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Number
287
April/May 2001
Standing on a
Street Corner Doing Nothing is
Power
PETER
BERG
Copyright
© 2001 Poetry Flash
Gregory Corso authored a prodigious legend of
personal liberty. This is a small handful of
remembrances sprinkled onto what will surely become
a towering death mound.
His ultimate departure could have happened
anytime after I met him, which was when he lived
with Belle Carpenter at Lenore Kandel and Bill
Fritsch's former flat in North Beach. Gregory was
part of an influx of New Yorkers including Diane di
Prima who had joined our late sixties cultural
rebellion in San Francisco. He was living what he
believed as though he was prepared to be killed for
it.
It was easy to feel brotherly toward Gregory. I
knew his Gasoline poems and some others, and
was especially impressed by a one-act play titled
Standing on a Street Corner. It exuded the
spirit of a wise clown epitomized in the line,
"Standing on a street corner doing nothing is
power." I used the script in a weekly play study
class in my Haight-Ashbury apartment for fellow San
Francisco Mime Troupers. It helped inspire the
concept of guerrilla theater that was incubating
then for future pieces performed in Sproul Plaza
during teach-ins, at a bus station, and on actual
street corners.
If I ever told Gregory about this after I met
him, he never acknowledged it in any way that I
remember. He didn't usually relish any of the
recognition he received from the sixties generation
he helped to inspire. But he mourned relentlessly
over his own heroes. Once he described to me how he
had climbed into Kerouac's grave at the funeral,
and he cried at the dedication of an alley beside
City Lights Bookstore named for him. He raved
furiously about the unfairness of Giordano Bruno's
execution at the stake, as though it had just
happened.
Gregory's most typical reaction to praise was to
ignore the specifics and quickly ask for something.
A ride somewhere, a place to stay, a bag of dope.
It's neither an exaggeration nor disrespectful to
state what anyone who knew him saw. It wasn't as
mundane as a broken-down boxer cadging drinks from
admirers at a bar. Gregory might launch a verbal
flight that the boxer could no longer match
physically. He was a remorseless junkie; his
clothes were crumpled and soiled; his teeth were
disappearing; a reporter called him "an
uninstitutionalized man." Still, his spirit would
shine and soar. Gregory might invoke tombs in
Egypt, black-dressed old women in Greece,
mathematical models for proving divinity or love,
talents of imbeciles, weaknesses of warriors. He
wasn't small in descriptions or shallow in
comparisons. He didn't feel bad; he was mired in
corporeal mud. He didn't feel good; he was a cloud
piling up on a mountain top. I saw people leave a
conversation with him truly humbled by the quantity
and uniqueness of his mind.
One of those impressed was Frank Oppenheimer
during the time he was conceiving what would become
the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco.
I turned Frank onto spontaneous audience
participation at a Digger event titled "The End of
the War" where audience members waved tree limbs or
climbed cargo nets while Steve Miller's band played
for a group of nude dancers and continuous film
loops showed seeds sprouting, volcanoes exploding,
and soldiers being shot. Frank was put off at first
by the seeming lack of direction but later
incorporated this kind of participative play in the
museum, along with the suggestion to make it "an
exploration." He asked to meet a philosophical
literary person, so I brought Gregory to a small
party at his apartment. The brother of the atomic
bomb's creator and the most street-wise poet of the
Beat Generation were an immediate conversational
match, shifting mental gears at the same
double-clutching speed and pushing each other to be
clearer or more imaginative. I know that Gregory
was an individualistic hedonist but stayed somehow
innocent to the degree that anything he did could
draw the attention of art. He was simultaneously
wooed by cherubs and flayed by devils, while an
opera of libraries streamed from his mouth.
Self-righteous judges, rich fatheads, power
maddened politicians, pitiless critics,
unimaginative academicians, sadistic policemen,
ruinous generals: be careful not to celebrate too
long. Gregory Corso showed us real power.
Peter Berg, Founder and Director of the
Planet Drum Foundation (www.planetdrum.org),
worked---with Judy Goldhaft---with the San
Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers in the Haight
Ashbury in the mid-sixties. Recognized as the first
to use and defin the term bioregion, Peter
Berg is the author of Discovering Your
Life-Place: Education in Action and Figures
of Regulation: Guides for Re-Balancing Society with
the Biosphere. He e-mailed this 'dispatch' from
Ecuador, and Judy Goldhaft read it at the New
College memorial for Gregory Corso, January 24, in
San Francisco.
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