Italian Journals

Gregory Corso's Italian Journals are a poetic snapshot of his time in Rome in 1988. It is not a journal of his day-to-day activities but rather of his thoughts and reactions in the form of over forty poems. He also used it as a sketchbook to record sketches of some of the places around Rome he was visiting. The Italian Journals include both the poems and the sketches to provide an intimate account of his life during his stay in Rome. These poetic journal entries describe hanging out in the bars and visiting the graves of the poets he admired as well as his feelings of angst over his life as a poet and his relationship to God. The second part of the book is a brief memoir recounting what it was like to be around Gregory Corso during the 1980s when he was teaching at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa College in Boulder, Colorado until his death in 2001.