Marriage by Gregory Corso

"Marriage" by Gregory Corso, performed as a semi-improvised song by Thomas Munro. "Marriage" is Corso's most anthologized poem, and one of my favorites. I've been a fan of Corso's for almost 25 years; in fact, poems like "Marriage" have been touchstones for me, things I've returned to time and time again. I chose "Marriage" for this art/music project in part because it has so many voices, colors and tones. "Marriage" is a masterwork in the eclectic style Corso invented, which mixes high and low diction with singular pathos. As Allen Ginsberg implied, Corso stands alone among the beats for his ability to capture that Ciceronian nobility of the great Romantic poets - the kind of thing we see in the 20th century in Yeats and Auden. His pained yearning for his own kind of Byzantium is everywhere in his poems, and everywhere in this poem. Yet it is profoundly grounded in the real rough-and-tumble of a real man, and often touched with a gentle humor. The melodies of my song were developed through repeated improvisation on the text, and remain in flux. They are my personal response to the ebb and flow of the language, and, FOR ME, are a better representation of what the poem does to me than a straight reading would be.