httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGPDZD7AK5o

Five poems by Gregory Corso

On this date in 2001 beat poet Gregory Corso died (born 1930).

Frye in “World Enough Without Time”:

The “beat” writers are trying to identify the genuine proletariat, the body of those who are excluded from the benefits of society and have sense enough to realize it.  For such a proletariat the road to freedom is not through organizing a revolution to seize power from the squares and become squares in their turn, but through breaking the current of social  energy by drifting, bumming, playing jazz, taking dope, or what not, and entering the world of the pure present through the break.  The beat philosophy may be wrong — that is, it may be crazy itself instead of merely making use of craziness — but its symbolism is a contemporary cultural force to be reckoned with. (CW 21, 292)