While Kerouac, erstwhile football hero and Wolfian novelist, was supported by his long suffering, dysfunctional alcoholic mother, Ginsburg, the son of New Jersey middle class teachers, was embracing congenital posturing madness, and Burroughs, part of the St. Louis elite, had the luxury to explore and exploit his vices, Gregory Corso was a child of the streets. A product of Greenwich Village, Corso was born on Bleecker Street on March 26, 1930 to teenage immigrant Italian parents and put into foster care as a toddler after his mother fled back to Italy. Shortly after reuniting with his father, Gregory was bounced from juvenile hall to reformatory and back again until, as a teenager, he finally ended up in Danemora at the age of 16 for stealing a radio. Prison was a double-edged sword for the young Corso. While he was brutalized by some of the other older inmates, another contingent recognized the raw genius in him and directed him to the library where he discovered poetry. Corso avidly studied the Romantics, particularly Shelley, and through him found his lifelong fascination with the classics and began his journey as a fledgling poet.

Upon his release from prison, Corso met Allen Ginsburg in a Greenwich Village tavern, showed him his poems, and was recognized as a talent to reckon with. Ginsburg may have coasted after "Howl" and perpetuated his career as a hanger-on and political figure head, but one thing I do give him credit for is turning Corso on to surrealism and language play and introducing Corso to the esteemed Columbia University Professor and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Mark Van Doren (father of the quiz show scandal contestant Charles Van Doren) who was an advocate for Corso and helped him become published by the age of 20.

Corso was a master of the original in poetry; a truly unrecognized force who should have been this country's laureate if only for his basic understanding of the human spirit, his breaking of the boundaries of language and convention, and his uniquely apolitical way of challenging the status quo in a gloves off manner as only a New York City street kid could. Gregory sang of the spirit of the untamed individual, a concept that is truly American, yet feared by America as a whole.

I could fill pages writing about how Corso, still reeking of the streets, conquered Harvard University students and faculty alike with his fresh approach to poetry and how his first published work "The Vestal Lady On Brattle" was based on his experiences there. I could carry on about how as a man with no formal education, Gregory Corso embraced the idea of the noble savage in both Native American image, and the ancient Greek of antiquity. But the crux of the matter is that he used this primordial image of man in direct rebellion to the 1990s buttoned-down automaton that the majority aspired to. How Rock and Roll!

Corso challenged language in the same pieces in which he invoked masters like Byron, Shelley, Keats and Blake. Look for the use of surrealism in words like 'penguin dust', 'apple death' and 'gargoyle blood'. Read the poems, 'Bomb', 'The Happy Birthday of Death', 'Marriage', and 'Hair'. Even Dylan at his best could not beat Corso in lyrically expressing the sights, smells, and tastes of the walking and stigmatized bohemia. And take my word for it. Without Corso, there would be no Dylan.

True, this honor as the daddy-o of rock n roll is usually bestowed upon Jack Kerouac. And I am an advocate, a lover, a mourner of Kerouac, both as a Massachusetts girl who comes from people who knew people who knew a very young Kerouac, and as a writer looking for a Papa with a very broad shoulder to rest her head upon. But Corso had the youthful vitality. Corso was a lyricist. Corso spawned the technique that allowed Dylan to channel "Positively Fourth Street" exposing hypocrisy. Corso created the freedom allowing Dylan to use phrases like "jingle jangle morning" in "Mr. Tambourine Man". Corso lived up to it until January 17th.

Later, when the Beats migrated West to San Francisco's North Beach to join the East's most notorious expatriate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a whole new generation (Gary Snyder, Michael McClure) who really would give birth to the hippies, emerged. And with this flux in consciousness and geography came the gentrifying, and gentle-fying of the Urban Young Romantics (Kerouac, Corso, Ginsburg) from Greenwich Village. Zen Buddhism was being explored in the late forties and early fifties. As radical as that was, it became part of the uniform in the early sixties; a uniform discarded by the soldiers who started it all. Kerouac drank more and wrapped himself in the flag and became ever more self destructive. Ginsburg milked his role as Daddy-o and was nothing more than a scenester ligging the likes of Bobby Zimmerman. But Corso remained true to his roots. Attending readings, lectures, and symposiums, Corso disrupted the affairs by standing and spewing obscenities at anyone guilty of posturing or hypocrisy. Corso remained true to his principles, even if meant fading into and ultimately dying in near obscurity. This to me is the spirit of rock and roll. The beats' soundtrack may have been Bop, but they spawned a rebellion that culminated in punk and allowing for the florid poetry and nihilism of Goth and the mirror to savagery held up by the industrial movement.

Get to know Gregory Corso and know thyself. Find him by reading his poetry collections. My favorite is "The Happy Birthday of Death". You can find him as a character in many a Kerouac novel…Yuri Gregorovic, Kerouac's rival in love in "The Subterraneans" for example. You can also see him as a performer challenging religious and social hypocrisy in America's first independent film, written by Kerouac himself in 1999, a Robert Frank film called "Pull My Daisy".

Rest In Peace, Gregory. I am going to make sure that people know you, if I have to die and join you on the road in trying. Be bop be bop be bop.