MORE BOMBS WILL BE BORN
CORSO, Gregory. BOMB San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1958.
Fold-out paper broadside (610 x 190 mm); creasing and wear to front cover, otherwise near fine.
First edition, signed by the author.
Corso wrote BOMB in the Paris lodging house known as The Beat Hotel. Also present were Allen Ginsberg (who had just begun his famous poem Kaddish) and William Burroughs (then writing The Naked Lunch).
A visual poem or calligram, BOMB is arranged in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Blending politics and humour, it was at first misunderstood as being pro-nuclear war: “You Bomb / Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched-sky I cannot hate you”. When heckled by members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament during a 1958 reading in Oxford, Corso – then in a relationship with Belle Carpenter, whose family manufactured nuclear weapons – quipped “her family made the atom bomb, and I wrote the Bomb poem. See the combine?”.
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