Poetry
Gasoline
Gregory Corso · 1958
Synopsis
A short collection, written partly in Paris and partly in Mexico. It opens with an ode to the Coit Tower in San Francisco. A twenty-five-year-old poet declares his hatred of old poets and wants to steal their poems. A puma from the Chapultepec zoo appears in a furnished room in New York. A man returns to the building where he was born. Other pieces pass through Italy or address the sun.
Context
The volume appeared in 1958 from City Lights, number 8 in the Pocket Poets series, which had published Howl two years earlier; Ginsberg wrote the introduction, composed in Amsterdam, and praises turns of phrase “picked up in the streets of his mind”. The poems date from the stay in Paris, in 1957 and 1958, and from a trip to Mexico with Ginsberg. Corso's first book had appeared in 1955, paid for by students of Harvard and Radcliffe.
Who it is for
A collection of forty-eight pages. Translated into French by Pierre Joris in 1977, in a bilingual volume that brings together several collections.
Prizes and reception
Eighth volume of City Lights' pocket series, regarded as its author's first important book.
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