CORSO, Gregory. Gasoline. San Francisco: City Lights Books. 1958.
Small 4to. Cream template on front cover with red box containing white title lettering; specification 'Number Eight' in The Pocket Poets Series, Red template on back cover with cream box containing blurb; pp. [6], 7-48; usual fading from discolouration; penned initials to top of front cover, small stain on back cover, but generally very good.
First edition, first printing, with introduction by Allen Ginsberg.
In this editions introduction to Gasoline by close friend Allen Ginsberg, he christens Gregory Corso as, "probably the greatest American poet in America". After several stints in prison during which he immersed himself in the imaginations of canonical writers, Corso found himself in New York where the two inspired writers struck up a friendship that would prove crucial to the evolution of Corso's relationship to experimental language.
From 1957-1958 Gregory Corso lived in Paris and the poems composed during that period were brought together in the 'Gasoline' collection. It would be his first major book following The Vestal Lady on Battle (1955) . 'Gasoline' also contains poems written during his travels with Ginsberg in Mexico. Corso compared the free form of his work to music subervise to convention; "When Bird Parker or Miles Davis blow a standard piece of music, they break off into into their own-self little unstanard sounds- well, that's my way with poetry…many will say that a poem written in that order is unpolished etc. - that's just what I want them to be….like all good, spontaenous jazz".
Jack Kerouac would summarise Corso, his inflections of sound and rhthm and his daring linguistic freedom as such; "a tough young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the rooftops … Gregory the Herald. Read slowly and see".
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