[Gary Keenan]

I was going to post this in Julie's thread, but I think Corso deserves his own twist. I'm not sure the formatting will carry over, so I'll edit later if need be.

POETS HITCHHIKING ON THE HIGHWAY


Of course I tried to tell him but he cranked his head without an excuse. I told him the sky chases the sun, and he smiled and said: "What's the use."
I was feeling like a demon again, so I said: "But the ocean chases the fish."
This time he laughed and said: "Suppose the strawberry were pushed into a mountain." After that, I knew the war was on-so we fought.
He said: "The apple-cart like a broomstick-angel snaps & splinters old dutch shoes."
I said: "Lightning will strike the old oak and free the fumes!"
He said: "Mad street with no name."
I said: "Bald killer! Bald killer! Bald killer!"
He said, getting real mad, "Firestoves! Gas! Couch!"
I said, only smiling, "I know God would turn back his head if I sat quietly and thought." We ended by melting away, hating the air!


I've rendered this brief narrative poem by Gregory Corso as prose, inserting a few marks of punctuation to compensate for the sealed line breaks. I think it's a pretty good little prose poem, as it maintains something essential about the incident and its mundane, prosaic contours--two men need a ride, don't get one, chat to pass the time. The two men are I believe Corso and Jack Kerouac, and their chat becomes a spontaneous throwdown of poemettes, a sort of bardic competition in miniature that raises the attention to how they (and, by implication, we) pass time and so transform it with imagination, how this exchange figuratively disembodies the individuals involved. The piece begins in media res and resolves in a curious silence of hating air, the very thing that makes life, breath, speech and poetry possible. It might be difficult to construct a longer prose piece in such a style, though Roddy Doyle and William Gaddis, two very different novelists, have written narratives that are largely dialogue. I think prose narrative arises from an experience of life as episode, time as a sequence of incidents upon the body, and this way of experiencing language and time becomes Corso's base material for the composition of the poem. Narrative is a kind of self-consciousness, and prose or poetic narratives are refinements of this consciousness via choices about organizing language.

Corso's choice to organize his prosaic incident via line breaks represents a form of attention to experience, an appreciation for event, dialectics, and imaginative leaps (which while courting nonsense or the surreal also have an underlying organic theme). He is literally chopping up a prosaic recollection, to slow the rendering as a means of amplifying certain dynamics between the participants and within each recollection and utterance. Sometimes the shifts in attention are subtle, other times they emphasize contradictions already apparent but perhaps undervalued as straight prose. Corso's quite virtuosic in this mode; his best lyric poems are exquisitely entertaining, both in the sense of providing enjoyment and offering consideration. Here is the actual rendering of the poem.


POETS HITCHHIKING ON THE HIGHWAY


Of course I tried to tell him
but he cranked his head
without an excuse.
I told him the sky chases
the sun
And he smiled and said:
'What's the use.'
I was feeling like a demon
Again
So I said: 'But the ocean chases
the fish.'
This time he laughed
and said: 'Suppose the
strawberry were
pushed into a mountain.'
After that, I knew the
war was on-
So we fought:
He said: 'The apple-cart like a
broomstick-angel
snaps & splinters
old dutch shoes.'
I said: 'Lightning will strike the old oak
and free the fumes!'
He said: "Mad street with no name."
I said: "Bald killer! Bald killer! Bald killer!"
He said, getting real mad,
'Firestoves! Gas! Couch!"
I said, only smiling,
'I know God would turn back his head
if I sat quietly and thought.'
We ended by melting away,
hating the air!

The line breaks sometimes follow a breath unit, sometimes move in smaller bits akin to Williams' variable foot. There are end-rhymes, near-rhyme, alliteration, assonance, simile, personification, and so the poetic rhetoric is fairly complex, but I think the essential technique employed is the division of prosaic dialogue and narrative into units of consideration that reveal a poem.

All I have time for at the moment. More about this poem and Corso when I'm able.

[robert mezey]

I don't see that there's much difference, whether
you print this piece as prose or as verse. The verse
is hopeless---Corso has almost no sense of a line.
(Was there any Beat poet who had a good ear?) The
rhymes, what few there are, seem quite accidental.
As for Williams' variable foot, what on earth is that?
Is it like a variable inch, or a variable minute? The
man wrote some marvelous things, but whenever he talks
about verse, he doesn't know what he's talking about
and makes a fool of himself. (Even when he's writing about
poetry in general, he is not at his best. E.g. "No ideas
but in things"---that very statement is self-contradictory:
an idea that is not in things, but purely abstract.)
Every once in a while, Corso can be funny or touching, and
then one is willing to overlook his technical ineptitude---
his other virtues seem for the moment more worthy of
attention.

[Gary Keenan]

Robert,
You are free to pay attention to what you will. There are many ineptitudes at work in any poetic situation, some located in the poet, some in the poem, some in the reader. I'm more interested right now in the specific case of this poem and these lines rather than commonplace generalizations. So I'll proceed as I will, and work on my own ineptitudes as I can.

Thanks for your contributions.
Gary

Originally posted by robert mezey:
I don't see that there's much difference, whether
you print this piece as prose or as verse. The verse
is hopeless---Corso has almost no sense of a line.
(Was there any Beat poet who had a good ear?) The
rhymes, what few there are, seem quite accidental.
As for Williams' variable foot, what on earth is that?
Is it like a variable inch, or a variable minute? The
man wrote some marvelous things, but whenever he talks
about verse, he doesn't know what he's talking about
and makes a fool of himself. (Even when he's writing about
poetry in general, he is not at his best. E.g. "No ideas
but in things"---that very statement is self-contradictory:
an idea that is not in things, but purely abstract.)
Every once in a while, Corso can be funny or touching, and
then one is willing to overlook his technical ineptitude---
his other virtues seem for the moment more worthy of
attention.

[Julie]

Hi, Gary.

Well, I think this is pretty bad as prose, and worse as verse, so I don't think it's aiding the prose to poem case.

However, and this is a big however, I'm more turned off by the words than the prosiness. In fact, I don't think this does work as prose at all.

So, I guess I'm disagreeing that this is chopped prose as much as I'm disagreeing that it's successful poetry.

Of course, this very likely makes me a heathen, but we infidels need a place to live, too!

Julie

[Tony]

I rather like this; it appeals to my sense of whimsy (I've always had a weakness for penguin dust). For me, it touches on the difficulty in trying to incorporate dialogue into poetry. I think this works as poetry because of the brevity of the zingers, the sound bites. It's not bad as prose, though I find the ladder of "I said...", "He said..." towards the end a little distracting. I've only tried to use dialogue in poetry a few times, and as often as not ended up converting it into prose.

Tony

[graywyvern]

Originally posted by robert mezey:
(Was there any Beat poet who had a good ear?)

Robert Duncan (which is why he sometimes isn't considered
a Beat poet).

actually i sort of like this poem. but not as good
art; more as a display of an ingratiating personality.
he does try too hard, though,--even in his better ones.

[robert mezey]

You're right, Duncan does sometimes swing.
But I never thought of him as a Beat--he
certainly didn't live like one. I believe
he's usually grouped with the Black Mountain
school. I can't read him in quantity, but
some of his stuff is beautiful.