Nuke Beat

Gregory Corso's "BOMB" (1958)

In 1958, the famed City Lights Books published Beat poet Gregory Corso’s poem “BOMB” as a provocative broadside. It is a long, curious, gnomic digression on, or deconstruction of, what it means to live in the megaton-and-missile age. The broadside unfolds vertically, as a mushroom cloud’s “head” and “stem”:

This page contains it retyped with the appropriate spacing. And if you want to hear Corso read it aloud, here you go:

My own sense is that it starts out strong and then becomes perhaps a bit too associative for my tastes. The mushroom head starts out boldy:

               Budger of history   Brake of time   You   Bomb
      Toy of universe   Grandest of all snatched sky   I cannot hate you

And there’s a really smart section that faces whether death-by-bomb is so different than any other death in this world (apologies that the formatting is not quite capable of being preserved):

 Bomb   you are as cruel as man makes you   and you're no crueller than cancer
  All Man hates you   they'd rather die by car-crash   lightning   drowning
Falling off a roof   electric-chair  heart-attack   old age   old age   O Bomb
     They'd rather die by anything but you

Once you get further down the “stem” of it, it becomes a little less clear to me what’s going on. A poem is not merely a means of conveying ideas or a “message,” of course, and I can respect a strong turn of phrase. But I’m not really sure this works as well as the above:

                         Oppenheimer is seated
                       in the dark pocket of Light
                    Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
                         Einstein his mythmouth
                 a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head

And it does resort to perhaps a bit too much of the, err, “BING BANG BONG BOOM” towards the end:

                        O resound thy tanky knees
                     BOOM   BOOM   BOOM   BOOM   BOOM
                      BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
                    BOOM BOOM ye moons   ye stars BOOM
                     nights ye BOOM   ye days ye BOOM
                 BOOM BOOM ye winds   ye clouds ye rains
                    go BANG ye lakes   ye oceans BING
                     Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
                       Ubangi BOOM   orangutang 
                 BING BANG BONG BOOM   bee bear baboon
                        ye BANG ye BONG ye BING

I’m not an expert on the Beats, but I gather this sort of thing was bold in the 1950s, so I will give it due credit as a historical artifact while not finding it quite so compelling today…

It does have one really good line at the end though:

         that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born

I’m not a poet nor much of a reader of poetry, but I have a lot of respect for that ability to craft a strong, resonant, powerful line. “In the hearts of men to come, more bombs will be born” works for me. “BING BANG BONG BOOM,” uh, doesn’t.

There are a lot of commentaries on “BOMB” over the years, and even at least one graduate thesis dedicated exclusively to it. The reception to the poem has been mixed — some heralding it as one of the great Beat offerings, some deriding it as fairly silly. A reviewer at Time magazine referred to it as “Beat blather,” which feels like one of those opinions that doesn’t age well. I find some Beat poetry very moving, and some parts of “BOMB” are great, even if a lot of it does very little for me.

There is a story that when it was read to a poetry group at Oxford, they disapproved of it. Many of the quotes about this reading say that shoes were thrown, although a later commentary from someone in attendance suggests this is an exaggeration, that the sentiment was rather that: “We thought it a lousy poem, but we threw no shoes.”

In 1981, Corso would call back to “BOMB” in his short poem, “Many Have Fallen”:

In 1958 I took to prophecy
the heaviest kind: Doomsday
It was announced in a frolicy poem called BOMB
and concluded like this:
Know that in the hearts of men to come
more bombs will be born
. . . yea, into our lives a bomb shall fall

Well, 20 years later
not one but 86 bombs, A-Bombs, have fallen
We bombed Utah, Nevada, New Mexico,
and all survived
. . . until two decades later
when the dead finally died

Which is far less “frolicy” than “BOMB,” and its brevity and focus is, at least for me, more powerful overall, even if it is a sort of grim victory lap to run on one’s career.

Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles about his experiences with the Beats and “BOMB” in particular as he contemplated exiting from the world of fraternities, jobs, and the straight life:

I suppose what I was looking for was what I read about in On the Road — looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it, looking for what Allen Ginsberg had called the “hydrogen jukebox world.” Maybe I’d lived in it all my life, I didn’t know, but nobody ever called it that. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the other Beat poets, had called it “The kiss proof world of plastic toilet seats, Tampax and taxis.” That was okay, too, but the Gregory Corso poem “Bomb” was more to the point and touched the spirit of the times better — a wasted world and totally mechanized-a lot of hustle and bustle — a lot of shelves to clean, boxes to stack. I wasn’t going to pin my hopes on that.

…which is high praise, indeed.

I’m not sure “BOMB” does as much for me today, but hey, perhaps it shouldn’t — if something as rooted in its moment like “BOMB” didn’t feel a bit out of date 70 years later, what would that say about it, or us?