Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit [Signed]

Corso, Gregory

ISBN 10: 0811208087 / ISBN 13: 9780811208086

Published by New Directions, New York, 1981

About this Item

SIGNED in full & additionally annotated WITH CORRECTIONS by the well-known Beat Generation poet. Corso has signed/inscribed the half-title page in black ink: "With corrections - Gregory Corso". The corrections, in Corso's hand, & in black ink, appear on the following four pages: page 2 (one word), page 3 (one word), page 7 (one word), & page 32 (three lines). New Directions Paperbook 522 (copyright 1973, 1975, 1981). Contains 50 poems by Corso. Printed in the USA. Covers & spine with mild wear, small stain at pages 38-42, otherwise a nice clean tight solid softcover copy. 57pp. Scarce SIGNED & corrected copy. RARE.

Seller Inventory # 001154

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit [Signed]
• Publisher: New Directions, New York
• Publication Date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811208087
• ISBN 13: 9780811208086
• Binding: Pictorial Wraps
• Edition: First Thus
• Condition: Very Good
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Beat Generation
  • Signed
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

Gregory Corso is still kicking “the ivory applecart of tyrannical values,” heralding the wild and keenly experienced life. Since the 1950s, when with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others, Corso electrified the literary establishment with what he describes as “spontaneous subterranean poesy of the streets,” he has fathered “three fleshed angels,” traveled through Europe and Egypt, seen the demise of several fellow “Daddies of an Age,” and now finds himself over half a century old.

The lush, fervent oratory of Shelley is evident in these poems of one who may be his most ardent American heir, and the author of The Happy Birthday of Death and Elegiac Feelings American never entirely forgets that a “leaky lifeboat” is the mortal’s only home. “You’d think there would be chaos/the futility of it all/Yet children are born/oft times spitting images of us/ … and the gift keeps on coming.”

Corso knows death, despair, and silence only too well, and his first major collection in eleven years is permeated with a sense of crucial choices to be made. “Columbia U Poesy Reading––1975” begins with Beat history and ends with a solitary vision of God in the form of the muse: “Seated on a cold park bench/I heard her moan: ’O Gregorio Gregorio/you’ll fail me, I know/Walking away/a little old lady behind me was singing: True! True!’/’Not so!’/ rang the spirit, ’Not so!’” In a cocky, exuberant blend of high style and down-home New Yorkese, the Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit brings more auspicious tidings.

About the Author

Gregory Corso (1930-2001) was abandoned by his mother a month after his birth at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York. Growing up in foster care and on the streets of Little Italy, Corso was a juvenile delinquent who spent time in Clinton Correctional Facility, in the cell recently vacated by gangster "Lucky" Luciano. An aspiring poet, Corso was taken under the wing of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and became the youngest member of the Beat Generation's inner circle, with whom he lived and work in the Beat Hotel, a lodging house in Paris, during the late fifties. There he created one of his signature works, "Bomb", a poem composed of typewritten strips of paper arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Late in life, Corso became reunited with his mother and maintained a close relationship with her until his death.