Gregory Corso died on January 17th, 2001. I was on a business trip, ten days in Pittsburgh training a new reporter for my company, and I missed hearing about it until after I got back to Charlotte.
I always had mixed feeling about Corso. Some of his stuff was overarchingly beautiful, some of it was just plain corny, some of it stiff, some of it just plain wrong. I also heard some rather unflattering things about him over the years, which I won't deign to repeat here, except to say that it appeared his best years were behind him but damned if he was ready to admit it.
While in Pittsburgh I picked up a biography of Kerouac (a rather embarrassing and overly detailed one, I might add). At one point in the book the author presented a picture of Corso at Kerouac's funeral, where Corso actually suggested they dump the body out and mourn the coffin, since the body was absent Kerouac's spirit. It's an episode I had forgotten about, and one of the most shamefully stupid and cruel things this sometimes stupid and cruel man ever said.
But he was a poet. He overcame some terrible odds, abandoned as a child and incarcerated by the state for the things he had to do to survive as an abandoned child in America, incarcerated in his adolescence for the bad habits he couldn't break, scraping along, and then, suddenly, almost miraculously, he starts to write, and he writes so well that he gets the chance to pull himself out of the gutter and go to college, and then he joined the Beats, sure as hell, in the crucible of the movement, Ferlinghetti, Ginsburg, Kerouac, my God! What a life. And when he wrote well he wrote very, very well.
So Godspeed, Greg, and I hope eveything is as you had hoped on the other side.