Most poets are fortunate if they are remembered for having written one good line.
Gregory Corso, a central poet of the Beat movement, is known for many great ones, in such lyrical and widely translated poems as For Homer, Bomb, Marriage, Window, In the Fleeting Hand of Time, and Elegiac Feelings American, written after the death of his friend and fellow Beat Jack Kerouac. Corso suffered from prostate cancer and died on January 17 in suburban Minneapolis, where he had been living for the past few months. Born Nunzio Gregorio Corso to teenage immigrant Italian parents in New York s Greenwich Village, Corso was a toddler when his mother abandoned the family. His father, struggling to earn a living at the height of the Depression, put Corso and his brother Joseph into foster care. Corso s formal education ceased at about the sixth grade, when he started getting arrested for petty crimes.