Overview

Gregory Corso's Italian Journals are a poetic snapshot of his time in Rome in 1988. It is not a journal of his day-to-day activities but rather of his thoughts and reactions in the form of over forty poems. He also used it as a sketchbook to record sketches of some of the places around Rome he was visiting. The Italian Journals include both the poems and the sketches to provide an intimate account of his life during his stay in Rome. These poetic journal entries describe hanging out in the bars and visiting the graves of the poets he admired as well as his feelings of angst over his life as a poet and his relationship to God. The second part of the book is a brief memoir recounting what it was like to be around Gregory Corso during the 1980s when he was teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa College in Boulder, Colorado until his death in 2001.

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Gregory Corso was born in 1930 and grew up at the corner of Bleeker Street and MacDougal in the heart of Greenwich Village in Manhattan. His mother immigrated from Italy when she was nine and married at sixteen to a local teenage Italian American. Gregory was born Nunzio and chose the name Gregory himself. He was abandoned by his mother before he was one year old and his father placed him in a series of foster homes. He was homeless for much of his youth, sleeping in the subways in the winter and on rooftops in the summer. He was an outstanding student and attended parochial school. He was arrested at age thirteen and went to the Tombs, the most infamous prison in New York City. The cell next to his housed a serial murderer. He got out and was quickly arrested again and sent right back to the Tombs. On turning eighteen he was arrested as an adult and sentenced to three years at Clinton State Prison where ""Lucky"" Luciano and other mobsters were incarcerated. He met Allen Ginsberg when he was twenty-one hanging out at a lesbian bar in Manhattan. Allen immediately recognized Gregory as a kindred spirit and they became lifelong friends. He subsequently met Kerouac and was integrated into the heart of the Beat literary circle. He is the main character in Kerouac's book The Subterraneans. He published widely in literary magazines and New Directions Press brought out a series of his slender volumes of poetry. In 1989 Thunder Mouth Press came out with an anthology of his poetry called Mindfield: New and Selected Poems. Both Burroughs and Ginsberg wrote Introductions for him. He died of cancer in 2001 and is buried in Rome.

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