Gasoline & The Vestal Lady on Brattle

I first read this book in the summer of 1965. Saw it beside Howl in a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue, probably Shakespeare & Co. It was delightfully iconoclastic, with overtones of Subterranean Homesick Blues. Well over my head at the time with its dense literary allusions and references to locations I hadn't experienced yet. 55 years later, more widely read and more widely traveled, it makes more sense now. Of course not all of it make sense to anyone now; there are numerous obscure autobiographical and personal allusions we may never understand.
Corso was nothing if not a master of mixed metaphors ... or a mister of maxed metaphors. Some poems make Subterranean Homesick Blues look like MacArthur Park.
It starts in San Francisco (“O anti-verdurous phallic ... “) and ends in Paris (“ ... Dollhouse of Mama War.”) with, in Ginsberg's words, “a box of crazy toys” in between.

Ginsberg describes it best in the intro. the last poem is about Cambridge, and it is sad and lonely and tired, and closes the door on all the fire that this book is filled with. Not perfect, nothing is, but still good. still made me light, and happy. laughing gas poetry with tears included. Corso saw something. I don't know what it was, but it was something.