CORSO, Gregory.

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Original ink drawing. A detailed drawing by Corso, signed by him at the foot. It appears to depict a personal vision of life and afterlife, replete with medieval, Christian, and Buddhist influences. The lower third depicts an ensemble of musicians perched on plinths. Above them, humanoid creatures walk in procession past a cluster of knights; still further above, a line of tiny pointed figures plod past a smiling cat to a door marked "EXIT", which presumably leads to the upper third of the picture, illustrated with enlightened and angelic figures against a backdrop of celestial patterns.Corso was an iconoclast when it came to religion. Despite teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in the 1970s, he reportedly heckled the lectures of Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa and tossed firecrackers into the meditation hall. He was critical of organized religions but used their motifs throughout his poetry.The drawing is accompanied by a signed letter of provenance, which notes that it was given as a gift to the poet and academic David Posner (1921-1985) in the mid-1960s. Posner was an English teacher and assistant curator of poetry at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where Corso intermittently taught. Both contributed work to New Directions in Prose and Poetry, Issue 19, 1966.

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