![CORSO, Gregory (1930-2001). Typed manuscript signed ("Gregory") of his shaped poem "Bomb" ("Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb"), boldly inscribed at end in ink "for Graham Gregory," and with Corso's Paris address in ink at top of page 1: "9 Git-le-coeur Paris-- France." [Paris, ca.1958]. Large folio (38½ x 8½ in.), typed on rectos only in two sizes of upper-case letters, on four separate sheets of stationery from The Paris Review, 16, Rue Vernet - Paris VIIIe (heading at top of the sheet), these neatly laid down on three sections of white foamcore, small clean tears to bottom edges, but generally in excellent condition.](https://www.christies.com/img/LotImages/2002/NYR/2002_NYR_01083_0263_000(043421).jpg?w=1)
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CORSO, Gregory (1930-2001). Typed manuscript signed ("Gregory") of his shaped poem "Bomb" ("Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb"), boldly inscribed at end in ink "for Graham Gregory," and with Corso's Paris address in ink at top of page 1: "9 Git-le-coeur Paris-- France." [Paris, ca.1958]. Large folio (38½ x 8½ in.), typed on rectos only in two sizes of upper-case letters, on four separate sheets of stationery from The Paris Review, 16, Rue Vernet - Paris VIIIe (heading at top of the sheet), these neatly laid down on three sections of white foamcore, small clean tears to bottom edges, but generally in excellent condition.
CORSO'S "BOMB": "YES YES INTO OUR MIDST A BOMB WILL FALL"
An early typescript of one of Corso's most famous works. The poet spent 1958 to 1960 traveling through France, Italy, and Greece, and "Bomb," an ironic elegy to the atomic bomb and the specter of worldwide nuclear armageddon, dates from this period. The address is that of the run-down flat on the Left Bank which Corso shared with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. One early autograph draft is extant (in Wimberly Library, Florida Atlantic University) and bears an appended note by the poet, explaining the difficulty he encountered in trying to shape the poem on a typewriter. Eventually, to achieve the poem's characteristic mushroom-cloud shape, Corso carefully sliced a typewritten text of the poem into strips and reassembled them with paste, collage-style, on a long strip of paper. The present is apparently a fair copy prepared at the request of a Paris friend.
Corso's "Bomb" was one of the earliest poems to deal with the specter of nuclear annhilation. Coros, ironically, "was at the time married to a DuPont; as he said, 'Her family made the bomb, and I wrote the Bomb poem.'" (Catharine F. Seigel, "Corso, Kinnell, and the Bomb," in University of Dayton Review, 18.3 (Summer 1987), pp. 95-103.
Corso's "Bomb" was first published in San Francisco as a City Lights Press broadside, then as a fold-out leaf in the 1960 collection entitled The Happy Birthday of Death, the first book of Corso's poems published by James Laughlin of New Directions, a book which carried on its cover a striking photograph of the mushroom cloud from the bombing of Hiroshima.
Provenance: Graham Z. Seidman, Paris.
CORSO'S "BOMB": "YES YES INTO OUR MIDST A BOMB WILL FALL"
An early typescript of one of Corso's most famous works. The poet spent 1958 to 1960 traveling through France, Italy, and Greece, and "Bomb," an ironic elegy to the atomic bomb and the specter of worldwide nuclear armageddon, dates from this period. The address is that of the run-down flat on the Left Bank which Corso shared with William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. One early autograph draft is extant (in Wimberly Library, Florida Atlantic University) and bears an appended note by the poet, explaining the difficulty he encountered in trying to shape the poem on a typewriter. Eventually, to achieve the poem's characteristic mushroom-cloud shape, Corso carefully sliced a typewritten text of the poem into strips and reassembled them with paste, collage-style, on a long strip of paper. The present is apparently a fair copy prepared at the request of a Paris friend.
Corso's "Bomb" was one of the earliest poems to deal with the specter of nuclear annhilation. Coros, ironically, "was at the time married to a DuPont; as he said, 'Her family made the bomb, and I wrote the Bomb poem.'" (Catharine F. Seigel, "Corso, Kinnell, and the Bomb," in University of Dayton Review, 18.3 (Summer 1987), pp. 95-103.
Corso's "Bomb" was first published in San Francisco as a City Lights Press broadside, then as a fold-out leaf in the 1960 collection entitled The Happy Birthday of Death, the first book of Corso's poems published by James Laughlin of New Directions, a book which carried on its cover a striking photograph of the mushroom cloud from the bombing of Hiroshima.
Provenance: Graham Z. Seidman, Paris.