Patrick Shelley's Sensual Paintings by Gregory Corso 1956


Sensualist painters not only tell you how to live a life of kicks, they
also tell you one great scientific fact. THERE ARE MORE WAYS TO
AN ORGASM THAN THE RIDICULOUS ACKNOWLEDGED ONE; and
one of the wildest gassiest ways to get kicks is by digging sensual objects;
People go to Florence and see cocks and arses, lulling around the
Palazzo Vecchio and think THAT is sensual. How sad! How absurd!
Patrick Shelley, leading avatar of sensuality is here to tell you that the
way to purest orgasm is through pure orgiastic painting.
I promise that if, whenever you are lucky enough to stand before one
of Shelley's paintings, and you don't walk away with your pants or panties
dripping, I promise that I'll not go to Greece this summer; and God knows,
I want to go. Got to dig Crete, especially: all the cringing ruins, the
weird cypresses, the sirenic echoes of Minos, Sarpedon, Diomedes;
loud distant shrieks from Circe's cave; Menelaus sobbing for Priam-
embraced Helen, and so on, therefore I got something to lose by
telling you to dig at least get with sensualist painting. I can't look at
the paintings anymore because I'm getting weak. My chick wonders about me;
"Baby, we haven't made it in a coon's age." I tried to explain to her that
it wasn't my being impotent or something, but that I just dug Shelley's
LEMONS ( a real gassy painting ) so much that I'm all washed out,
that's all. She actually thinks I'm going crazy, well, all I can say is /
Let her think what she wants ; why should I care; I ain't gonna stay in Paris
long anyway; but as long as I stay I say to you, Ladies and gentlemen,
for some real way - out kicks, go dig Sensualist Painting.
50 Zen Buddhists endorse the Sensualists.
Sensualism won't let you forget
the kicks you could have had
but did not get.
Hail! Hail! Hail to kicks!
Patrick Shelley, the ambassador of kicks!
He paints a bushel of apples
and they become a bushel of pricks!
Hail Sensualism wears a crazy hat
on a head of metamorphical fat.
But beware of Sensualism!
It has a way to reach out and grab
the lonely pimp from his happiest dream;
It has a mountain of fingers begging alms
in the chamber of Allah;
beware beware
the breasts of Sensualism are like
clanking ovens;
the eyes of Sensualism are dripping old
flowers;
Sensualism has not cunt;
Sensualism is dead, cold tight in the
tomb of an old nun's trembling mind;
The alligator is a swinging cat
he's got swamp and more than that
he's got the immaculate sheet of Sensualism
in his jaw of utensils;
yet the pure ghost of Sensualism wails
in the night;
"Woe to the mathematicians of Beauty;
woe to creators blasting their impotency
to humancy;
woe to humancy content with the blast"


In the park of God there are no children,
only Sensualists.

Gregory Corso
Paris, April, 1956

© copyright graham seidman 1988


Corso wrote this poem for the opening of Patrick
Shelley's first Paris show in 1956. Patrick
introduced him to the not-then-Beat Hotel. The
poem is in the show's catalog.