Corso Anecdote

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky lived on Bluff St in Boulder during the wild early days of the Keroauc School. They had half of an old two-story Victorian house divided in half. You climbed up a steep set of concrete stairs.

The house was a true poet's house, a house of the muse. It was a typical Allen scene, serving as a crash pad, a tea house, a classroom, a nerve center, a sex den, an office, a home studio. In 1980, Allen held one class at his home on Dylan, the Child Ballads, Thomas Campion. We were studying the Sapphic hendecasyllabic, an eleven-syllable line, and he noted how the opening stanza to Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" began with the words "William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll." When Allen applied ancient prosodiac forms to modern lyric verse, it was a revelation. As a novice poet, you got the feeling that you were participating in an art form that transcended time.

One day, Allen bought an old upright piano. One of those great brown furniture pieces that defined American home life between the first and second world wars. It became the center of the music room. Peter's banjo was there. Steven Taylor would work out arrangements with Allen there. Allen would compose at it, little Ma Rainey blues, Blake songs, ideas he would transpose to harmonium. When Corso was in town to teach, hold court, and perform, he would stay there. As mind-stopping brilliant, maddening and hyperconfrontational as Gregory was in public, he could be quite different in private.

After my first semester at Naropa in 1976, I took off for Georgia to learn to tune and rebuild pianos at the Simms School of Piano Technology in Columbus, so when Allen had a couple interns lug the heavy upright up the steps he had me do some minor action repair, a cleaning of the cobwebs down in the traps and a tuning. The pinblock was cracked so I couldn't tune it to pitch, only relative pitch. I'd thrown everybody out so I could have some quiet and had just finished.

There was a golden light in the room. It was night, winter. Allen and Gregory walked in and Allen sat down and banged away. It was "Vomit Express" -- one of the songs he'd recorded with Bob. Then he padded off in his black socks upstairs to return phone calls. Gregory then sat down at the piano. Eyes closed, scarf around his neck, shining snowflakes not yet melted in his hair. he played Cole Porter's "Begin The Beguine." He played it by memory.

"What moments divine, what raptures serene," he said after the last notes of the piece faded off, slowly lifting his fingers from the keys.

Jim Cohn

June 15, 2005