Born: Andernach, Germany: 1920
Died: San Pedro, California: 1994

Charles wrote more than 45 books of poetry and prose, and many have been translated into other languages. Most of his books were published by Black Sparrow Press. He began writing early in life, but did not publish anything until the early 1960s (except for some earlier poetry). He was a drifter who was living on the edge, working different jobs. His fascination with death and insanity appear in his writings. Though not considered “beat,” he is often included in anthologies and publications that discuss other beat works.

Books

Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960)
Longshot Pomes for Broke Players (1962)
Run with the Hunted (1962)
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963)
Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965)
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard (1965)
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts (1965)
All the Assholes in the World and Mine (1966)
At Terror Street and Agony Way (1968)
Poems Written Before Jumping out of an 8 Story Window (1968)
Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
A Bukowski Sampler (1969)
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969)
Fire Station (1970)
Post Office (1971) Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972)
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972)
South of No North (1973)
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems (1955-1974)
Factotum (1975)
Love Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1(974-1977)
Women (1978)
Play the Piano Drunk/Like a Percussion Instrument/Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit (1979)
Shakespeare Never Did This (1979)
Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981) Ham on Rye (1982)
Bring Me Your Love (1983)
Hot Water Music (1983)
There’s No Business (1984)
War All the Time: Poems (1981-1984, 1984)
You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986)
The Movie: “Barfly” (1987)
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, (1946-1966, 1988)
Hollywood (1989)
Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems (1990)
The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992)
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters (1960-1970, 1993)
Pulp (1994)

I went back to Mexico City and saw Joan Burroughs leaning forward in a garden chair, arms on her knees…

Before Bill, she lived with Edie Parker (Kerouac’s girlfriend at the time) in New York City. Their pad was a meeting place for Jack Kerouac, Hal Chase, Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other Columbia University students. The place was a haven for Tequila, Benzedrine, long midnight talks, and writing. Joan was described as intelligent and beautiful, and she got into Kant, Plato, and classical music. Kerouac described Joan, Allen, and Bill as Oscar Wilde types.

Soon her abuse of Benzedrine and drinking became destructive. At a party in 1952, William told guests he was going to show them the “William Tell Act” and attempted to shoot at a glass of water on top of Joan’s head. He missed (everyone had been drinking). Joan died immediately, and William spent less than two weeks in jail (with the help of a good lawyer). He credited Joan’s death to his writing thereafter.

Joan is the main character in Gary Walkow’s Beat, a movie selected in the American Spectrum category for the Sundance Film Festival 2000. Sundance’s movie description of Beat says,

“Joan was the center of a circle of friends who would later become the beats. They all lived on the edge, and they all shared a gift for falling in love with the wrong people. It is 1951, and William (Kiefer Sutherland) and Joan (Courtney Love) are living in Mexico City. When old friends Ginsberg (Ron Livingston) and Lucien Carr (Norman Reedus) drive down for a visit, William has taken off to Guatemala with another man. Joan is feeling low but is captivated by the idea of a car trip to an erupting volcano. On the road, Joan and Lucien fall in love. When William returns home, there is a confrontation over the obvious flaws in their marriage which ends in a drunken game of William Tell.”

Note that the film is rather controversial in its implications about Joan and Lucien’s romance, so the reasons behind their quote of the William Tell Act may or may not be true. Joan was known as “Jane” in On the Road and Subterraneans, “Mary Dennison” in Town and the City, and “June” in Vanity of Duluoz.

Born: February 5, 1914, St. Louis, Missouri
Died: August 2, 1997, Lawrence, Kansas

If you ever listen to William S. Burroughs’ readings of Dr. Benway or Twilight’s Last Gleamings, you’ll realize his sardonic humor that strikes an immediate cynical chord with the audience. You’ll laugh, because Burroughs is funny. I guess he’s a bit weird, too, but not so alien or out there that it’s impossible to relate to his mindset. He edges on the planet, with a couple feet here and there, but for all that’s been written about him, I think that he’s rather infectiously part of folks’ thoughts–whether or not we care to admit it.

Unlike some of the other beats, who were born into various forms of struggle and poverty, Burroughs was born into comfort. His grandfather had invented the adding machine, and his uncle Ivy Lee actually was Hitler’s publicist and an image-builder to John D. Rockefeller Jr., after the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. Burroughs thoughts of the Nazi regime were that, according to Word Virus (Grove Press), “When gangsters write the laws, as Burroughs was sure they did, not only in the Third Reich but in most of the post-WWII West, ethics become fugitives, sanity is branded madness, and the artist’s only option is total resistance.”

He was a thin, wrangly child–an outcast among “normal” children. Though very intelligent, he was an early rebel against the status-quo. He was branded as a “problem child” in school and was interested in drugs, homosexuality, trickery, and non-convention. After St. Louis, the family lived in New Mexico, and Burroughs attended Los Alamos Ranch (he dropped out, but attended Harvard later).

Three years after his graduation from Harvard, he went to Chicago and held a job as an exterminator (see The Naked Lunch). Here, he hung out with dealers and let his imagination grow. In 1943, he moved to New York, where his friend Lucien Carr was attending Columbia University. This is where Burroughs also met Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Edie Parker, and his future common-law wife, Joan Vollmer. Documented essays and biographies of the beats tell that these times in NYC in the early 1940s comprised the “real” beginning of the beat generation. The West Coast variety was alive too, with political poetry and underground presses–but this initial gang, also including Herbert Huncke, who Burroughs met in New York City, had not yet gotten to know the poets in San Francisco. It was out of the Kerouac/Burroughs/Ginsberg/Vollmer/Parker/Carr/Huncke clan that the words such as beatific, seeking, and furtive came about.

Burroughs was older than the rest, and mentored the others’ writing styles. They were all seekers of a new philosophy, and inspired by Rimbaud’s poetry (particularly “Seasons in Hell”) attempted to put their literary and spiritual quests into a label or definition. They came up with a “New Vision.” According to the Portable Beat Reader, Burroughs “discouraged their more extravagant antics, like their candlelit exercises writing poetry with their own blood, and urged them to read one of his favorite books, Oswald Spengler’s Decline and Fall of the West, in an effort to help them develop a more substantial historical context for their New Vision.”

Burroughs, though discouraging seemingly “more extravagant antics,” of his younger peers, was on a darker trail. He became addicted to heroin, and did what most junkies will do: sell prized possessions for more dope. He sold his typewriter in 1954, and wrote longhand. His addiction to heroin lasted 15 years.

In 1951, he was living in Mexico with Joan Vollmer. There was a party. I’ve heard variations of the story (he was attempting to shoot a glass of champagne, no, of water, etc.) off Joan’s head. This was his “William Tell” act. He missed, and Joan died. This one act, though Burroughs got off easily with the aid of a lawyer, dug at him his whole life. Though Burroughs was a homosexual, and interested in Joan in other ways (they had great familiarity, and their minds clicked, and they loved each other), he was heartbroken about this event. Perhaps not heartbroken in the typical sense, for there’s not much typical to Burroughs–but he was not an alien, and Joan’s death affected him greatly. His writing was influenced by her thereafter, and he grieved her loss like anyone would grieve the loss of a loved one.

Thirty-three years after this event, Burroughs finally wrote about it in his introduction to Queer: “[the death] brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have no choice except to write my way out.”

Burroughs left the country after Joan’s death, and until 1973, lived as an expatriate. During this time, he traveled extensively, wrote, and collaborated with Brion Gysin in the cut-up methodology. After returning to the United States, he met James Grauerholz, who would become Burroughs’ biographer–and who helped Burroughs create some of his extravagant characters, such as Dr. Benway. Later in Burroughs life, he infected punk music and musicians such as Patti Smith, acted in movies (such as The Drugstore Cowboy), went on the television show Saturday Night Live, and went down the path that other beats went: into further subcultures, further paths, and further media.

Burroughs was a genius, really, who developed his own perspective of the world at a very young age, and who continued his sneer against conformity up until his dying day, when he smoked the “sacred herb” (August, 1997).

Allow me to stop here and put Burroughs into the “beat category,” which is an awful label in one way–but which exists nonetheless. The beats, as we call them now, did form a bond that was more closely tied to a central conciousness than to similarity in writing styles. Burroughs was nothing like Gary Snyder, for example. Burroughs seemed dark, comparably, and was coming from the East Coast circle of beats of peers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Herbert Huncke. He was an alien. Snyder, from the West Coast poetry scene, was lighter, completely immersed in nature and culture. Their approaches were different. But one thing in common with these types of beat personalities is that the way, or dao, was off the beaten path. To be beat, simply, to me seems to be off the path–writers who go off into their own style of wilderness to see what is out there and to come back to express what they found.

With that thought in mind, here are the kinds of things Burroughs wrote in his 83 years of existence on this planet:
(Taken and varied from Adrien Begrand’s review of Word Virus):

Short Stories:

• “Personal Magnetism” shows his trademark sense of humor starting to peek through his writing.
• “Twilight’s Last Gleamings,” his famous collaboration with buddy Kells Elvins, is the first example of Burroughs’ brilliant satirical imagination.
• In “And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks,” an early collaboration with Jack Kerouac, they both (in alternating chapters) embellished the story of the famous David Kammerer murder

Novels:

Junkie, Queer, and Yage Letters are all key to Burroughs, with his touching, famous introduction to Queer, where he mourns the loss of his companion Joan (saying it was his mission to write his way out of the darkness created by the shooting incident); and “Roosevelt After The Inauguration,” a savagely funny routine from The Yage Letters, which describes, in the way only Burroughs can describe, the first few days of a power-mad politician’s presidency. The apocalyptic, horrific, hilarious story marks a real turning-point in Burroughs’ writing. However, the real turning point is Interzone.

Interzone is the real stuff, the start of the journey into Burroughs’ apocalyptic vision. The book Word Virus starts off with excerpts from the book Interzone, including the section “Word”. In it Burroughs finally lets go, attempting for the first time a sream-of-consciousness style, writing anything that pops into his head. He accurately describes his experience as finally letting loose an enema that had been inside him for forty-odd years. He let the shit fly, and the world (and the Word) was all the better for it.

The Naked Lunch, one of Burroughs’ trademarks, has Dr. Benway, the immortal “Atrophied Preface”, and, of course, the talking asshole.

The cut-up novels of the mid-sixties, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express comprise another trilogy. The Soft Machine is the best book of the three, with “The Mayan Caper” ranking among Burroughs’ all-time best pieces. The Ticket That Exploded, when read in full, is an alternately fascinating and frustrating book, where Burroughs lets the cut-ups and fold-ins nearly spiral out of control, but the excerpts provided highlight the best parts of the book, and make his ‘language as a virus’ theory more clear and comprehensible.

The Nova Express excerpts also keep things a bit more focused, instead of going into cut-up overkill. “Inspector Lee: Nova Heat” (Word Virus) is definitive of Burroughs’ cut-up theory, but rapidly loses momentum in the pieces “Who Is The Third That Walks Beside You” and “Last Post Danger Ahead.”

The selections from The Third Mind, Burroughs’ collaboration with Gysin, are at first interesting, but quickly bog down in far too much cut-up experimentation. It’s a stultifying read, and what memorable parts there are hard to find again amid the mess of random phrases. The pieces from The Job are a bit too long, nearly thirty pages devoted to Burroughs’ rambling on and on about tape splicing, L. Ron Hubbard’s e-meters, and other subjects.

The Job was never a book I really totally got into in the past, and I still found it a bit boring. The last half of the section, however, redeems the meandering of the previous selections. “Remembering Jack Kerouac” is a beautiful tribute to Burroughs’ good friend, and there’s a pang of regret there, for the two didn’t see eye to eye in Jack’s later years. “When Did I Stop Wanting To Be President?” is another classic hilarious routine, describing Burroughs’ demented fantasy of being named Commissioner of Sewers for the City of St. Louis. “The Limits Of Control”, “Immortality”, and “The Johnson Family”, all from The Adding Machine, are outstanding as well.

Two of Burroughs’ best books, The Wild Boys and Exterminator!, are excerpted in the next section. The Wild Boys is given only twenty pages, and is missing “The Green Nun”, one of my favorite parts. What is there is great, though. Several stories from Exterminator!, such as “The Discipline of DE”, “What Washington? What Orders?”, and the classic “The Priest, They Called Him”, pay fitting tribute to one of Burroughs’ most underrated books.

The Red Night Trilogy is next, and it is obvious that editors James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (and William himself) wanted to stress the importance of the three books: Cities Of The Red Night, The Place Of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands. The section is given a whopping one hundred-or-so pages, and deservedly so. Along with Naked Lunch and Soft Machine, the Red Night Trilogy marks the high point of Burroughs’ writing. He introduces several memorable characters like Clem Snide, Audrey Carsons, Joe the Dead, Neferti, and Burroughs’ own old-age pseudonym William Seward Hall. Starting in ‘Cities’, a send-up of old children’s pirate novels, Burroughs makes the journey towards death, redemption, and eventual immortality, which continues through ‘Dead Roads’ (in Old-Western form), and culminates in the Egyptian-inspired Western Lands, where William seems to see the writing on the wall, saying he “had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words.” He realizes that his pilgrimage will be an ongoing one, and seems to accept the end of his journey as a writer. After reading the Red Night section, I had a better understanding of the entire trilogy than when I first read it, and it’s a fitting, monumental climax to the Reader.

The ‘Later Work’ section features small excerpts from The Cat Inside and My Education: A Book Of Dreams, and beautifully shows Burroughs’ tender side, especially in his loving ode to his cats. I remember Patricia Elliott telling us on the beat-l mailing list two years ago that William was very broken up about the death of his favorite cat, and James Grauerholz mentions the same thing. With all of Burroughs’ best friends dead, the death of his cat Fletch was the clincher, and he never totally recovered.

I would have liked to have seen excerpts from such books as Port Of Saints, Ah Pook Is Here, Ghost Of Chance, Blade Runner, and Last Words Of Dutch Schultz, but, as it is, the book is overflowing with essential material. It is noted in the book that all the pieces which were included met with Burroughs’ approval, shortly before he died, so there is consolation in the fact that this was the book that Burroughs himself wanted to put out.

Burroughs is in several Kerouac books: as Will Dennison in Town and the City, Wilson (Will) Holmes Humbbard in Vanity of Duluoz, Old Bull Lee in On the Road, Frank Carmody in Subterraneans, and Bull Hubbard in Desolation Angels and Book of Dreams. He is also known as Dennison in Holmes’ Go.

Books and Audio

Streets of Chance (1981)
A William Burroughs Reader (1982)
Ah Pook is Here! (1979)
Ali’s Smile (1971)
Apocalypse (1988)
Blade Runner (1979)
Brion Gysin Let the Mice In (1973)
Cities of the Red Night (1981)
Cobble Stone Gardens (1976)
Colloque de Tanger (1976, 1979)
Dead Fingers Talk (1963, 1970)
Early Routines (1981)
Electronic Revolution (1971, 1976)
Entretiens avec William Burroughs (1969)
Exterminator (1960, 1973)
Ghost of Chance (1991)
Interzone (1987)
Jack Kerouac (1971)
Junkie (1953, 1973, 1977)
Letters to Allen Ginsberg (1953-1957)
Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973)
Minutes To Go (1960)
Naked Scientology (1978)
Oeuvre Croise’e (1977)
Paper Cloud (1992)
Port of Saints (1973, 1975)
Port of Saints (1980)
QueerViking (1985, 1987)
Roosevelt after Inauguration And Other Atrocities (1965, 1979)
Ruski (1984)
Seven Deadly Sins (1992)
Sidetripping (1975)
Sinki’s Sauna (1982)
Snack (1975)
So Who Owns Death TV? (1967)
The Adding Machine: Collected Essays (1985)
The Book of Breathing
The Burroughs File (1984)
The Cat Inside (1986)
The Dead Star (1969)
The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1984)
The Job (1970)
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970)
The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1975, 1987)
The Naked Lunch (1959)
The Place of Dead Roads (1983)
The Retreat Diaries (1976)
The Soft Machine (1961)
The Soft Machine (1966, 1968)
The Third Mind (1978)
The Ticket that Exploded (1962)
The Ticket that Exploded (1967)
The Western Lands (1987_
The Wild Boys (1971)
The Yage Letters (1964, 1992)
Time (1965,1966)
Uncommon Quotes, Vol. 1. (1989)
Valentines Day Reading (1965)
White Subway (1973)

-from The Portable Beat Reader

Lucien Carr was part of the Columbia University student circle with whom Kerouac and Ginsberg hung out in their college days. Into literature and poetry, taking Benzedrine, and smoking pot, these students were a little rebellious, but even more so were dissatisfied with the social structure as it was post-WW2. They were seekers of a new philosophy, and inspired by Rimbaud’s poetry (particularly Seasons in Hell) and attempting to put their literary and spiritual quests into some label or definition, they came up with a “New Vision.”

According to the Portable Beat Reader, Burroughs “discouraged their more extravagant antics, like their candlelit exercises writing poetry with their own blood, and urged them to read one of his favorite books, Oswald Spengler’s Decline and Fall of the West, in an effort to help them develop a more substantial historical context for their ‘New Vision.’”

During Carr’s friendship with the other beats, he was the object of obsession by a man named David Kammerer, who pursued him so incessantly (including threatening Carr) that it broke whatever threshold Carr might have had regarding a level head. Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer, and was later sent to jail. This was around the same time Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife, Joan (who had filed for divorce with Burroughs, after falling in love with Carr).

There is currently in production a biopic called Kill Your Darlings that is about this event and the young searchers of a new writing style. Kerouac and Burroughs worked together on And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, which is about the Carr-Kammerer events as well. The novel was written in 1945. The book was not published until after Carr died in 2005.

These incidents put a bad rap on the beats. After Carr’s jail sentence, he stayed friends with the original Beat circle, and eventually found a steady job as a news service editor.

Carr is known in Kerouac’s books as Kenny Wood in Town and the City, Julien (Love) in Big Sur and Book of Dreams and Visions of Cody, Sam Vedder in Subterraneans, Damion in On the Road, and Claude de Maubrus in Vanity of Duluoz.

Carolyn is a writer and a painter and mother. She had trouble with her husband’s philandering, but eventually tried to come to terms with it because of her love for him. After his death, she moved to London. With her children now grown, and even with grandchildren, she visits them in California and stays an active individual in the lives of her family and in the ever-present history of the beats. She wrote Off the Road in 1990, which showed her perspective of the beat generation and her involvement in it. Carolyn was “Evelyn” in Big Sur and Visions of Cody and “Camille” in On the Road

Born: 1926, Salt Lake City, Utah
Died: 1968, San Miguel de Allande, Mexico

Photo credit: Larry Keenan

Neal Cassady was the famous Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. Kerouac described Neal Cassady and friend Allen Ginsberg (Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx) in the novel. “But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Kerouac was incredibly impressed by Neal Cassady throughout the years, even though they lost touch for the most part in the mid-sixties, after Kerouac began drinking more and after Cassady’s troubles seemed to have multiplied. Yet, as younger men, they were fascinated with each other and in touch more often. Many of Kerouac’s books, especially On the Road and Visions of Cody were inspired by Cassady, who took to the road like a madman and wrote wordslinging, fresh spontaneous letters.

Cassady was the Wolfeian adventure hero from Kerouac’s youth, come to life. Neal’s and Jack’s “brotherhood” seemed to be a resurrected symbol of Kerouac’s lost brotherhood with his Gerard, who had died when Kerouac was only nine. Also, Kerouac was sympathetic to Cassady’s dreams to find his father, who had been a drunk in Denver, in and out of jail (much like Dean’s own experiences). From The Americans, in which there is also a passage from Kerouac’s Visions of Cody, it’s all about Dean going home, which is metaphorical, since Dean’s “home” seemed to be the road, and the search for the expanse of paradise from the road.

Cassady settled down (for the most part) with his wife Carolyn and their three children, near San Francisco, and worked many jobs, including one as a brakeman. Though his visions were to be a family man and support his wife and children, that wasn’t often the case.

Kerouac often stayed with the Cassadys during his road travels, and became very close to the entire family. He adored Carolyn and the three children. Neal and family are mentioned in several books, including the above two mentioned, Big Sur, and Desolation Angels.

In his later years, Cassady joined Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, along with Allen Ginsberg, and also suffered an arrest and conviction relating to marijuana possession, which was the final straw with his marriage to Carolyn. Toward the end of his life, he still visited Carolyn and his children–yet was going downhill, even mentally. Carolyn’s book describes a scene wherein Neal came home and took a shower, and became very delusional. Neal died after falling asleep on some railroad tracks in Mexico. Many books were written about Cassady, but his only novel, The Fist Third, went unfinished and unpublished until after he died.

A note about Neal Cassady’s death: when he died, a girlfriend went down to Mexico to retrieve his ashes. She brought them to Carolyn, who was living in Los Gatos, near San Francisco. Although Neal had taken numerous mistresses during their marriage, he was closest to Carolyn emotionally. They had a large bond, which was perpetuated by their three children, Carolyn’s final tolerances of Neal’s long-sought seeking and freedom, discussions of art and Cayce and philosophy and literature, and mutual friends–including Ginsberg and Kerouac. Carolyn still retains the ashes in a fancy box.

According to Adam Saroyan, who wrote “Genesis Angel” in the Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, “Stapled to the side of the box is a scrap of paper on which is typed Contiene Cenizas Del Sr. Neal Cassady Jr. in faint ink.”

Neal Cassady is known as Dean Moriarty in On the Road; Cody Pomeroy in Visions of Cody, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur, and Book of Dreams; and as Leroy in Subterraneans. He is also known as Hart Kennedy in Holmes’ Go.

He has published people like Gregory Corso and Angus MacLise in his rice-paper presses. A complete artistic accomplishment, bibliography, and biography of Ira–as well as articles and artwork–is at Big Bridge Magazine. With permissions, I’ve excerpted a bio here.

He uses phrases like: “Electronic/Multimedia/Shamanism” and Akashic Record and they are cool names if you know what they mean or can get past them. He is not a “Beat” and resents association with the Beats though he has been called “post-beat” which is important for our knowledge. But I see him as being in the heart and belly of the 60′s doing the real work–camera, pen, dope, exploration of mysticism, a multi-faceted phenomenological mystic with real visionary powers. And I want to open people up to him. Bring them through a friendly door and then let them descend into Ira’s world without knowing it is happening, and then finally find themselves in this mystic paradise of life and death, his “revolving door”. And then ask themselves “how in the world could I have not known Ira Cohen?” Or have not known how key he is and was to the understanding of the old and the new, the hallucinatory mind-expanding layers of reality that frighten and amuse us, the panorama of the traveling circus of all physical and non-physical things. Cohen is a true and unquestionable original innovator, friend of Gysin, Burroughs, Bowles, and Charles Henri Ford, the absolute geniuses of transformation, transmigration, and the cosmic joke. And then when the audience walks away they will say, where is that monument to Ira Cohen, the one we built for Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for Burroughs and Valery, for Genet and Gertrude Stein. Ira Cohen must be made accessible! But he has made it absolutely impossible to penetrate the organic construct of his spirit, without running the risk that you will sell him out in the process–or maybe not. Maybe something gentle to begin with, a pale lavender, a dash of blue and fluff of white, then the slow spinning of Gods and Gurus and Shamans and Mythologies, the painted faces, deformed limbs, the broken erections, the flaming corpse of his dearest friend Angus MacLise and then settling everyone down to say: Hey, it’s alright. There is life, laughter, love and humanity in these strange visions, no need to come down from your trip, be cool with it, it is the inside of a beetle’s shell, life in a termite nest, air rushing through the lungs and jaws of a lion, a hoot!
- Michael Rothenberg

1935: Born to deaf parents; learned to spell on his fingers when he was one.

1964: Edited and published GNAOUA in Tangier featuring William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Jack Smith and Irving Rosenthal.

1966-1970: Started the Universal Mutant Repertory Company and became “The Father of Mylar Photography,” making celebrated photographs in bendable mirrors of Jimi Hendrix, Charles Ludlam, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Robert LaVigne, etc.
1966: Brought out The Hashish Cookbook under the name of Panama Rose, and Jilala, an LP record of Moroccan Trance Music. Wrote The Goblet of Dreams for Playboy Magazine.

1968: Directed and starred in the award winning film The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda. Appeared in Jack Smith’s Reefers of Technicolor Island. Produced Paradise Now in Amerika, a film of the Living Theater’s historic 1968 American tour.
1970s: Went to Kathmandu and started the Starstreams Poetry Series under the Bardo Matrix imprint, publishing on rice paper the work of Gregory Corso, Charles Henri Ford, Angus MacLise and Paul Bowles (among others). Also published his own work including Poems From The Cosmic Crypt, Seven Marvels and Gilded Splinters.

1980-1985: Three photos by Ira Cohen (of Jules Deelder, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg) were produced as part of a limited-edition silkscreen series (1980-1993) by Kirke Wilson, and published by Ins & Outs Press, Amsterdam, Holland. Ira and Kirke Wilson later collaborated independently on an Akashic Silkscreen Edition print, a portrait of Charles Henri Ford from Ira’s photograph. Ins & Outs Press also published a series of postcards, which included many of Ira’s photographs, most notably the Bandaged Poets series.

1980 to present: Moved back to New York.

Photographic exhibitions worldwide include: Kathmandu Portfolio, The Bandaged Poet Series, Kings with Straw Mats, Dangerous Visions, Retrospectacle, About Faces (with Carol Beckwith), New York Slings hots, From The Mylar Chamber, a two-man show at the Lessing Gallery in NYC with Man Ray, a two-man show at Space Time Light New York) with Jack Micheline, etc. Photographs have appeared in The London Sunday Times, Avant Garde, LIFE Magazine, Facade Paris), Nexus, Nieuwe Revue (Amsterdam), Caliban, etc.

Galleries include: Wildfire Gallery (Amsterdam), Photo Boutique (New York), ART (New York), October Gallery (London), Visionary Gallery New York), Deer Gallery (New York), Susan Cooper Gallery (Woodstock, NY), TAM TAM Gallery (Prague), Caravan of Dreams (Ft. Worth, TX), Varia Theater (Brussels), Nul Gallery (Amsterdam), Merlin Theater (Budapest), TB Institute (Tokyo), Anya Gosseln Gallery (Dublin), Gallery of Photography (Dublin), Plateau (Akashic Weekend, Brussels)
He has photographed many book and record covers including: John McLaughlin’s Devotion and Spirit’s The 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus. Recently, he has made photographs for Bill Laswell and Axiom Records, including Blues in the East. A silk-screen edition of a Mylar portrait of Jimi Hendrix, called Ref1ections, was also used on the recent CD The Ultimate Experience. Also did photos for Pharoah Sanders’ CD Message From Home (Verve) 1996

He has exhibited photographs of Southern Ethiopia and produced The Goblet of Dreams (Marrakesh 1987)
1986-1995: Uncountable poetry readings from Okinawa to San Francisco. He has also been a featured reader in Paris (Paysage du Nord-Ouest, Brussels John Cage Tribute), Prague, Portland (Artquake) and Texas (Mandalay Poetry Festival).

He appeared in Dublin with the Burroughs-Gysin Here to Go Show.

Contributing Editor to: Ins & Outs (Amsterdam), Third Rail (Los Angeles), Ignite (New York), Nexus (Dayton, OH), XPress (Bohemia, NY) 15 Minutes (St. Louis), Growing Hand (San Francisco). Edited Jack Smith’s Historical Treasures for Hanuman Books. Co-edited The Great Society with Bobby Richkin. Published Petroleum Petroleum by Gustav Meyrink (Akashic Bulletin #1, 1991).

Books of Poetry: The Stauffenberg Cycle and Other Poems (Holland), From the Divan of Petra Vogt (Rotterdam), On Feet of Gold (Synergetic Press), Media Shamans Ratio 3 (with Gerard Malanga and Angus MacLise, Temple Press, England). Also, a CD of readings: The Majoon Traveler (with music by Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Moroccan trance music, etc., Sub Rosa, Belgium). Kaliban und Andere Gedichte (Altaquito Press, Gottingen)

President of The Akashic Record, a non-profit corporation dedicated to publishing and preserving sacred materials, lost scenarios, the hidden meaning of the hidden meaning. Staged at The Kitchen, NY, in collaboration with Sylvie Degiez and Wayne Lopes (Cosmic Legends, Gift of Eagle) an Akashic Event, ORFEO: The $500 Opera, based on the work of Angus MacLise. In May, 1995, he edited an Akashic Issue for Broadshirt, a magazine on a T-shirt designed by Phyllis Segura, with over twenty contributors including Paul Bowles, Brion Gysin, Judith Malina, etc.

Contributing Editor and Photographer, NY Black Book 1997-99 NYC. Performed with John Zorn Radical Jewish Culture Group at Lincoln Center December 1995, NY. Collaborated with Nadine Ganase Dance Company on Crossing the Border, a multimedia performance from 1996-99 in Brussels, Paris, Glasgow, Amiens, Hamburg, Hanover, etc. Audio cassette of Crossing the Border, readings by Ira Cohen and music by Philippe Franck (available from Transcultures). Reading at St. Mark’s Poetry Project with Gerard Malanga Feb. 12,1997.

Jilala, CD release of historic 1966 recording with new material (Baraka).

Kings with Straw Mats, video documentary of the Hardwar Kumbh Mela, 1986 Mystic Fire Video, 1998). Online photo gallery (www.mysticfire.com) Ira Cohen Portraits of India.Minbad Sinbad, a book of writings and photos dealing with Morocco published in French (Didier Devillez, Brussels, 1998).

1998: Regular live broadcast bi-weekly on Internet called The Majoon Traveler (www.channelp.com).

1999: Photographic collaboration with Allan Graubard for his poem Fragments from Nomad Days

October 1999 screening of The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda at the Whitney Museum, NYC

Release of Angus MacLise CD The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda sound track (Siltbreeze) A Book of photographs to be published in 2000 by Kargo (Paris).

A special symposium on the work of Ira Cohen to be held in Japan under the auspices of Electric Rexroth and High Moon Noon in 2001.

Born: March 26, 1930, New York City
Died: January 17, 2001, Robbinsdale, Minnesota

Photo credit: Larry Keenan. Gregory Corso (left) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (right).

Photo courtesy: Larry Keenan, of Gregory Corso (left) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti posing in front of my “Last Gathering” mural at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Rebels: Painters and Poets of 1950′s exhibition.

Last summer [2000], when Gregory was very ill, people began writing tributes to him as a poet, a man, a cutup, even. This picture was taken by Horst Spandler in the summer of ’77 in Boulder, Colorado, during a party of Naropa Institute poets and students.

January 17, 2001: Gregory Corso passed away. He was 70. There’s more about him at the SF Gate. I figured this was a good time as ever to open some blackberry wine and have a few smokes (which I’d given up) in honor of the poetry whiz whose words were witty and wonderful. Gregory suffered from prostate cancer and last summer had a significant relapse, which got everyone worried sad.

Everyone thought he was going to die then, but he hung on. Word had it later that he was off with his daughter gambling on an Indian reservation. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it wouldn’t surprise me–he had a lot of energy and soul, even in the roughest times. Around the time he had the relapse, a few people wrote devotions–to express what was going on at that time in their heads. Most of all, though, I think we’re all affected to some degree (most of us a lot) that Gregory is not here anymore. Well, I can’t be some preacher chick saying all the platitudes–but long live Gregory. Here’s a toast to ya, man.

January 19: Adrien Begrand sent me to his site, which has some excellent links to Corso, including (get this!) a link to a “43-minute real video reading by Corso at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado circa 1987, complete with an introduction by Allen Ginsberg.”

He Wears the Map of Calabria on His Face
For Gregory

He tells her, “I’ll kiss your microphone.”
This is no profession, but a confession,
so says the ex-professor of tempests and torments
but rain falls and I fall with it.
Let’s raise the stakes before the sun sets.
Let’s stake ourselves to the sun before we set.
Let’s turn over the bowl of dementia
and wear it proudly when night falls.
Let’s lick the sweaty sewers at the shadow door to nowhere.
Her tits speak a language we used to know – summer snow.
Her tits rise above the cornflake battlements
and shiver with the dust of debrained monuments.
Alas! A poet lies dying in his iron cage.
Alas! The owl-eyed totems bleed newsprint
and we wander in wonder at how easy it is
to sip from a straw sunk in the molten magma of the next outrage.
Yet Life still blocks the door as Death kicks in
and the cars slip by as if they were snakes.
Gently, gently we open our arms
Whirlwinds typhoons hurricanes water spouts hail formosa
formica pachyderms lean in waiting hungrily
for a last leaven of weightless fingers
and the last breath blows away the dust covering the altar.
-Ira Cohen & Allan Graubard
August 12, 2000

Gligoric

during a
discussion about
Burroughs,
somebody
asked the
beat-l mailing list
to recommend
the best
beat cut-up
to which
someone else
replied,
“Gregory Corso.”

-Adrien Begrand

I’ve been receiving very cool tributes to Gregory. Since JACK’s next issue comes out soon, with a chapbook feature by Gregory, it’s only fitting to provide a tribute page this time, too. I’ll put some of the stuff I’m getting there, or here, depending on how you prefer; the communal effort at this has been extraordinary, and justifiably so. The chapbook is “Way Out: A Poem in Discord,” which Gregory wrote while in Nepal in the early 1970s. Ira Cohen published it through his then press, Bardo Matrix, in Kathmandu, Nepal, 1974. At that time, 500 copies were distributed and the chapbook never got too “out there” to be read by many. I believe it to be one of his outstanding works, and am happy to provide the means to have more people get all bedazzled by it as well.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a memorial gathering is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday (January 24) at the New College of California Theater, 777 Valencia St., San Francisco. This is hosted by Neeli Cherkovski and Gerald Nicosia. All are welcome to attend. Those who knew Gregory will be given a chance to speak a few words in remembrance. According to the AP report and Sheri Langerman (Gregory’s daughter), funeral services are not final yet, but a service is planned for Greenwich Village and the burial planned in Rome.

I wish love and magic upon the family and friends close to Gregory.

To people like Robert, Steve, Louise, Eddie, Adrien, Larry, and Michael–your wisdom and wit and words these last couple days have been heavy and tipsy. Thank you.

January 20: Well, things sink in, and invariably there is both sadness and lightness. I heard from someone late last night who said that she’d never gotten into the beat poets, swayed by an aversion to them. Then, upon hearing about Gregory’s death, she went out and began reading his poetry that day. And was overwhelmed. That gave me goosebumps. Ah hell, I hate being mushy, but it’s all so true.

Larry Carradini sent the following:
“On behalf of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac!, I extend our warmest condolences
to all those who loved Gregory and his works. I would, especially, like to
express our most heartfelt feelings of loss to Gregory’s friends and
family. His life was bigger than life. His art is clear as rain. We will
remember him here in Lowell, in October, when the air is crisp — like
Gregory’s words. As a poet, I am feeling a personal loss as well. Take care,
proud angel. Fly high and free. We will listen for your mischievous feet –
in treetops — your laughter — spit gleefully — from fountains — in the
park.” — Larry Carradini

Also, see:
A Steve Silberman Special to the Chronicle, APPRECIATION: Poet Was Ever a Subversive Spirit. Gregory Corso despised pretension. This reminds me of his great poem “Poet Talking to Himself in the Mirror”, whose last lines go:

Ain’t got no agent
can’t see poets having agents
Yet Ginzy, Ferl, have one
and make lots of money by them
and fame too
Maybe I should get an agent?
Wow!
No way, Gregory, stay
close to the poem!!!

January 24: Gregory Corso’s funeral was today, and from what I hear it was beautiful (“weird and interesting”), in a Catholic church in Greenwich Village. Speaking of villages, the Village Voice has a nicely written tribute to Gregory, by Patti Smith.

***The above was written in 2000-2001 around the time of Gregory’s illness and death. Below is a brief bio.

Gregory Corso, born in Greenwich Village, was sent to prison at age 16 for robbery. During this time, he wrote some poetry, and later when released, met Allen Ginsberg, who was impressed with Corso’s prison writings. With Ginsberg’s help, Corso’s poetry was widely read and later published. Gregory Corso said in an interview in Variations of a Generation, that he was not beat, but he was not square, either.

Corso, along with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky (briefly), William Burroughs, and others went to Paris during the years of 1958-1963, and stayed for the most part (while he wasn’t traveling around to other parts of Europe), at the rue Git-le-Coeur, otherwise known as The Beat Hotel. Here, Gregory wrote the collection A Happy Birthday of Death and his famous poem “Bomb.” With his comrades (Burroughs sometimes off in Tangier), he lived in a classic yet rundown hotel that had rats in its hallways, rationed use of bathing areas, and meager living arrangements. Despite its poverty, The Beat Hotel was amidst a rich tapestry of artists, bookstores, cheap cafes, and bohemian life that sported the Left Bank. One of my favorite stories of this time is how Corso and Ginsberg met artist Duchamp at a formal party. Drunk, they were enamored of Duchamp, and Corso cut off half his tie to show this admiration.

According to the Gale Group:

With only six years of formal schooling, Corso is largely self-educated. His poetry displays a special absorption in art and the ideas acquired through broad, if eclectic, reading; it also reveals an unevenness, a parataxis of popular and high culture, pronunciamento and lyric, naivete; and sophistication. Nevertheless, Corso is an extraordinary natural writer who possesses a pure and original sensibility shaped by and transcending the hardships of his early life. Range, swift invention, humor, and striking elliptical imagery characterize his best poems.

Despite these qualities, Corso’s work has been almost totally disregarded by serious reviewers. His lack of canonical status as a writer, the rawness of his talent, and perhaps his reportedly abrasive manner with poetry audiences and interviewers have resulted in slighting treatments of him as a mere Beat celebrity. Only a handful of critics have given Corso’s poetry any thoughtful consideration: they admire his extraordinary imaging ability and bizarre humor but temper their praise with reservations about what they perceive as a lack of intellectual sophistication and finesse and a strain of self-promotion.

Yet, among his peers and some of the publishers of the 50s and 60s, such as New Directions, Corso is seen as one of the best poets of the times:

David Amram, in his introductory notes to Corso’s collection Mindfield, said “And I can say, ungrudgingly: Gregory Corso is a poet. He has the rare calling of a pure lyric gift. And he has never doubted his calling.”

William Burroughs said, deftly and simply, “Gregory Corso is a poet” (a high compliment coming from Burroughs). He also said, “Gregory is a gambler. He suffers reverses, like every man who takes chances. But his vitality and resilience always will shine through with a light that is more than human. The immortal light of his muse. Gregory is indeed one of the Daddies.”

Allen Ginsberg said, “Corso is a poet’s poet, his verse pure velvet, close to John Keats for our time, exquisitely delicate in manners of the Muse.”

Jack Kerouac said of Greogry: “A fabulous young American poet of the very first magnitude in the history of English is Gregory Corso, whose best long poems, Bomb, Army, Marriage and whole Mexicanas of notebooks of poetry he scribbled in Mexico have not been printed (and a lot of his best work he’s personally rejected himself and hid under floorboards, and some lost by the suitcase in buses!) (“O Atom Bomb, resound thy tanky knees!”).”

Some of Corso’s books include the following:

Elegiac Feelings American: A collection of poetry, drawings, and glyphs.
Gasoline: Pocket Poets No.8. “Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys, take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere.” — Allen Ginsberg
Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit: Poems about death, despair, and silence.
The Happy Birthday of Death: The notorious “Bomb” is a foldout in this cornucopia of ironic wisdom.
Long Live Man: From 1962. Atom bombs, computers, car exhausts, and lovelessness do not get this poet down…other substances do.
Mindfield: A generous selection of Corso’s own favorite poems, including some new work.
The most recent book about Corso is titled ‘A Clown in a Grave’ : Complexities and Tensions in the Works of Gregory Corso, by Michael Skau (published October 1999, Southern Illinois University Press). An editorial review of this book, at Amazon.com, says “Corso emphasizes social issues, yet risks undermining this significance by using wit, wordplay, and humor. While conceding mortality, he is adamant in refusing to acknowledge death’s power. Even as he rebels against conventional literature, he still is enchanted by classicism and romanticism, often borrowing their techniques and idioms. Skau examines these complexities and seeming contradictions throughout Corso’s career, showing that Corso finds value in inconsistency and vacillation.”

Gregory Corso is known as Yuri Gligoric in Subterraneans and as Rafael Urso in Desolation Angels and Book of Dreams.