Between the Covers

Unbound. One quarto leaf typed both sides, titled in ink at the beginning and corrected in ink and Signed by Corso on the second page. Folded, soiled, small nicks and tears, overall good or better. An apparently unpublished manuscript of a poem by Corso that displays numerous corrections and many typos. The poem seems to be about the possibility of the U.S. going to war with Iraq; a rumination about Arabs in general, about Jews and his dating Moshe Dayan's daughter: ("...whose father, one patch eyed mosey, was perhaps all set to be king of Isreal; wow, thought i, if i marry his daughter, and he i dies, then his daughter takes the throne, zand in a way I'd be king of the jews." [note: all spellings are Corso's]), and a reminiscence of being in Morocco smoking kief and watching young dancing boys with Paul Bowles, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Francis Bacon, and Timothy Leary. The final line reads (again the spellings are Corso's): "babylonh ---- the cradle of civilization, full circle, we are about to war against the first and oldest army on earth." We have searched numerous word combinations and could find nothing published that was remotely similar to this poem. Corso was the youngest of the original group of Beat Poets. He produced an important and lasting body of work that, while sometimes overlooked, was praised by his contemporaries. Ginsberg called him a "poet’s poet,” and Kerouac, who cast him as the character Yuri Gregorovic in his novel *The Subterraneans*, called him a "poet of the very first magnitude in the history of English." Presumably unique.

Item #364466