George Corso's Poetry Echos the Kennedy Assassination

November 22nd, 1963. The date in itself is a powerful phrase that should have no need for explanation to most Americans. The date marks one of the most jarring events in 20th century US history. The assassination of John F. Kennedy produced an enormous reaction both in 1963 and the decades that followed. Gregory Corso used poetry to express his reaction, and the end result echoed what many Americans felt after the assassination of their president. The poem “Lines Written Nov. 22, 23- 1963 –in discord–” reflects feelings of shock, sadness, and an uncertain future that Americans were thrust into on November 22nd, 1963. 

The ideas of civilization and progress were greatly challenged as a result of Kennedy’s death. Ironic that as a president Kennedy had spoken of progress, and yet his death seemed to be a regression to something uncivilized, something primitive. As David Frost said on the British TV show That was the Week that Was on November 23rd, “It was the least likely thing to happen in the whole world… we just didn’t believe in assassination anymore, not in the civilized world anyway” (qtd. in United Press International 66). The majority of Corso’s poem reflects this idea. He recounts ancient cultures and civilizations from the “Evolution of the Rocks” to “every King every Pope every puny/clubbed-foot Elect” (Corso 142). Corso travels the annals of history trying to create some worse crime than Kennedy’s assassination by “pee[ing] upon the Evolution of the Rocks,” by “pummel[ing] [his] Colt .38 into the iron skin of the Palaeolithic/muralist!” (141). And in the end, his “thousand years attempt at being/the Great Assassinator/ has failed” (143). The use of these earlier civilizations portrays the juxtapositions of past and present, savagery and civilization that many Americans felt.