milk and saw trees outrun themselves
valleys outdo themselves
and no mountain stood a chance of not walking
Dessert came in the spindly hands of stepmother
I wanted to drop fire-engines from my mouth!
But in ran the moonlight and grabbed the prunes.181
It’s total contradiction but okay. “I wanted to drop fire-engines from my mouth!” In other words, he wanted to make the big sound, wanted to make big metaphor, big fire engines out of his mouth. Incredible idea of how to say poetical power. Really direct, totally direct, in the sense of what’s the most powerful screamy red majestical noise maker you can imagine? A fire engine! Okay, now “I wanted to drop fire-engines out of my mouth.” You may not understand that he means he wants to achieve great rhetoric, which is what that line means, but it is so strange in itself that even if you don’t understand what it means it penetrates the mind immediately with some kind of unconscious excitement in the language, excitement of having jumped over a chasm of nonassociation into a real clear logical association, so that it does mean something.
But what contradicted him? “In ran the moonlight,” beauty, “and grabbed the prunes.” In ran beauty and grabbed reality. How can moonlight grab the prunes? What was the moonlight doing running in there anyway? It’s obviously playful, obviously an imaginary world of contradictions.
He was interested in taking the actuals of his own thoughts, like moonlight, prunes, fire engines, Christmas, father, mother, peas, and then turning it upside down so that it contradicts itself. And by these discords, or self-contradictions, making a funny kind of harmony or beauty.
CHAPTER 34
Corso and Gasoline and Other Poems
Peter, I, and Gregory were living in Amsterdam in October 1957. He was preparing this book [Gasoline] for City Lights and so he asked me to write an introduction. I asked him to write something about his method, because he had once given me a long lecture on his method, which completely knocked me out. It was a description of his mind process while writing and I’d never heard anybody talk so precise in such a funny direction as he did. Gregory’s method was that if he wanted to write a romantic poem about a young girl, then he would follow her in his mind’s eye to the courtyard and climb up her balcony to the fire escape like Romeo and Juliet, but once he got on the fire escape he would extend the image somewhere else. Not into some corny regular idea, he would find something that would contradict it. If there was laundry hanging from the fire escape, then there would have to be corpses, laundered human skins, and that would lead to [asking] how’d that get there? Well, maybe there was a fight on the moon or whatever occurred to him. And if there was a fight on the moon there had to be a spaceship. In other words, following mind associations and making a metaphor, but rather than completing it logically, completing the metaphor by making it contradict itself constantly, twisting it around and turning it upside down. He called that automaticism. Taking those automatic associations and making them contradict.
I asked him to write a little essay that I could enclose within his preface, explaining his precise method of association. And he said, “With me automaticism is an intract moment in which the mind accelerates a constant hour of mind-foolery, mind genius,
mind madness, when Bird Parker or Miles Davis blow a standard piece of music, they break off into other ownself little understood sounds, well that’s my way with poetry. X, Y, and Z, call it automatic, I call it a standard flow because the offset words are standard, that is intentionally distractive, or diversed into my own sound. Of course many will say that a poem written on that order is unpolished. That’s just what I want them to be. Because I have made them truly my own which is inevitably something new, like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected by hip people who listen.”
One excellent example is an odd poem, very Shelleyan, which he has down here as characterization, “Don’t Shoot the Warthog,” the warthog as being the muse. He chose the most ugly beast imaginable for his muse. He identifies with that strange ugly muse. “My goodness” is his comment on that one. Which is another way of putting his aesthetic out front.
Don’t Shoot the Warthog
A child came to me
swinging an ocean on a stick.
Well, see, he’s doing that again, a child swinging an ocean on a stick. Kind of a weird idea. Why not?
He told me his sister was dead,
I pulled down his pants
and gave him a kick.
What he’s trying to do is contradict each line. Each line contradicted a little bit.
I drove him down the streets
down the night of my generation
I screamed his name, his cursed name,
down the streets of my generation
and children lept in joy to the name
and running came.
Mothers and fathers bent their heads to hear;
I screamed the name.
The child trembled, fell,
and staggered up again,
I screamed his name!
And a fury of mothers and fathers
sank their teeth into his brain.
I called to the angels of my generation
on the rooftops, in the alleyways,
beneath the garbage and the stones,
I screamed the name! and they came
and gnawed the child’s bones.
I screamed the name: Beauty
Beauty Beauty Beauty182
A funny combination. So his conception of beauty is as a warthog, discord. His method of writing was to go to the opposite, to be contrary, as with all of his life, to create beautiful objects out of the unexpected contradictory imagery. Beauty as the unexpected, like a fire engine dropped out of your mouth. Beauty as ugly, beauty as discord, beauty as contradiction, beauty as surprise, beauty as unreality, beauty as anything except the expected. So beauty as the ugly old self. Beauty as a dumb kid in the Lower East Side.
The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats Page 27