BOO KS
747
poems as poems, in any old-fashioned sense. The long poem,
Bomb,
is shock-tactics, reminding one of Marinetti (the bombs in Ethiopia,
flowering. on the ground like great red roses, brown bodies frizzling
at the edge of the petals) and partly of very smart advertisement
copy writing; plug, project, repeat are, I would say, Corso's aesthe–
tic rules. The deep psychological technique of adjustment is the
White Queen's: scream all the time before it happens, and then
what happens will be an anticlimax, which you can take quite calm–
ly. I think it was the White Queen who also told Alice that you
have to run very hard to stay in one place, and this I think Corso
is doing. The revealing bits are where some "poetry" in an old
sense creeps in, and seems often touchingly soft-centered:
Often, in some steep ancestral book,
when I find myself entangled with leopard-apples and torched
mushrooms,
my cypressean skin outreaches the recorded age
and I, as though tipping a pitcher of milk,
pour secrecy upon the dying page.
Some ear there, some sense of the shaping of a stanza: or. ...
Men! let's bypass the city let us fly let us go jet
until we crash safely into snow from huge pink foundations-–
gentle children await us.
The troubling thing with Mr. Corso is that he is such a Charles
Addams character one doesn't quite know what he is going to do
with these gentle children when he meets them. Rescue them, nour–
ish them, comfort them? Boil them in a cannibal stew? The power–
ful, wobbly, eructative emotions of a volume like this seem above
all eminently
exploitable
by men with harder heads, worse hearts
and sharper purposes than Mr. Corso. Richards thought what a
good reading of a good poem should do is leave you more open and
alert for what happens next; I feel that full surrender to Mr. Corso
(which I admit I have avoided, however) would leave you flat on
your back waiting for elephants to trample on you. But I would
by no means say there is no talent here, or that the individual has
not a right to organize his suffering as a machine of self-projection
and symbolic psychic aggression. One says, "Good, he is getting it
out of his system!" And one's own system, as the defenses are one
by one tom away, must take its chances.
G. S.
Fraser
