Mindfield: New and Selected Poems was published by Hanover House in 1989 (later reissued by Thunder’s Mouth Press) and is the essential single-volume Gregory Corso — drawing from all his previous collections and adding new work that demonstrated his powers were undiminished. For readers encountering Corso for the first time, it remains the recommended starting point; for collectors, it represents the definitive gathering of a body of work too often fragmented across small-press editions and fugitive broadsides.
The Collection
Mindfield draws from:
- The Vestal Lady on Brattle (1955)
- Gasoline (1958)
- The Happy Birthday of Death (1960)
- Long Live Man (1962)
- Elegiac Feelings American (1970)
- Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit (1981)
- Plus new poems written in the mid-to-late 1980s
The selection reveals what the scattered original publications obscured: that Corso was one of the most consistently gifted American poets of the postwar era. His poems from every period display the same qualities — surrealist imagery grounded in street reality, tonal range from comedy to elegy, a gift for the single perfect line that lodges permanently in memory.
Key Poems
“Marriage” — the comic masterpiece.
“Bomb” — the controversial shaped poem.
“The Mad Yak” — pure surrealist lyric.
“Dream of a Baseball Star” — Ted Williams at bat as cosmic event.
“The Last Warmth of Arnold” — one of Corso’s tenderest poems.
“I Held a Shelley Manuscript” — on touching the physical past of poetry.
“Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday” — self-assessment at mid-life.
Critical Significance
Mindfield served a crucial rehabilitative function. By the late 1980s, Corso’s reputation had suffered: his personal difficulties (heroin addiction, erratic behavior, unreliability) had overshadowed his poetry, and the general critical dismissal of the Beats had carried him down with the movement. The Selected Poems allowed readers to encounter the work on its own terms — separated from biography, separated from movement politics — and recognize its quality.
The critical consensus that has emerged since Mindfield places Corso as the third essential Beat poet (after Ginsberg and Gary Snyder) and as a significant figure in the wider tradition of American visionary poetry running from Whitman through Crane to the New York School.
Collecting Mindfield
First edition (Hanover House, 1989): Trade paperback and hardcover simultaneous editions.
Identification points:
- Hanover House imprint (later Thunder’s Mouth Press reissue)
- “First Edition” stated
- 284 pages
Market values: Hardcover first edition in dust jacket: $75–$200. The paperback original ($20–$40) is the more common edition.
Signed copies: $200–$500. Corso was alive until 2001 and signed at readings.
As the single-volume Corso, it has the steady utility value that Selected Poems always commands — the book that people actually buy and read when they want to know a poet’s work.