Student: Do you get in arguments, Gregory, with Ginsberg about anything that goes down at Naropa?
Corso: No I don’t bother with that one. That’s his choice. Fucking consideration. Whatever people want let ‘em take the shot man, they’re not going to live very long. What is it, a hundred years? or some shit.
- THE BALLGAME’S OVER the dialogues of Gregory Corso and Tom Clark on The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, unpublished transcript once held in New College of California’s library, edited by Poetics student Allen Ensign
…
Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea
The above lines serve as epitaph upon Corso’s grave in Rome’s non-Catholic cemetery. His ashes are buried just across the way from Shelley’s own. There’s footage “out there” of Corso at the site in his later years, hanging out, taking notes, while the feral cemetery cats wander about. Keats is buried in the far corner of the same cemetery and there’s a photo of Ed Dorn in his last years standing by that grave similarly with notebook out and feline nearby. While Pound is laid up to the north on Venice’s San Michele Cemetery Island with lizards by the dozens crawling in and out of the tombs there.
Italy is a poet-pilgrimage well worth
making and Rome a fine locale for hosting Corso’s remains. As he puts it in “Is
Love Instinctive” one of a number of late poems gathered in The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997-2000 (Lithic
Press, 2022):
I loved things romantic
most things I loved
seemed lifeless
I loved beautiful Greek statues
I loved young dead great poets
And so how fitting he now lies amongst them.
Throughout The Dot he also frequently imagines entering into eternity via The
Mermaid Tavern, that infamous poet’s watering hole of Old England frequented by
the likes of Donne, Marvell, Herrick, etc.
say when my time is up
will I be welcomed at The Mermaid Tavern?
There’s Joyce standing at the bar
with a booted foot on the brass rail
It looks like [with] a haughty eye he’s on me
It doesn’t look good
there’s Keats seated alone
looking dejectedly down upon his death mask
The bartender was standing at the far end
It was Andrew Marvell and he was conversing with Milton
There was Auden; him I knew
I acknowledge him
he smiled…or was it a grimace?
I moved away from the door
and began looking at the Blakes on the walls
These lines show how truly “in process” the writing in The Dot remains. I’ve added “with” to attempt smooth out the haughty eye line, it only sort of helps out. Corso abruptly shifts perspective, moving from imagining being at the scene inside the Mermaid to as if describing an actual past visit within those walls, perhaps recalling a literal dream experience? While his wondering whether Auden smiles or grimaces at him offers a rather touching glimpse of self-judgement and regret over his well-documented abrasive social antics over the years, which—from the references he makes to them in The Dot—appear to have plagued his conscience.
The Mermaid also appears in “I feel like writing a beautiful poem…” (many entries in The Dot are untitled, the editors thankfully supply an index of titles and first lines):
The Mermaid Tavern sign creaks
like a mouse caught in a windy creaky door
each squeak lets go a dot of blood on the hinge
within the velvet suits have a boot up on the bar rail
“Brightness falls from the air” was your best
And “Fat as butter; cheap as egg” yours
back and forth it went
Each poet reciting the other’s best line
Once again, he is back to imagining the
visit. An exercise he repeats yet another time in “When the year 1 arrived for
the descendants…”
the labor is in dwindling the redundancy;
the finite-infinite thing can make it in a line or two—
To tailor the brown velvet suit when I enter the Mermaid Tavern
with Joyce and Allen seated at a table; and the Immortal Bard
a booted foot on the brass rail; I’ll order a stout and vow
my soul to keep my mouth shut the entire stay—
It’s rather impossible to imagine Corso
ever managing keep such a vow…yet there’s no doubt he’s now at The Mermaid
Tavern, in velvet suit with booted foot on brass rail as he wags about and
swaggers his way through the endless night of elevated bombast and ridicule
challenging everybody and anybody as outside rain falls and the poets inside
warmly cheer him on.
for Tate Swindell
from notes presented on 9/21/2022
at The Golden Dot release reading
Bird and Beckett Books, San Francisco
Patrick James Dunagan recently edited David Meltzer's Rock Tao and Roots and Routes: Poetics at New College of California (eds. Dunagan Lazzara & Whittington). His new book of poems, After the Banished, variations off of ancient Chinese poets Li Bai&co, is dedicated to Tom Clark.