Name: Gasoline: Gregory Corso's Box of Crazy Beat Toys, 1958
Item: Gasoline
Author: Vagobond

The Beat Century — post 20 of 100. Gregory Corso, Gasoline (1958).

Cover of Gasoline by Gregory Corso — Gasoline, 1958. Cover image via Open Library.

City Lights printed 1,500 copies of Corso’s second collection in 1958 with an introduction by Ginsberg, and it remains the purest surviving sample of Beat poetry written as pleasure rather than prophecy.

Gasoline was volume eight in the City Lights Pocket Poets series, published in 1958 in a run of 1,500 copies priced at ninety-five cents on the back cover. The economics are worth noting because they describe the whole enterprise: a pocket-sized book, cheap enough to be bought on impulse, distributed through a bookshop that doubled as a movement’s headquarters. Later printings paired it with Corso’s first collection, The Vestal Lady on Brattle. Distribution was itself part of the aesthetic, since a book priced at the cost of a sandwich reaches readers a hardback never will.

By the late 1950s Corso’s renown as a Beat writer was second only to Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s, and Gasoline is the book that earned it. It remains his most famous work after the concrete poem “Bomb.” It remains his most famous work after the concrete poem “Bomb,” which arranged typed slips of verse into the shape of a mushroom cloud.

Ginsberg’s Introduction, and Its Warning

Allen Ginsberg’s introduction is short and does the book more good than a critical essay would have. “Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys,” he wrote, “take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere. These combinations are imaginary and pure, in accordance with Corso’s individual (therefore universal) desire.” It does the book more good than a formal critical essay would have managed, because it tells a reader how to hold the thing. The introduction is short, and it tells a reader how to hold the book rather than what to conclude about it.

The introduction also contains the era’s most efficient piece of critical evasion: “But what is he saying? Who cares?! It’s said!” It is a genuine aesthetic position — that the sensory rightness of a phrase precedes and outranks its paraphrasable content — and also a preemptive defense against the charge that Corso’s poems frequently do not mean much. Readers will land differently on whether the defense holds. It is a real aesthetic position, holding that the sensory rightness of a phrase precedes and outranks its paraphrasable content, and simultaneously a preemptive defense against the charge that Corso’s poems often do not mean very much.

The Hysterical Catalogue

Corso’s method is surrealist in ancestry but distinctly American in application. Critics have identified two strains running through the work: a Dionysian force of emotion and spontaneity, and a persistent preoccupation with death. The poems generate their effects by yoking incompatible registers — the sacred and the junk-shop, terror and slapstick — in a technique that has been described as the hysterical catalogue.

The distinctive move is to take the destructive, dehumanizing conditions of mid-century life and run them through a comic imagination that neither denies nor submits to them. “Birthplace Revisited” is the frequently cited case in Gasoline, where time and criminal violence blend into a single surprising image. It is surrealism given a social application rather than a purely psychic one. The technique takes the dehumanizing conditions of mid-century life and runs them through a comic imagination that neither denies them nor submits to them.

The Least Respectable Education

Corso’s biography is the one Beat legend that requires the least inflation. Born in Greenwich Village to a teenage mother, raised through foster homes, imprisoned at Clinton state prison in his late teens, he read his way through the prison library and emerged with an idiosyncratic classical education acquired entirely without instruction. He met Ginsberg in a Village bar shortly after his release.

That formation explains the peculiar texture of his diction — archaic words and mythological furniture deployed with no academic self-consciousness whatsoever, because he never sat in a seminar learning which uses were permitted. The affectations that would be unbearable in a university poet read in Corso as delight. The archaic words and mythological furniture arrive with no academic self-consciousness whatever, because he never sat in a seminar being taught which uses were permitted and which were embarrassing. The affectations that would be unbearable in a university poet read in Corso as undisguised delight.

Ninety-Five Cents a Copy

The physical book is part of the argument. Fifteen hundred copies, ninety-five cents printed on the back cover, small enough for a coat pocket: the Pocket Poets format was designed to put contemporary poetry into circulation at the price of a sandwich, sold through a bookshop that functioned as the movement’s clearinghouse. Distribution was the aesthetic. The Pocket Poets format was built to put contemporary poetry into circulation at roughly the price of a sandwich, sold through a bookshop that doubled as the movement’s clearinghouse.

Later printings bound Gasoline together with The Vestal Lady on Brattle, Corso’s 1955 first collection, which is how most readers now encounter it. The pairing flatters the later book by showing how quickly Corso’s ear sharpened between the two, and it preserves the sequence in which a self-educated ex-convict became, within three years, the third name on the movement’s marquee. The pairing flatters the later book by showing how sharply Corso’s ear improved in the three years between them.

What the Book Is Good For

Gasoline is a seminal book in the birth of its literary generation, and its influence is more visible in tone than in technique. The permission it granted was to be funny — to write poems in which the joke and the dread arrive in the same line, without the poet stepping outside to explain the relationship. Corso’s best-known later poems, “Marriage” and “Bomb” from The Happy Birthday of Death (1960), extend the Gasoline manner into longer forms; “Marriage” won him the Longview Award.

The collection has aged unevenly, as work built on surprise tends to. Some poems now read as a young man rummaging for the next startling adjective. But at its best the book does something no other Beat volume manages: it treats poetry as a source of straightforward fun without ever becoming trivial, and that combination has proved much rarer than the prophetic mode it shared shelf space with. At its best the book manages something no other Beat volume does: it treats poetry as a source of straightforward pleasure without becoming trivial, and that combination has proved far rarer than the prophetic mode it shared shelf space with.

Open this book as you would a box of crazy toys, take in your hands a refinement of beauty out of a destructive atmosphere.

Allen Ginsberg, introduction to Gasoline (1958)

Where to go next

Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death (1960) carries the same imagination into “Marriage” and “Bomb,” his two most anthologized poems.

Previous: Janine Pommy Vega, Poems to Fernando. Next: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.

Sources

CD Damitio

CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA

CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.

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