Biography

March 26, 1930 · New York City, New York, USA

January 17, 2001 · Robbinsdale, Minnesota, USA (prostate cancer)

Nunzio Gregory Corso

Poet; part of the Beat movement.

Served a stretch in a New York state penitentiary, 1947-1950.

Corso's piece "Marriage" is performed by Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites (1994), which co-starred Winona Ryder, whose parents were friends of Corso's.

[about his time in prison] If one must climb a ladder to reach a height and from that height see, then it were best to write about what you see and not about how you climbed. Prison to me was such a ladder.

I write from the top of my head and to write so means to write honestly, but it also means to write clumsily. No poet likes to be clumsy. But I decided to heck with it, as long as it allows me to speak the truth. If the poet's mind is shapely then his poem will come out shapely.