Corso, Herald of Autoc. Spirit. Poetry heralding "the ivory applecart of tyrannical values"

A collection of poems by the renowned Beat poet, Gregory Corso.

He left (or was left by) a number of girlfriends and he fathered five children along the way. He was apt to raise a bit of a ruckus at poetry readings and other public events. No one could be sure what he might do next except that he would write poetry and get published and that it would be widely read.".

Gregory Corso is the most intensely spiritual of the Beat generation poets and still by far the least explored. The virtue of Kirby Olson's Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist is that it is the first book to place all of Corso's work in a philosophical perspective, concentrating on Corso as a poet torn between a static Catholic Thomist viewpoint and that of a progressive surrealist. While Corso is a subject of great controversy--his work often being seen as nihilistic and wildly comic--Olson argues that Corso's poetry, in fact, maintains an insistent theme of doubt and faith with regard to his early Catholicism. Although many critics have attempted to read his poetry, and some have done so brilliantly, Olson--in his approach and focus--is the first to attempt to give a holistic understanding of the oeuvre as essentially one not of entertainment or hilarity but of a deep spiritual and philosophical quest by an important and profound mind. In nine chapters, Olson addresses Corso from a broad philosophical perspective and shows how Corso takes on particular philosophical issues and contributes to new understandings. Corso's concerns, like his influence, extend beyond the Beat generation as he speaks about concerns that have troubled thinkers from the beginning of the Western tradition, and his answers offer provocative new openings for thought. Corso may very well be the most important Catholic poet in the American literary canon, a visionary like Burroughs and Ginsberg, whose work illuminated a generation. Written in a lively and engaging style, Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist seeks to keep Corso's memory alive and at last delve fully into Corso's poetry.

The Spiritual Imagination of the Beats is the first comprehensive study to explore the role of esoteric, occult, alchemical, shamanistic, mystical and magical traditions in the work of eleven major Beat authors. The opening chapter discusses Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan as predecessors and important influences on the spiritual orientation of the Beats. David Stephen Calonne draws comparisons throughout the book between various approaches individual Beat writers took regarding sacred experience - for example, Burroughs had significant objections to Buddhist philosophy, while Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac both devoted considerable time to studying Buddhist history and texts. This book also focuses on authors who have traditionally been neglected in Beat Studies - Diane di Prima, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia and Philip Whalen. In addition, several understudied work such as Gregory Corso's 'The Geometric Poem' - inspired by Corso's deep engagement with ancient Egyptian thought - are given close attention. Calonne introduces important themes from the history of heterodoxy - from Gnosticism, Manicheanism and Ismailism to Theosophy and Tarot - and demonstrates how inextricably these ideas shaped the Beat literary imagination.

"Skau covers the complete works of Corso, one of the four major Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs) who attempted to provide an alternative to what they saw as the academic forms of literature dominating American writing through the 1940s and 1950s."--BOOK JACKET.

[Bei Dao] was obliged to create a new poetic idiom that was simultaneously a protective camouflage and an appropriate vehicle for 'unreality.' --Jonathan Spence, The New York Times Book Review. [A Bei Dao poem] feels as if it follows the pulse of consciousness, as it moves from metaphor to metaphor, thought to thought, something like a pilot light turned down to the jets and flickers of a single, intense, blue flame. --Robert Hass, Washington Post Book World.

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. "No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of mankind within a context of fantasy.... Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more consciously analyzed than in The Cannibal. Yet one is aware throughout that such analysis proceeds only in terms of a resolutely committed humanism." - Hayden Carruth

As the author herself says, she "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in an attempt to compensate for the lack of margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not.