Remembering Huncke

Twenty years on. It's scarcely imaginable. Herbert Huncke, "Beat Godfather" died on this day.  In memoriam, our good friend Laki Vazakas has provided us with this new Huncke footage - Huncke reading three poems in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, February 7, 1994.

February 4th 1994 - "Long am I overdue It doesn't matter.."…"A perfection rare of exquisite beauty"
"Comments vague threats broken noses.."…."reading their brand of sentiment on and on"
"There are other things I could do.."…."something of the energy flow remains, to encourage"

Remembering Huncke

Here's an accompanying note from Laki:

Today, August 8th, marks the 20th anniversary of Herbert Huncke's passing.

He lived a hard, jagged, full life. 

He was honest about his dark side.

But those of us who were fortunate to know Herbert as a friend also experienced his gentle wisdom, his wry wit, and his eternal cool.

For someone who had lost almost a decade of his life to incarceration, Huncke was remarkably generous with his time, his stories, his candor.

I think of Herbert quite often, envisioning him sitting at his desk in room 828 of the Chelsea, looking out the window as the sky morphed from azure to taxi yellow and finally to his beloved crimson.

I think of the community of friends who looked after Herbert in his final years.  Jerome Poynton, Raymond Foye, Tim Moran and other folks in the Chelsea did all they could to care for Huncke as his health began to fail.

I think of Dimitri Mugianis, James Rasin, Wylie Nash, Jeremiah Newton, Edgar and Helen Oliver, Jack Walls, Paul Romero, Anna Lee Simpson and others who visited and spent substantial time with Herbert.

I think of Ben Schafer's stellar work to edit and compile much of Herbert's writing in The Herbert Huncke Reader.

I also recall visiting Herbert in Beth Israel the night before he died.  His breathing had become laborious, but over the lull of morphine, he raised his voice to share these words: "Tomorrow night, we're gonna have a pow-wow.  Talk among ourselves." 

I remember the way he enunciated and elongated the words pow-wow.

Anyone who was touched by Huncke's unpretentious, nonchalant charisma understands the significance of those two syllables.  Herbert valued the company of his friends, the fine art of conversation, the small details and chance connections that illuminated his midnight stories.

I thought I'd share this video of Herbert reading three of his poems at the Chelsea in 1994.   He was recovering from a broken shoulder, and pneumonia, after falling on the ice.  He reveals his battle scar at the end of the clip.

Huncke wasn't afraid to show his scars.

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 265

                                                               [Scrap Leaves (1968) and Sad Dust Glories (1975) - two early Allen Ginsberg pamphlets]

Michael Schumacher, author of The Essential Ginsberg and the biography, Dharma Lion,
reviews the UnCollected Poems:

"Allen Ginsberg’s harshest critics have claimed that he published every word he’d ever written, regardless of value as poetry.

This, of course, is nonsense. As someone who has seen all of his journals, I can attest to the fact that he published only a small portion of his writings. There are some real jewels buried in his journals, just as there were numerous published poems that neither made his small poetry books nor his gigantic 1,200-page, posthumously issued Collected Poems.

Beat Generation scholar Bill Morgan, who compiled Ginsberg’s bibliography, catalogued his archives, wrote a biography of Ginsberg, and edited six volumes of his letters and journals, has sifted through scores of old poetry pamphlets and journals, newspapers, magazines and other sources to gather what he considers to be the best of Ginsberg’s uncollected poems. The resulting volume, Wait Till I’m Dead (Grove Press), touches on Ginsberg’s writings from six decades, beginning with the poet’s earliest work and concluding when he was growing old and ruminating about his mortality and the deaths of some of his closest friends.

Some of this book’s 103 poems were published in such Ginsberg pamphlets as Scrap Leaves and Sad Dust Glories, but were not included, for whatever reason, in Collected Poems.

Most appeared in tiny publications, many no longer in existence. A handful were never published at all. Morgan arranges the poems in chronological order, broken into sections arranged by decades, with annotations that offer readers brief histories of the works.

All this makes me think of how Ginsberg’s friend, Bob Dylan, would write and record wonderful songs that were never included on his albums, but which are now being released as part of his Bootleg Series. Some of Ginsberg’s poems, like Dylan’s songs, were crying out to be issued in a wide-circulation format, and Wait Till I’m Dead, similar to Dylan’s better Bootleg Series albums, gives you a look at the lifelong development of the artist, as well as offering meritorious work.

I’m partial to Ginsberg’s travel poems, which seem to find him at his most observant of detail; this book offers a strong sampling, from the long “New York to San Fran” to a few outtakes from his National Book Award-winning The Fall of America. “Notice what you notice,” Ginsberg advised, and what he noticed was an enormous range of interests, from the banal to the sublime. I’ve always been impressed by how Ginsberg’s poems never seem to age, how his mind remained fresh until his final days. His publisher claims this will be his “final major contribution.” Knowing what’s still out there, hidden in his journals, I wouldn’t bet on it.

In the meantime, we have Morgan to thank for assembling another volume from one of the greatest poets of the 20th century."

One of the most rare (and seemingly unlikely) Ginsberg items - Allen's direct connection to "hard-core" -  "Hard-core legend", Harley Flanagan's 1976 children's book, Stories & Illustrations by Harley (surely the only children's book Allen ever wrote an introduction to!) 

[Stories and Illustrations by Harley - Introduced by Allen Ginsburg [sic], Charlatan Press, 1976]

This is what he wrote (on May 6, 1976):
"Harley Flanagan lives in Denmark. He is nine years old. He started this story in Morocco. The Shopkeeper and The Donkey. His mother Rosebud was a Lower East Side hippie, and a friend of mine. Harley is also a friend of mine since he was a year old. We lived on a farm together. I'm glad he grew up to be an Artist. His sense of perspective is vast. His choise [sic] of details, mud-wall bricks, triangular mountains, arabic writing on bottles, paths of the Bee to the Moon, baloons [sic] with big music notes out of the mouth, teeth in the sun, big donkey ears - is bold and smart. I'm proud to know he is a member of the Sensitive Family."

Harley puts the book in context: "I have often been asked about the book of poetry I did when I was a kid with the introduction by Allen Ginsberg. Well this is the story...

 When I was a kid in the early 70's, me my mother and my stepfather traveled to Morocco, and while living there at the foothills of the Atlas mountains I wrote and drew two short stories, it wasn't poetry at all. One was about a Shopkeeper his donkey and a bee, the other was a story made up only of drawings involving a saber-tooth tiger family and some sort of mammoth or elephant and their fight for survival. Maybe a year or two after I had drawn this little book and stapled it together, for whatever reason, this Danish press, called Charlatan Press, decided it was amazing child art, or something to that effect, and wanted to put it out, so (much to my embarrassment) it came out, nearly three years after I had drawn and written it. Allen Ginsberg was a friend of my mother and my family, I had known him since birth. He did the introduction for it.

The funny thing is Allen, one of the most important writers of his age, he did the introduction for the book, and if you look at the cover you'll notice that the press spelled his name wrong! [Ginsburg again! - see here]

This book is very rare and was on display in the children's museum of NYC [the children's center at the New York Public Library] right next to the original copy of Winnie the Pooh. My Mother was extremely proud and went there to take pictures of the display."

Plenty of water has passed under the bridge since 1976, since those "hippie" days, Harley did indeed become "an Artist" (tho' perhaps not quite the kind that Allen expected!) - "...cheated of  rocknroll money, twenty thousand people in stadiums/cheering his tattooed skinhead murderous Hare Krishna vegetarian drum lyrics", as Allen remembers him, (from his 1992 poem, "The Charnel Ground"). Harley has a new (very different) book coming out Hard-Core - Life Of My Own, his memoirs (due out from Feral House in September) and new CD of his genre-defining music (more details here) 

  

[The Travel Agency Is On Fire - William S Burroughs - edited by Alex Wemer-Colan CUNY Poetics Documentary Initiative, series 5 (2015)] 

Coming soon, series 6, the next installment of the extraordinary Lost & Found - CUNY Poetics Document Initiative. For the previous five series (a positive cornucopia of poetics rediscoveries - in short - and not so short - pamphlets) - see here
William Burroughs'  The Travel Agency Is On Fire was one of the titles in the last series,  Gregory Corso's  Naropa Lectures 1981 (edited by William Camponovo, Mary Catherine Kinniburgh and Oyku Tekten with a preface by Anne Waldman), spearheads the new series. But, singling these out does a disservice to the range and relevance and intelligence of the endeavor. They are all essential books.

And another book - 
Herbert Huncke's Guilty of Everything  (published by Endemunde) recently appeared in Italian. For a review of the book in La Stampa - see here  



Paul Iorio's nearly 4,ooo word  Lawrence Ferlinghetti interview, (from 2000), covering Beat history, the Six Gallery reading, and much more (Lawrence setting the record straight) may be read here.

Jay Babcock, Larry "Ratso" Sloman, and Michael Simmons' oral history, of another historic counter-cultural moment, the Yippie 1967 Exorcism of the Pentagon, "Out Demons Out", (originally published in 2004 in Arthur magazine), can likewise be read in its entirety - here

Big news - Jack Kerouac's French writings (scheduled to be published-in-translation and included in a new volume published by the Library of America, later in the year) appeared this month (in their original language) from Les Editions du Boreal in Montreal.

Gregory Corso's papers (some of them, anyway!)  are now available at Brown.

Here's an entertaining little piece from The Paris Review, a profile of Don Wilen, Allen's accountant.

4/20 - Allen Ginsberg's 1992 High Times Interview

Allen Ginsberg's High Times interview with Gregory Daurer appeared originally in February 1992.

Before the interview Daurer penned a few introductory paragraphs:

"Count Beat poet Allen Ginsberg among the nation's first hemp activists. After his seminal poem "Howl" thrust him into the national spotlight in 1956, Ginsberg began speaking out in favor of marijuana-law reform, gay rights, and a myriad of other causes close to his heart. Since then, he's produced a body of work (including Planet News, the anti-nuke Plutonian Ode, and White Shroud) that has earned him the recognition of not only the counterculture, but also that of the literary establishment  - receiving the 1974 National Book Award for The Fall of America.
Besides Ginsberg's literary notoriety, he's recorded with Bob Dylan and The Clash, and his recent spoken-word/music disc, The Lion For Real, is tender and raunchy - highly recommended. Ginsberg also wrote lyrics for an opera, Hydrogen Jukebox, collaboration with noted composer Philip Glass. And, as if this weren't enough, Twelvetrees Press has just released a beautiful book of the poet's photographs.
A devotee of Tibetan Buddhism since 1972 (and less and less a pot smoker). Ginsberg, now 65, teaches poetics during the summer at Naropa Institute's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, where this interview took place. At first testy, due to his consistently hectic schedule, Ginsberg quickly warmed up and proved to be a generous interview subject, his stream-of-consciousness replies sounding like improvisational poetry. 

GD: Why do you think there's a revival of interest in the (19)50's Beat Generation and it's literature?

AG: The literature and the mythology of the Beat Generation runs counter to the current hyper-technological, homogenized, money-obsessed, security/fear based, militaristic gross-out. It specialized in the analysis of the technological police state; the refreshing insight into ecological sanity. the revival of the Whitmanic notion of American friendship and affection as the basis for democracy; respect for individuality; disrespect for individuality; disrespect for the law where "the law is an ass" pertaining to psychedelics, marijuana, and the handling of heroin, not as a medical thing but as basis for sort of police state structure. All these themes make the original Beat ethos quite user-friendly, compared to the destructiveness of (a) supposed "straight"world that can go nuts, killing 150,000 people in Iraq for the sake of oil that..that'll pollute the planet.

 These themes are perennial values in a decade without values in America - a nation sustained by abuse of the earth's resources and consuming a disproportionate amount of raw materials, creating a disproportionate amount of garbage, and possessing a disproportionate amount of military power for such a small nation.

GD: What Beat works best reflect the ideal you've discussed?

AG: Books like On The Road, or, Visions of Cody, or, Visions of Gerard, or, The Subterraneans - any of (Jack) Kerouac's writings coming from his spontaneous natural mind. Or (William) Burroughs'  extremely intelligent analysis of the addiction situation in America. Or my own sort of exuberant, sometimes gay, sometimes psychedelic, sometimes Buddhist, sometimes angry, sometimes funny, natural mind - see Collected Poems, or White Shroud. Or Gregory Corso's historical scope in Mindfield, because he's a pretty good one for applying Greek myth to contemporaneity. Or Gary Snyder's Practice of the Wild, correlating backcountry with wilderness of mind. Or Philip Whalen, the first Beat poet abbot. Or Michael McClure's new biological poetry, nature talking. As well as the sometimes inspiring myths of Neal Cassady who transcended - or spanned - several generations or so of  American psyche and road simultaneously - from (Jack)  Kerouac to (Ken) Kesey

GD: Can you comment on the genesis of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - how that came together and how it expresses these values you're discussing?

AG: Well, to begin, the Venerable Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was a Tibetan lama and came to Boulder and established a meditation center, Dharmadahtu, and invited me and Gary Snyder and Robert Bly out for a poetry reading to raise money for it in 1972. At the end of summer, 1974, Trungpa sat down with me and John Cage and Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima and a few of his students and said, "Can you fellows take the responsibility for forming a school of poetry here within Naropa Institute to teach the Buddhists pure mouth, poetic mouth, because they're not going to be good teachers or good Buddhists unless they use the world of speech skillfully to enlighten other people, to liberate other people. And at the same time, the poets who work here can learn meditation and sanity so there's less death from alcohol and suicidal behavior and doubt about poetry being ok. So I thought that view was great. It's go on for seventeen years [1991], and the school finally got accredited about five years ago in 1986

GD: What are your current views [1991] on psychedelic drugs?

AG: The last thing I tried was Ecstasy. The first trip was really great - here in Boulder - five years ago. One immediate conclusion I came to was that Ecstasy was misnamed. It was not a poet who laid that trip on the poor drug. It's "Empathy"."Ecstasy" is some kind of hippy-do[[y exaggeration hyperbole. "Empathy" is more accurate, because the trip immediately made me feel very sympathetic, empathetic to everybody I knew.

GD: Have you tried it since then?

AG: Second time I took it, same thing, bu much diluted and it wasn't that interesting. The amphetamine-esque aspect of it was dominant and I didn't like that. I don't like amphetamines or cocaine - they just make you nervous and frazzle your nerves and exhaust your endorphins.

GD: What did you learn from psychedelics?

AG: Psychedelics seemed to me a classic educational tool, or classic visionary tool. The only thing is I've slightly changed my view of them - it's been twenty years of meditating now - I think it'd be useful to have some information or instruction or experience in centering yourself with meditation practice. Preferably non-theistic, so you don't get trippy on Hindu gods, or Christian gods, or Jewish Yahweh's, or monotheistic monsters in the sky, or devils; but more open space, as in Buddhist and some Hindu and some Kabbalah and some Sufi view - a centering mechanism so you don't get enangled and trapped in your own projections. And being trapped in your own projections on acid is something I've experienced often and I can see how it could lead to disasters.

GD: Explain what that concept means

AG: Some people get into a circular feedback, "Oooh, I'm a human body, oooh, I'm dying, I must be dying this very minute, maybe I'm dying now, pooh, call the police!" And that's how one gets entangled in one's own projections. Or take of all your clothes and jump in front of the cars, and say, "Stop all the machinery!" So you might get run over or arrested, not knowing skillful means of communicating naked nature.

GD: What would "skillful means" be?

AG: The "skillful means" aspect of activities comes as a by-product of centering. The "wisdom" aspect might be psychedelic perception of the transitoriness of the world - with minute particular detail glittering in the malady of the eyeball, a sense of emptiness in the world. So, combining wisdom and skillful means together would be necessary.
Unfortunately the teaching of the government is neither wise nor skillful. It's fixated on some God realm or some monotheistic central state-ism. And the government is entangled in its own projections, the projections that it had originally when the CIA introduced acid - that psychedelics were war weapons, and would drive the enemy nuts.They never got over it because perhaps they were nuts themselves, the CIA director of Project MK/ULTRA

GD: You've described Timothy Leary's psychedelic retreat in upstate New York - Millbrook - as a remarkable place. What do you recall about those times in the early (19)60's?

AG: Well they trained people - psychologists and Eastern advisors - with a foundation aimed at exploring reactions and uses and safe procedures with LSD or other psychedelics. Hospitable. Open. Actually, quite scientific, compared to the government's experiments, which were totally unscientific. And, as someone who took part in legal government experiments, I know how they were unscientific

GD: How were the government-sponsored acid tests unscientific?

AG: They put me in a terrible room with whitewashed-tile hospital walls and all sorts of batteries and machines and stuck electrodes on my skin and treated me like a hospital victim. It wasn't the right way to take LSD
Leary had you take it in the woods or in the big house with friendly people so you didn't become an "object". See, in government experiments at the Stanford Institute of Mental Health - 1959 - they treated subjects like objects to be studied, rather than living persons with whom to relate. Leary was treating the people he was working with as living, autonomous, individually - different people, and taking a lot of notes and information on the subjective experience, saying that all you can get from that experience is subjective description.
Just like with love-making - You can measure the prick, or the pulsations, or the number of sperm, or the body heat, but you won't get the subjective thing in the belly - How does it feel in the belly or the heart when you relate to someone? And that's the key to sex - you can't measure it from the outside. And it goes along with (Werner) Heisenberg and (Albert) Einstein - the measuring instrument determines the appearance of the physical world. Anyway, the government was inept and Leary was ept.

GD: What did you find useful about Leary's methods?

AG: Millbrook was a safe center and he evolved a number of good generalizations for the use, mainly - Don't make it secret, be candid, give the people the drug to take as much as they want themselves, so that they control the input rather than some controller - take it in a relaxed setting.
Leary came to the generalization that the set and setting influence the trip, which is the most wise thing that has been said so far by a psychologist about drugs, and it's the key to why some people freak out and it's the key to why the whole government criminalization of the psychedelics put a wet blanket on the whole psyche.

GD: Who do you recall first lining up for Leary's Harvard psilocybin experiments?

AG: (Jack) Kerouac. And Bob Kaufman, the black poet, living upstairs. Kerouac and Kaufman came and we tried psilocybin. I remember "Coach Leary", as Kerouac saw him, like an Irish football coach, and Kerouac looking out the window and saying in a funny voice, "I feel like pissing at the moon", or something.
But then Kerouac said one great thing when he realized the import of it - though he'd had peyote ten years earlier. He said, "Walking on water wasn't built in a day" - I've always remembered that in terms of the change of American consciousness or the alteration of the hyper-industrial monstrosity - a deconstruction which is necessary for the survival of the planet. That kind of miracle isn't built in a day. Slow patience.
That's one of the very best things I've heard about acid or psychedelics - as distinct from crazed enthusiasts who think with one experience they understand the secrets of the universe.

GD: What do you think of the [Reagan-era] "War on Drugs"?

AG: I think it's a fraud, and it's a conscious fraud. The government has been entangled in the sale of hard drugs all along. Mainly the transportation of heroin from the Golden Triangle from the (19)60's on, at least.
The tradition goes on through Central America, where you see marijuana and cocaine being used to pay for arms. That's been gone into at great length with (John) Kerry's Senate sub-committee, so that's pretty well established, even in the mainstream. And the government,  simultaneously appointing a "War on Drugs", has been secretly dealing drugs, or using drug money for its own nefarious purposes, secret and illegal, off-the-shelf CIA/NSA operations.
So the "War on Drugs" doesn't make any sense at all. It's (a) completely chaotic and evil, sinister, outright criminal, enterprise by the government. It's not a "War on Drugs", it seems almost an effort to spread drugs.

GD: What do you see as a solution?

AG: The only way there's ever going to be a solution is to legalize grass as a cash crop for small family farms, to reinvigorate the small family farm ideal in America and make it economically feasible. Send the junkies to doctors, either to cure or maintain with natural opiates that are better than heavy, synthetic methadone. The latter seems to give too heavy a habit and is too hard to kick - so some opiate would be better (as (Herbert) Huncke said, in a previous issue (of High Times)). Liberate the psychedelics for a scientific or spiritual use, maybe licensed in some way - You know, maybe youo can get it free if you take a course in samatha-vipassana or a course in centering, or tai chi. And you could then re-examine what you wanted to do with cocaine and amphetamines, because they do lead to psychosis, they are a threat like alcohol. They're not as big a threat as alcohol, but they are the similar parallel threat to the family, to friends, to houses - violence and burglaries ries with that kind of psychosis. But at least we could look at the real heavy substances to find a way out or cure, or "skillful means".
But as long as you pile up the "War on Drugs" as the war on all drugs, and call everything a drug, whether it's a dried herb, or natural opium, or mushroom, or cactus plant - that doesn't make any sense at all. It never did. It's such a prejudiced, stupid, narrow-minded, ignorant set-up that it must be a set-up on purpose. And the purpose would be to extend government control over individual lives, over dissidents and seekers for an authority outside organized state and rigid religion.

GD: What emboldened you to speak out against drug laws in the (19)50's?

AG: What emboldened me was meeting (Herbert) Huncke and hearing about his situation as a junkie, and realizing he was in trouble and the police were hounding him like Nazis hounding a Jew, something parallel. He had this addiction, there was no doctor who could cure him. He had a medical condition and he was being hounded by the police with guns. It didn't make any sense at all. It wasn't like you read in the paper - he wasn't a "dope fiend", in that sense. He was just a guy in trouble. And a brilliant and sympathetic guy.
I went on a boat to New Orleans in 1945 or (19)46 and the Puerto Rican mess man/roommate turned me on to some grass and told me where I could find some in Harlem on 111th Street. The difference between the government party-line on marijuana and my direct experience of it was the difference between a world of abstract fantasy - the government's - and my own concrete realization - an experience that was not only sort of innocuous, but also I had surprisingly funny perceptions. 

GD: Like what?

AG: I can remember the first time I really got high in Manhattan. We got in a car and couldn't finf our way around the block practically. But we wound up going into a small cafe, and I ordered a black-and-white sundae. And it was this extremely cold, sweet, vanilla whitet ice-cream. covered by thick, hot, black, syrupy chocolate, and it was amazingly good! My taste buds (had) never recognized thr common black-and-white sundae - the humor of that combination, the polarity of it, the commonality, the common-ness - this is the all-American creation, the completely yin-yang of polar opposite, artistic creation!  And then all of a sudden I think of the government idea that marijuana drives you mad like a frothing dog until you take an axe and kill somebody. Instead they have me ice-cream?

GD: What were some of your other grass experiences in the late (19)40's and early (19) 50's?

AG: I'd go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the Carlo Crivelli  and other Renaissance paintings, and I went on to look at (Paul) Cezanne and (Paul) Klee from that point of view. I found it useful for the study of aesthetics. I really don't dig people using it just for giggling and having parties and getting drunk on it, because it seems that with marijuana you can refine your sense, if you make that your purpose. So the difference between my direct experience of grass - and a whole generation who had direct experience -  and the government party-line depicting grass as monstrous, causing psychosis - gave me to realize that the habitual tendency of the government seemed to be intended to close the "doors of perception" lest people become too individualistic and begin to suspect the government as being some type of network, plot to keep people asleep, in line, not merely physically but psychologically

This interview also appeared in ( is excerpted in) the Dictionary of Literary Biography - Volume 237  - The Beats (Gale, 2000) and The Beats: A Literary Reference (Carroll & Graf, 2002).

A Gregory Corso Weekend

                            [Gregory Corso, Boulder, Colarado, July 1994 - Photograph by Seth Brigham]

[Gregory Corso - Self Portrait (undated)]

A Gregory Corso weekend.. It's Gregory's birthday. He would have been eighty-six today. 

We've featured Gregory many many times on the Allen Ginsberg, starting way back in 2010 with this birthday announcement. 
Gregory Corso Happy Birthday of Death (sic) can be found here
Corso 2013 Birthday celebration - here
Corso 2014 Birthday celebration - here
Corso 2015 Birthday celebration - here
Not Forgetting Gregory Corso - here

Two vintage  Naropa readings - one (with William Burroughs)  - from 1975, and one (solo), from 1981 (a reading from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit - that reading continues here) 

Original Beats, Francois Bernardi's film of Gregory and Herbert Huncke can be seen here  (additional footage from that movie - here) 

Here's more footage of Gregory



Here's Gregory reading The Bill of Rights on an East Village rooftop!
 
Die on Me is the extraordinary set of recordings put out in 2002 on Paris Records. A complimentary record, Lieders (with Marianne Faithfull) was also put out by Paris Records

Listen to to "Ah Roma!" (with Francis Kuipers)
(More Gregory-in-Rome here and here) 

Gregory heckling Allen? - It wouldn't be a proper Gregory memory if there weren't record of Gregory misbehaving. There's his famous 1973 interruption of Allen's uptown Y reading 

That same year, he wasn' t any less restrained at the Salem State Kerouac conference.

Gregory's more measured words on Kerouac (from 1986's What Happened to Jack Kerouac?) here:



Allen and Gregory bickering over Shakespeare - here,
confessing he's in error - here 
and sparring with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, way back in 1975,  in a hilarious series of posts (eight of them in all) starting here - ("He wants to be like me - famous! - and Allen. He wants to get into the poetry racket, that's what he wants to do") 

That year (1975), indeed for many years, Gregory gave classes at Naropa. The Allen Ginsberg Project has featured several extensive transcriptions. The 1975 classes (serialized in seven parts) begin here (after "Two Shots From Gregory Corso"). This is followed by a four-part serializaton, (posted February 2012),  "More Corso At Naropa"  

Gregory interviewer and interviewee - 1961 -  the Journal For The Protection of All Beings interview - Gregory and Allen interview William Burroughs
From 1959, Gregory and Allen and Peter Orlovsky are interviewed by Studs Terkel
(plus a later radio interview with Allen and Gregory) 

Speaking of interviews, there's now this essential volume:

Gregory, the "great list poet". Allen evokes some of Gregory's longer works here
(and offers a shorter note - here)

in 1978 (in a four-part sequence) he joins Allen with a line-by-line reading (almost) of Whitman's revealing and foolishly neglected poem, "Respondez!"  

and there's more….

Happy Birthday, Gregory Nunzio Corso!

more tomorrow!

   [Gregory Corso,  September, 1959, in Athens, Greece, at the Acropolis - (for more from that particular occasion - see here]