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.
"In the hearts of mans to come more bombs will be born"
BOMB was composed in Paris in a lodging house nicknamed, "The Beat Hotel" in the company of Allen Ginsberg (who had just begun his famous poem Kaddish) and William Burroughs (then writing his Naked Lunch).
A visual poem or calligram, the text is presented in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Blending politics and humour, it was misunderstood as being pro-nuclear war: "You Bomb /Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched-sky I cannot hate you". Reading the poem in Oxford in 1958, the poet was heckled by members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Corso, in a relationship with Belle Carpenter, whose family were involved in manufacturing nuclear weapons quipped that "her family made the atom bomb, and I wrote the 'Bomb' poem. See the combine?".
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