Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregory Corso

Corso’s line is a small act of territorial sabotage: a poet refusing the tidy origin story the audience wants to pin on him. “East Side” isn’t just geography; it’s a shorthand for pedigree, for the uptown/downtown caste system of New York myth-making. In the postwar imagination, the East Side can connote establishment polish (or, depending on who’s speaking, immigrant grit packaged into respectability). Corso swerves around that, insisting his “background” begins in Greenwich Village, the West Side neighborhood already coded as bohemia, radical art, and chosen family.

The specific intent feels defensive and mischievous at once. Corso isn’t merely correcting a map error; he’s reclaiming authorship over his own narrative. Background is supposed to be something you inherit, but he frames it as where he started becoming himself. That’s pure Beat posture with a sharp edge: identity as self-invention, not résumé.

Subtext: don’t mistake me for a product of money, manners, or the approved literary pipeline. The Village was where the Beats congregated and where Corso, a rough-edged autodidact among better-networked peers, could be legible as an artist. The sentence’s blunt clarification - “which is West Side” - carries a wink of pedantry, but it’s also a jab at cultural gatekeepers who treat downtown as a footnote to the “real” city.

Context matters: mid-century New York was an ecosystem of neighborhood reputations. Corso’s insistence on the Village is a refusal of assimilation and a claim that marginal spaces are not detours; they’re the source.