Immigrant Can’t Write Poetry: Mad Yak Corso

by Ping Wang

In the courtyard of St. Mark’s church,
poets milled around, waiting for the event
of the year, organized by the Poetry Project.
Allen was going to read “Howl.”
I was scheduled to read before Allen.
I had spent three weeks writing a poem for this event:
“The Song of Calling Souls,” the story of Chinese
immigrants who drowned in Rockaway, NY,
after jumping ship to run from the cops.
It was a big crowd, with people I knew well—
Lewis, Ron, Ed, Rudy, and Yvonne—and people I’d never met.
Flowers were blooming, and the church
looked beautiful and dignified as usual.

Someone grabbed my legs shouting
things I couldn’t understand.
I screamed and jumped, but the man
with wild hair held onto my ankles,
his body mopping the church yard
as I tried to move away from him.
People were laughing as if it were something normal,
even entertaining, until Allen rushed over,
picked him up, and dragged him away.
I beard him say, “Take it easy, Greg.
Go home and sleep it off.”
Then he turned to me:
“No worries, Penny. He’s harmless.
He’s just being Greg Corso.”

I didn’t know who Greg Corso was.
I thought I didn’t know, but my pirit already knew.
I should have been startled, but I was not.
No I was more than startled. I was electrified,
like the first thunderbolt striking winter fields
where seeds, roots and worms had been awaiting.

That night I read my poem along with Ginsberg.
His “Howl” and my “Song of Calling Souls”
set the crowd and church on fire.

In St. Paul, I taught “Mad Yak” and “Marriage”
to elite students at an elite college, alongside
Ginsberg, Snyder, Kerouac, Waldman, Alexie, Erdrich, Troupe …
until I heard Greg passed in Robbinsdale, twenty miles from me,
until l got booted out for teaching things “unsafe”
and “inappropriate,” for “appropriating Native and Black
cultures” as a Chinese person, and “anti-white,” and worse,
“manipulating students’ emotions with poetry.”

But nothing can put out the fire and thunder
Gregory Corso ignited in me
as he grabbed my legs and mumbled magic
into my soul at St. Mark’s Church.
He was blessing me with his essence.
He was passing his torch to a girl from China
who is just as untamable as Mad Yak Corso,
writing and teaching poetry in English,
defying the elite critics’ mocking:
“Immigrants can’t write poetry.”