 I'm Lee Miller, and I'm curator of the Louisiana Research Collection, which is part of the Special Collections Division of Howard Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane. And I'd like to read the poem, Marriage, written in 1960 by the Beat poet, Gregory Corso. Like a few Beat poets, Corso spent some time in prison. And while incarcerated, he'd like to read dictionaries. He loved reading dictionaries. He loved just the sound of words. And that's one of the things that I like about this poem, the way it gives you pleasure in just the sound of words. Toward the end of the poem is a reference to She, which is an 1879 novel by the great Victorian adventure novelist H. Reider Haggard. She was a woman who lived forever. The 1965 movie starred Ursula Andres, which gives you a sense of what kind of woman She was supposed to be. So, Marriage by Gregory Corso. Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and Faustus hood? Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries. Tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets. Then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries, and she going just so far and I understanding why, not getting angry saying, you must feel it's beautiful to feel. Instead, take her in my arms, lean against an old crooked tombstone and woo her the entire night, the constellations in the sky. When she introduces me to her parents, back straightened, hair finely combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit with my knees together on their third degree sofa and not ask, where's the bathroom? How else to feel other than I am, often thinking, flash Gordon's soap? Oh, how terrible it must be for a young man seated before a family in the family thinking, we never saw him before he wants our Mary Lou. After tea and homemade cookies they ask, what do you do for a living? Should I tell them? Would they like me then? Say, all right, get married, we're losing a daughter but we're gaining a son. And should I then ask, where's the bathroom? Oh, God, in the wedding, all her family and her friends and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded. Just wait to get at the drinks and food and the priest. He's looking at me as if I masturbated, asking me, do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife? And I, trembling, what to say, say, pie glue. I kiss the bride, all those corny men slapping me on the back, she's all yours, boy, ha ha ha. And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on. Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes, Niagara Falls, hordes of us, husbands, wives, flowers, all streaming into cozy hotels, all going to do the same thing tonight. The indifferent clerk, he knowing what was going to happen, the lobby zombies, they knowing what, the whistling elevator man, he knowing, everybody knowing, I'd almost be inclined not to do anything. Stay up all night, stare at that hotel clerk in the eye, screaming, I deny honeymoon, I deny honeymoon. Running rampant into those almost climactic sweets yelling, Radio Belly, cat shovel. Oh, I'd live in Niagara forever in a dark cave beneath the Falls, I'd sit there the mad honeymooner, devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy, a saint of divorce. But I should get married, I should be good. How nice it be to come home to her and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen, apron young and lovely, wanting my baby and so happy about me, she burns the roast beef and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair saying, Christmas teeth, radiant brains, apple death. God, what a husband I'd make. Yes, I should get married, so much to do. Like sneaking into Mr. Jones house late at night and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books. Like hanging a picture of Rambo on the lawnmower. Like pasting Tanu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence. Like when Mrs. Kindhead comes to collect for the community chest, grab her and tell her there are unfavorable omens in the sky. And when the mayor comes to get my vote, tell him, when are you going to stop people killing whales? And when the milkman comes, leave him a note in the bottle. Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust. I want penguin dust. Yes, if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me. Finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man, knowledged with responsibility, not twig smear nor Roman coin, souk. Oh, what would that be like? Surely I'd give it for a pacifier, a rubber tacitus, for a rattle, a bag of broken Bach records, tack Della Francesca all over its crib, sew the Greek alphabet on its bib and build for his playpen a ruthless Parthenon. No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father, not rule, not snow, no quiet window. But hot, smelly, tight New York City, seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls, a fat, richie and wife screeching over potatoes, get a job. And five, nose running brats in love with Batman and the neighbors all toothless and dry haired like those hag masses of the 18th century all wanting to come in and watch TV. The landlord wants his rent, grocery store, blue cross, gas and electric nights of nights of Columbus impossible to lie back and dream, telephone snow, ghost parking. No, no, I should not get married. I should never get married. But imagine if I were married to a beautiful, sophisticated woman, tall and pale, wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves, holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a high ball in the other. And we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days. No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream. Oh, but what about love? I forget love. Not that I am incapable of love, it's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes. I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother. And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible and there's maybe a girl now but she's already married and I don't like men but there's got to be somebody. Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear and everybody else is married, all the universe married but me. Ah, yet, well, I know that we're a woman possible as I am possible than marriage would be possible. Like she in her lonely alien goat waiting her Egyptian lover, so I wait bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.