CORSO, GREGORY

born March 26, 1930, New York, N.Y., U.S. in full Gregory Nunzio Corso American poet, a leading member in the mid-1950s of the Beat movement (q.v.). Corso lived in an orphanage and with foster parents until he was 11, when his remarried father took him to live with him. 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 literature. He met the poet Allen Ginsberg in Greenwich Village in 1950 and through him continued his education as a writer and a noninstitutionalized man. He worked in 195152 for the Los Angeles Examiner and then traveled to South America and Africa. In 1955 Corso's first volume of verse, The Vestal Lady on Brattle, was published. In 1956 Corso went to San Francisco, where Ginsberg was residing, and the Beat movement was born at public readings in the bars and coffeehouses there. Of all Corso's poems, those in Gasoline (1958) are the most typical, using the rhythmic, incantatory style effective in spoken verse. In The Happy Birthday of Death (1960) he returned to an easier, conversational tone. Long Live Man (1962), Selected Poems (1962), The Mutation of the Spirit (1964), Elegiac Feelings American (1970), Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981), and other books of poetry followed. He also wrote plays and a novel.