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Gregory Corso

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Poet

The Resume

    (March 26, 1930-January 17, 2001)
    Born in New York City, New York
    Birth name was Nunzio Corso
    Beat Generation poet
    Poetry collections include 'The Vestal Lady and Other Poems' (1955), 'Gasoline' (1958), 'Happy Birthday of Death' (1960), 'Long Live Man' (1962), 'There Is Yet Time to Run Back Through Life and Expiate All That's Been Sadly Done' (1965), 'Elegiac Feelings American' (1970), 'Earth Egg' (1974), 'Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit' (1981) and 'Mindfield: New and Selected Poems' (1989)
    Subject of the documentary 'Corso: The Last Beat' (2009)

Why he might be annoying:

    He spent three years in prison for theft after being ruled a 'youthful multiple offender.' (1946-49)
    After his release, he was supported by the patrons of The Pony Stable, New York's first lesbian bar, as their 'artist in residence.'
    He said he earned drug money by selling notebooks of his poems: 'I get about $200 a book.'
    He spent the first 15 minutes of a lecture at NYU berating the students for their ignorance of the Greek classics.
    A poet who visited him in the 1980s was shocked when he began displaying items he had stolen from various homes he had been staying at.

Why he might not be annoying:

    His mother abandoned the family a month after he was born, and he spent most of his childhood in foster homes, institutions and on the streets of Little Italy.
    After he was busted at 13 for stealing a toaster, he was placed in a cell next to a criminally insane murderer who had stabbed his wife repeatedly with a screwdriver.
    Allen Ginsberg said, 'I think Gregory is the poet's poet.... Gregory, I think, in some respects is a poet superior to myself.'
    His ashes were buried next to the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Protestant Cemetary of Rome.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 9 Votes: 88.89% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 9 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 10 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 24 Votes: 20.83% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 13 Votes: 61.54% Annoying
    In 2012, Out of 14 Votes: 64.29% Annoying
    In 2011, Out of 11 Votes: 72.73% Annoying
    In 2010, Out of 58 Votes: 65.52% Annoying