“Books have been my passion since I started reading as a boy. When I was seventeen, I read On the Road, and that book changed everything. In those pages, I found my spiritual and intellectual comrades in Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, and their circle. After that, I read most of their books, and, except for Kerouac, I got to know the other “Daddies,” as Gregory Corso often called the Beats, to varying degrees."

Robert Yarra: Gregory Gave Me the World

The Golda Foundation was created in 2001 by Robert W. Yarra (Bobby Yarra) to support projects by a variety of people; among them poets, writers, painters, sculptors, and performers. Robert Yarra grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City. His mother, for whom the foundation is named, had a very important influence on him, one that remains a guiding lamp in all his endeavors. In his career as an immigration lawyer, Bobby spent much of his time in California, where he helped thousands of farm workers gain lawful status in the United States. All along he kept the great admiration for ‘outsiders’ that he developed growing up on the Lower East Side; a great love of poets, artists, musicians and eccentrics. Since being liberated from the legal profession, Bobby recently embarked this year on a lengthy trip that will begin with some months in India. While he is traveling, this site will serve as a virtual home for him, where he can be visited and host friends, and where he can share what he’s doing on his blog. Robert’s intention is to create here a virtual gallery, cinema and publishing venture, in order to present, celebrate and promote the work of a wide variety of creative individuals. Robert knew firsthand how much Gregory loved Italy and how the love was reciprocated, as they had traveled together to Rome and Positano in 1986.

(Photo: Robert Yarra and his chapbook "Gregory Corso Gave Me The World" by Counter Culture Chronicles)

When Gregory knew that he was dying, Robert conceived of the idea of having Gregory buried in Rome and asked if Gregory wanted to be buried there. The answer was an unequivocal "Yes!" It was Robert who set in motion the process of having Gregory buried in the famous Cementerio Acatolico in Rome, although it was his great friend in Rome, Hannelore Dellelis, who brought the burial to fruition, while overcoming great difficulties in the process. Robert also contributed and raised the money for the burial with the help of Patti Smith and others. Robert Yarra is co-trustee of the Vali Myers Art Gallery Trust. Robert Yarra's chapbook "Gregory Corso Gave Me The World" (2024, Counter Culture Chronicles) is an intimate look at Robert’s friendship with Corso. Various anecdotes and tales from travels together in Europe and time spent in the USA from NYC to San Francisco. A chapbook with 32 pages, with private color pics.

Interview by Michael Limnios                  Archive: Robert Yarra, 2013 Interview

Photos courtesy of Robert Yarra © / All rights reserved

How have the Beats and Counterculture influenced your views of the world and the journeys you’ve taken? What are some of the most important lessons you have learned from your life’s experiences with them?

I've always been attracted to the wild ones, the alienated, the drug fiends, the reprobates, and those who had no choice but to follow William Blake's maxim, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” as well as Charles Baudelaire’s imperative, “Get drunk. On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever. But get drunk. That’s the important thing.”

Books have been my passion since I started reading as a boy. When I was seventeen, I read On the Road, and that book changed everything. In those pages, I found my spiritual and intellectual comrades in Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso, and their circle. After that, I read most of their books, and, except for Kerouac, I got to know the other “Daddies,” as Gregory Corso often called the Beats, to varying degrees.

In 1974, I took a class with William Burroughs at CCNY called “Literature and the Supernatural.” William had just taken the cure in London and needed a job, so Allen Ginsberg got him the gig. William spent the class telling fascinating stories while dragging deeply on his cigarette. He spoke a lot about Dutch Schultz, the American gangster whom he was writing about at the time. Every freak in New York showed up at his class, and he gave all the students an A.

I once sent Burroughs a piece I had written called “Dude University, “ where students were taught the fine art of torture, mayhem, and similar subjects, as I had been hanging with a sick crew of misanthropic misfits and danger-seekers, and we would spend hours high and goofing about what would happen “when the revolution comes” at our crash pad on Second Street in the badlands of the Lowest East Side. Along with the Dude University manuscript, I sent Burroughs a letter that asked, among other things, why he had killed his wife. This was his response:

January 18, 1975

77 Franklin St

NYC 10013

USA

Dear Robert Yarra: 

Sorry to be months late in answering your letter. Have been traveling giving readings in short trying to hustle a living and despite rumors to the contrary I have no other source of income and that answers one of your questions right there: ‘Why are you a writer and when did you realize it?’ I realized it when I sold my first book Junkie in 1953. I became a writer when I found I could make a living from writing. That also answers your question as to why I keep going.

If some one falls down stairs or runs his car into a a tree on some level he intended to do just that. If he is not able to contact the level of intention he says it was an accident from which we can derive a definition of an ‘accident’: an event over which one has or had no conscious control therefore doesn’t know why he did it. The death of my wife was to the best of my conscious knowledge an accident. I just don’t know.

Your letter is also difficult to answer since you seem to have me confused with Kerouac and two more dissimilar individuals would be hard to find. I am not Kerouac nor was meant to be.

How much actual  clinical madness have you seen? To me insanity and madness are the least interesting things because a psychotic is reactin(g) compulsively and therefore predictably to past conditioning. Press the same button and the same thing happens every time. And I find that about as boring as anything could be. I suspect that by madness you mean excentricity. No I have not met thousands of madmen or even excentrics. Most of my time for the past 15 years has been spent in front of a typewriter writing. And for the past seven years I have led the life of a recluse seeing almost nobody, except the characters I created on paper. Writers just don’t have time to lead glamorous extroverted lives and know thousands or even hundred  of people.  Here in New York there are only a handful of people that I see regularly…Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, Gragor Corso occasionally, several painters, a few writers, some business contacts.

Liked your university idea but feel you could develop a more detailed curriculum. I mean how do you train people to be all around sons of bitches?

2.
Well all the best for 75 and success in a difficult and often thankless profession. Give me a ring if you feel like it.  I’m in the phone book.

Have a good year

William Burroughs 

I didn’t see Burroughs again until we met at Naropa, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in 1985. Gregory Corso and I went to visit him at his office, and he told me he remembered my letter and “Dude University.”

(Photo: Robert Yarra, Gregory Corso, Vali Myers, and Gianni Menichetti in Positano, New York 1986)

I met Gregory Corso at the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco in 1983. We became friends, took walks often, or hung out at the Caffe Trieste or on the steps of the Saint Francis Church in North Beach. Gregory liked to play the game of “pitching pennies,” a game I played as a boy growing up on the Lower East Side of New York, where players throw a coin against a wall, and the one whose coin lands closest to the wall wins. We would often drink together in Chinatown dive bars, where he was less likely to be recognized as a famous poet. We also hung out together in New York City, quite often at the Chelsea Hotel, where Gregory introduced me to probably the greatest friend of my life, the Australian artist Vali Myers, but that’s another story.

In April 1984, Gregory asked if I wanted to accompany him to London for a poetry reading at the Royal Albert Hall. Of course, I agreed. I arrived in London before Gregory and met Allen Ginsberg, who invited me to travel with him to Liverpool, where he was giving a poetry reading. Allen and I became friends during this trip, and we even spontaneously read alternating verses of William Blake’s poem London from his Songs of Experience at the bar of the famous Adelphi Hotel where Allen and I were staying. Our friendship was strengthened when I spent parts of the summers of 1985 and 1986 at Naropa. As I was an immigration lawyer, I would sometimes receive calls from all over the world from friends of Allen with immigration questions. I believe he also appreciated the fact that I took some of the “weight” of Gregory’s friendship off his back. Allen was courageous and generous, among many other fine qualities, and my admiration for him continued to grow the better I knew him.

William, Allen, and Gregory were geniuses, and they were wonderful teachers. Time spent with any of them was illuminating. Gregory could, at times, be difficult, as he was unpredictable and would sometimes say horrible things to the wrong people just to get a reaction, but that was the price of his friendship. And I guess I liked danger, though, in fact, dangerous times with Gregory were rare. A better description would be adventurous and enlightening times. And hearing about Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Neal Cassady, and so many others whom I admired was always a delight. Gregory would often say, “When I drop names, they bounce,” and that was true.

It's often said that one should avoid meeting one's heroes, but, in my case, knowing William, Allen, and Gregory opened my life to a world of possibilities, ideas, perspectives, and people I might never otherwise have known. These “Daddies” enriched my world beyond measure.

(Photo: Robert Yarra with Gregory Corso in Rome, Italy 1986)

You have a chapbook titled “Gregory Gave Me The World.” Why is it important to preserve and spread Gregory Corso’s legacy/words/life?

What I meant by the book’s title was that, through Gregory’s friendship, I met Vali Myers, Allen Ginsberg, Peggy Biderman, Ira Cohen, Lionel Ziprin, George Scrivani, Herbert Kearney, Janine Pommy Vega, Roger Richards, Francis Kuipers, Jeffrey Lew, John Solt, Herbert Huncke, Penny Arcade, Edgar Oliver, Steve Dalachinsky, Yuko Otomo, Nina Zivancevic, Raymond Foye, John Sinclair, and so many other brilliant and dear souls who became close friends. My life was like a tree sprouting branches; I made many of the other great friendships of my life through these mostly departed and sorely missed kindred spirits.

Gregory was, in my opinion, and that of many others, a great poet. Allen Ginsberg once said to me, and to others too, “Of the two of us, Gregory is the better poet.” Gregory was also a wonderful teacher. He would often preface a life-lesson by saying, “Dig the ballgame, kid,” and then you knew something good was coming, such as “We’re all in the same leaky lifeboat,”  or “If you have two choices, take them both.” He had, indeed, a stockpile of such on-the-mark comments illuminating the human condition. He was a keen observer of our flawed species and could strip away layers of artifice to reveal what actually lay beneath. When pissed off, he could attack you where you were most vulnerable and joyfully turn the screws, but he was also capable of showing remorse afterwards and would try to make amends. Gregory was the sort of person of whom it is said, “he wears his heart on his sleeve.” He said what he felt or thought without any filter. In fact, his observations were almost always spot-on, and he was a raconteur of the first order.

Gregory grew up on the streets and in foster homes, sleeping on the subway and on rooftops until, at the age of 13, he was sent to that infamous New York jail so aptly nicknamed “The Tombs.” To escape from there, where he had been housed with violent and often predatory men, he faked madness and finally was sent to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital, where things were even worse. He told me about watching “horror shows,” seeing men pee into each other’s mouths, and so on. And, later, he served time at Clinton State Prison. Indeed, Gregory suffered as traumatic a childhood as any character in a Dickens novel. At Clinton, he read many of the books in the prison library. And he heeded the advice of an older inmate who said to him, “Don’t serve time; let time serve you.”  By the time he left prison, he was steeped in Greek and Roman mythology, had read many famous books, and had spent time with the dictionary and the Encyclopedia Brittanica. But, most importantly, in prison he had started writing poetry.

Gregory’s genius was his entry card into the relatively small clique of Beats. I first came across him as “Raphael Urso” in Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels,” and what struck me on rereading that book recently was how quickly those brilliant writers — Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg — accepted Gregory as an equal, a member of their tribe.

Gregory was a born poet who had the good fortune to run into Allen Ginsberg in a bar in Greenwich Village, and that was his great beginning. And he comes under the heading of “poete maudit,” a rare breed, and one that deserves to be preserved.

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(Photo: Robert Yarra with Gregory Corso in Positano, New York)