MORE BOMBS WILL BE BORN
CORSO, Greogry. BOMB. San Francisco:City Lights Books. 1958.
Fold-out paper broadside; creasing and wear to front cover otherwise near fine.
First edition, signed
"In the hearts of mans to come more bombs will be born"
BOMB is arguably one of the very first poems to acknowledge the reality of the atomic bomb.
BOMB was composed in Paris in a lodging house nicknamed, "The Beat Hotel" whilst in the company of Allen Ginsberg (who had just begun his famous poem Kaddish) and William Burroughs (who was compiling his seminal countercultural text, Naked Lunch from his previous writings).
The poem is a visual poem or a calligram, what with the text structured in the shape of a mushroom cloud. With its shameless blend of politics and humour, it was originally misunderstood as being in a posititve alliance with nuclear war, particularly the beginning lines, "You Bomb /Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched-sky I cannot hate you". First reading the poem at New College in Oxford in 1958, Corso was heckled by the many members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that were present.
At the time, Corso was in a relationship with Belle Carpenter, whose family, the DuPonts, had been responsible for the manufacturing of the atomic bomb. Of this ironic situation, he made the statement: "her family made the atom bomb, and I wrote the 'Bomb' poem. See the combine?".
Bob Dylan found inspiration with Corso's work and it's correlation with the political atmosphere, saying in an interview in Chronicle in 2004: "The Gregory Corso poem 'Bomb' was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better—a wasted world and totally mechanized—a lot of hustle and bustle—a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn't going to pin my hopes on that."
On his writing process in How Poetry Comes to Me (the epigraph of his famous collection Gasoline), Corso made the comment; "…It comes, I tell you, immense with gasolined rags and bits of wire and old bent nails, a dark arriviste, from a dark river within."
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