Loose talk recently emitted by powerful people about the possibility of exploding nuclear weapons again naturally made me recall Beat poet Gregory Corso’s marvelously playful shape-poem “Bomb.”
Why do I call it a shape poem? It might not have looked like one at first, when published by City Lights in 1958 as a series of broadsides. It assumed something closer to its ideal “shape” form only in 1960 when it was included in The Happy Birthday of Death, a collection of Corso’s poems published by New Directions. There, because of the poem’s length, “Bomb” was inserted into the binding in a compressed fold-out accordion format. When expanded (an effect you couldn’t see until you had the whole structure stretched out in front of you), the poem revealed the exploding bomb itself. Long parallel poetic lines at the top of one stretched-out accordion page suggested the pretty, puffy mushroom cloud, with shorter parallel poetic lines in erratic formation descending down the length of the unfurled page and—when you flip the accordion page over—continuing on the page’s back side to rest, at last, on Ground Zero. So a small wad of paper unfolds and flips over to deliver a terrific wallop.
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