LEON HORTON is a UK-based countercultural writer, interviewer, and editor. A regular contributor to International Times and Beatdom, his essays and interviews include ‘Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing in utero’; ‘Keeper of the Sacred Scrolls: An Interview with Bill Morgan’; ‘Charles Bukowski: Only Tough Guys Shit Themselves in Public’; ‘And the Hippies Were Boiled in their Tank Tops’; and ‘Gerald Nicosia: Jack Kerouac in the Bleak Inhuman Loneliness’.
He recently completed an extended interview with Victor Bockris for the forthcoming Beatdom Books publication, The Burroughs-Warhol Connection, and is the editor of Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet, a collection of essays, memoirs, poetry and photography in celebration of the legendary Beat poet.
Rock and the Beat Generation spoke to Horton with particular reference to the recently released Corso title…
SW: How did the Gregory Corso collection come about?
LH: It all started on the Acropolis in Athens, when I decided I wanted to write something about Gregory’s numerous adventures in Greece. Or rather, it started with Charles Bukowski. Or rather, it started with what turned out to be a conniving, double-dealing, cut-price Maurice Girodias who fancied himself a publisher.
What happened is that I’d written a short essay on Bukowski’s fear of live performance for a limited edition chapbook, and then suggested to the publisher, who shall forever remain nameless, that they do a chapbook on Corso. They asked if I would take it on as a pet project, and I was off… straight into a brick wall!
It wasn’t that difficult to find material for a 50-page celebration, but while I was working on it, I started hearing from other writers about their disastrous dealings with the publisher – no contracts, no royalties, no communication: the Girodias Touch. I wasn’t overly concerned at first – we writers do like a good moan – but when I heard the publisher was about to be sued for publishing something without permission, with great reluctance I decided to pull the project.
SW: Tell us a little more about the publisher you’ve been working with since.
LH: And then an Angel came to my door! Jesus, I don’t know what I would have done without Roadside Press. I was pretty down after the great chapbook collapse of 2022, having to inform the contributors – and we had some important names in Beat Studies already on board – that the whole thing had floundered and crashed under my watch. Roadside Press is the brainchild of Michele McDannold, a publisher dedicated to preserving and celebrating the legacy of the literary underground. Roadside was founded in 2022 and already they have about 30 titles under their belt.
SW: Do you want to say anything more about Michele McDannold?
LH: I don’t think she ever sleeps. When she’s not producing, publishing, and distributing works by other writers, when she’s not organising poetry events, or out on the road performing her own, she’s probably plotting world domination. I don’t know how she does it. Some sort of Faustian pact, I shouldn’t wonder. She has this wonderfully punk ethos when it comes to publishing, matched only by a ‘no bullshit’ approach to writers and writing. She can be a hard taskmaster at times, which is precisely what I needed.
SW: Did you pitch the book as editor?
LH: I didn’t so much pitch as send the work in progress, the 50-page chapbook, which already had some luminous names attached: Anne Waldman, Neeli Cherkovski, Ed Sanders…Luckily, Michele was very keen but wanted to develop the project into a full-length book. To go from 50 to needing 260 pages of material was daunting to say the least.
Pictured above: Jonathan Collins’ portrait features on the cover of the Corso volume
SW: How did you find your contributors? You certainly tracked an impressive line-up!
LH: I wish I could say it was all down to me. I mean, a lot of it was. I’m not backwards at coming forwards when it comes to approaching other writers, even writers I’m in awe of, but the fact is I couldn’t have done it without the watchful aegis of Raymond Foye and Robert Yarra, who put me in touch with many of the contributors. I was told that I’d never get Anne Waldman. Not that she was unapproachable, just that she is so busy on other projects. It took some doing, but I was delighted when she agreed to come on board. I’ve made some incredible connections through the making of this book.
SW: Gerald Nicosia has called it the ‘most important book published thus far’ on Corso, quite an accolade. Are there any rival titles in the field which gather essays or critical commentary on the man?
LH: It was very kind of Gerald to say that. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’m glad he liked the book so much. I’m not aware of any rival titles as such, but I can heartily recommend Gregory Stephenson’s brilliant 1989 treatise Exiled Angel: A Study of the Work of Gregory Corso, which was the first full-length critical study of Corso’s poetry. It’s an exceptional piece of work.
Essays and critical studies on Corso tend to be loosely distributed across the wider net of Beat Studies, disseminated through literary journals and magazines, which makes it difficult to pull together an overarching view from which to critique the man and his work.
I think all that is set to change with Kurt Hemmer’s forthcoming biography, a sample of which we present in the book. If Kurt’s brilliant depiction of Corso’s emotional childhood is anything to go by, then My Task Is the Poem Human: A Gregory Corso Biography will be the book Corso devotees are longing for.
SW: What is your personal take on Gregory Corso? He carried a difficult reputation. Is he misunderstood? Is he underrated?
LH: My personal take has grown, obviously, throughout the making of Ten Times a Poet. A difficult man, for sure, but misunderstood? I think he is very much understood. He was impossible at times – mercurial seems to be word that follows him around – but the fans who love him, who read his poetry, the people who lived and worked with him – poets, wives, girlfriends – they all seem to understand him on an emotional level, and were uncommonly forgiving of him when he acted up; the ones who stuck around, that is.
Underrated? I don’t know. I don’t know how Corso is rated these days. I know he complained bitterly about his standing in the nascent Beat Generation, but his body of work is relatively small compared to his friends. He averaged a new book of poetry every decade and there was no biography in his lifetime – all of which contributed to his being less known, less celebrated perhaps, than Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg et al.
Of course, his addictions and his sometimes errant behaviour also impacted on the way he was perceived, but nevertheless he was and remains the ‘Fourth Daddy’ of the Beats – as he often reminded people – and I might be wrong about this, but I’m sure I read that his poem ‘Marriage’ has been anthologized more than any other Beat poem.
Pictured above: Leon Horton, editor of the Corso title, ‘the most important book on the poet thus far’, according to Gerald Nicosia
SW: Can this volume help to rehabilitate him as man and artist?
LH: Does he need rehabilitating? Can he be? To be rehabilitated he would need to have been habilitated at some juncture, and I don’t think Corso ever was; or at least ever felt like he was. He was a man in search of himself. What I hope Ten Times a Poet achieves is to set that search for the self, in his life and in his poetry, in the context of his traumatic childhood and adolescence, against a backdrop of travels, through the eyes of those who knew him.
SW: What is your favourite Corso poem?
LH: Well, it keeps changing as I discover more of his work, but I’m definitely drawn more to his whimsical, humorous side. When I was writing about his adventures in Greece, my favourite poems were ‘First Night On the Acropolis’ (‘The night was right / All the plugs of heaven seemed in / The Night was Black was white / And the moon like a woman’s breast / Nippled the Parthenon full’), which never fails to make me smile, and ‘Reflection in a Green Arena’ (‘Where marble stood and fell / into an eternal landscape / I stand ephemeral’), which sends me back to a ‘spiritual moment’ I had on the Acropolis back in 2020.
More recently, however, through working on the book, it is the poem ‘Spirit’ – which was chosen as the epitaph for Gregory’s headstone in Rome – that has come to hold special meaning to me: ‘Spirit / is Life / It flows thru / the death of me / endlessly / like a river / unafraid / of becoming / the sea’ – I just love the sentiment, and the analogy.
It is a simple poem, which is more to my tastes, deceptively simple, and it speaks volumes to me. We open Ten Times a Poet with ‘Spirit’ (in my end is my beginning, as it were) and I’ve lived with the poem for two years, but it really doubled down personally when my father died after a long fight with cancer.
SW: We lost some important Beat figures during the making of this book. Would you like to say anything about Rosemary Manno, Jay Jeff Jones and Neeli Cherkovski?
LH: God, I know, it’s so sad. I never got to know Rosemary, unfortunately. She was very ill when I started doing Ten Times a Poet and it was only through the efforts of her friend Robert Yarra that I gained permission to include ‘Memories of Gregorio’ – the poem she read at Corso’s memorial at New College in 2001. It is a wonderful eulogy and I’m so pleased that I could include it. Robert and Tate Swindell published El Sol: Last Poems, Rosemary’s final collection, through the Golda Foundation in 2023, a copy of which I’m pleased to say I was gifted. It is an elegant collection, beautifully presented.
Jay was one of the earliest essayists to come on board Ten Times a Poet. He was very enthusiastic about the project, and his knowledge of the Beats was second to none. I knew his work from Beat Scene magazine and his involvement with bringing Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture back into print after 50 years. Jay had a great sense of humour and we had some lively email exchanges. He lived in Heptonstall, where Sylvia Plath is buried, which isn’t that far from where I live in Manchester. We were going to meet up for a drink and put the world to rights, but then I heard the terrible news that he’d passed away.
Neeli’s death hit me really hard. After I interviewed him for the literary journal Beatdom in 2023, we stayed in touch. He often rang me for a chat about his life, how things were going in San Francisco, how happy he was that his Collected Poems was about to be published. Neeli made me feel like I was part of the club, like I was special. He once described me as ‘very personable’. I don’t think anyone has called me that before. I miss him. I miss him telling me off for calling him ‘sir’ as a term of endearment.
SW: Finally, from what you know, might you be able to comment on Gregory Corso’s musical interests, tastes or inclinations? Were there any clues within the articles in this collection?
LH: His taste in music was pretty varied, which is touched upon several times in Ten Times a Poet. Francis Kuipers, who performed with Corso as his guitarist in the 1980s, recalls that he preferred melodic music and loved Italian opera. Like many of his fellow Beats, Gregory also loved jazz. He knew and referenced jazz in poems such as 'Requiem for “Bird” Parker, Musician' and he personally knew Thelonious Monk.
According to composer David Amram, Gregory 'was always respectful of the musicians who created spontaneous and sophisticated improvisations that soared beyond the restrictions of a conformist society’. The same cannot be said of rock music, it seems, as Kirby Olson reveals in an interview with Michael Limnios: ‘He looked down on rock musicians. He explicitly denounced Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan as false prophets.’
This seems odd to me, as he toured with Nico in the 1980s and later worked with Marianne Faithfull. I don't know, maybe he felt poetry was being eclipsed or threatened by rock music.
Editor’s notes: Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024) is available now from Amazon. The Burroughs-Warhol Connection (Beatdom Books) will be published later this year.
See also: ‘Book review #22 : Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet’, April 15th, 2024