Event Posters from the 1970's
(use links below for larger images suitable for viewing and printing)


Joseph Brodsky, Tymoteusz Karpowicz & Djordje Nikolic
Allen Ginsberg & William S. Burroughs
Gwendolyn Brooks & Etheridge Knight


Saul Bellow
Russell Edson & Charles Simic
Ted Berrigan & Ron Padgett

When it began, The Poetry Center pioneered the first independent, for the public and regular poetry reading series in the city of Chicago. No other arts organization offered monthly poetry events where people gathered to listen to poetry. In providing a consistent, decades-old reading series that is high profile and well attended, The Poetry Center has contributed to and sustained public interest in poetry and live poetry readings. Today, Chicago has a thriving poetry community and there are many regular reading series.

Billy Collins, who read for The Poetry Center when his first book was going out of print and then again in 2001 right after he was named Poet Laureate of the United States said "The Poetry Center of Chicago, appropriately placed in the center of this country, has long acted as a hub for a host of poetry activities. Lifting poetry awareness, it redirects our attention to this vital art and provides a lens to bring our best language into focus." Recently, Chicago Magazine called The Poetry Center "one of the city's true cultural gems" and New City congratulated "The Poetry Center's continuous efforts to bring high-profile poets to the Midwest." Lisel Mueller said, "A poem does not exist on the page alone. It has a voice that needs to be heard, and no one can unlock that voice more memorably than its author. The Poetry Center allows Chicagoans to hear our best poets read from their work month after month, and that is a rare gift." She went on to say that this idea was revolutionary in the early 1970's.

Its official founding with the Federal Government, in 1974, as The Poetry Center, Inc. and its subsequent history are both directly linked to issues of artistic freedom, literary excellence and accessibility. Its founder, Paul Carroll, was editor of Big Table literary magazine, the first issue of which contained the complete contents of a suppressed Winter 1959 Chicago Review magazine. It contained work by then little-known authors William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Edward Dahlberg and Jack Kerouac. A court case between Big Table and the U.S. Post Office resulted over what was at the time considered obscenity. The name Big Table was chosen out of a list of potential names generated by Jack Kerouac. Carroll picked the name because for him it was a metaphor for a table big enough hold every the best of every kind of poetry manuscript, no matter the aesthetic, no matter the camp. Due to the legal fees associated with the case, Big Table only lasted five issues, but it remains one of the most prominent magazines of the avant garde/beat era, and full sets of Big Table, still in good condition, are sold for hundreds of dollars.

Beginning in 1968, Paul Carroll organized and hosted readings at the Museum of Contemporary Art to promote the new Big Table Books series, published by independently and by Follett Publishing Company. Like Big Table magazine before it, Big Table Books proved to be influential. When Jorie Graham read for The Poetry Center in 2001, she picked up the Big Table Book The Young American Poets (Follett, 1969) from a shelf saying, "this book was like the bible." Carroll published Andrei Codrescu's first book License to Carry a Gun (Big Table Books, 1970), The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, by Saint Geraud (Big Table Books, 1968), and a couple other titles. Like Big Table, Big Table Books was short lived. But, the readings Carroll put together to promote the series would become The Poetry Center, the only poetry specific project of Carroll's currently "in print." Carroll recruited a dedicated team of poets and activists to serve as the founding board of The Poetry Center and this proved to be fortuitous, because after a year as board president, Carroll quit the organization. Before resigning, he secured Paul Hoover as The Poetry Center's second president. The newly minted board -Martha Friedberg, Lisel Mueller, Mark Perlberg, and John Rezek, - remained active in the organization in these pivotal early years. Years later, Mark Perlberg and John Rezek would both take on the task of board president.

From its founding, the Poetry Center has enjoyed the support of many loyal people whose devotion to poetry and The Poetry Center has carried the organization safely through time, trends, relocations, changing fortunes, and helped it adapt to the changing realities of fundraising, audiences, etc. Martha Friedberg was one of The Poetry Center's chief benefactors and volunteers. In her quiet way, she steered the organization on a path toward growth, leveraging her generosity to encourage The Poetry Center to grow and professionalize. She was the force behind the hiring of The Poetry Center's first staff person in the early 1990's and the implementation of a term limit for the Board President. In 1996, The Poetry Center received a bequest from her estate, the seed from which The Poetry Center has grown its rainy day fund, which The Poetry Center has leveraged to grow its programs.

The spirit of promoting literary excellence, experimentation, and approachability has been a trademark of the organization. The Reading Series presents emerging and local poets as well as nationally and internationally renowned poets to Chicago audiences. The following list includes the names of some of the poets who have been featured by The Poetry Center as part of the reading series:

Diane Ackerman, Isabel Allende, Yehuda Amichai, Michael Ananaia, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Amiri Baraka, Russell Banks, Saul Bellow, Ted Berrigan, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Claire Bloom, Robert Bly, Eavan Boland, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Burroughs, Ana Castillo, John and Bogdana Carpenter, Paul Carroll, John Cheever, Maxine Chernoff, Sandra Cisneros, Andrei Codrescu, J.M. Coetzee, Billy Collins, Robert Creeley, Bruce Cutler, James Dickey, John Dickson, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Alan Dugan, Stuart Dybek, Kenward Elmslie, Luciano Erba, Clayton Eshleman, Martín Espada, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jules Feiffer, Kent Foreman, Leon Forrest, Carolyn Forché, Carlos Fuentes, Tess Gallagher, Reginald Gibbons, Reggie Gibson, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Glück, Albert Goldbarth, Mary Gordon, Jorie Graham, Arielle Greenberg, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Jane Hamilton, Larry Heinemann, Garrett Hongo, Paul Hoover, Jean Howard, Ted Hughes, Lynda Hull, David Ignatow, Denis Johnson, Allison Joseph, Donald Justice, Garrison Keillor, Maxine Hong Kingston, Galway Kinnell, Mary Kinzie, Carolyn Kizer, Etheridge Knight, Bill Knott, Kenneth Koch, Ted Kooser, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, Art Lange, Quraysh Ali Lansana, James Laughlin, Li-Young Lee, Doris Lessing, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Thomas Lux, Thomas Lynch, Haki Madhubuti, Joe Mantegna, Campbell McGrath, Heather McHugh, W.S. Merwin, James Merrill, Czeslaw Milosz, N. Scott Momady, Simone Muench, Lisel Mueller, Paul Muldoon, Gloria Naylor, John Fredrick Nims, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Alice Ostricker, Ron Padgett, Grace Paley, Elise Paschen, Ed Paschke, Linda Pastan, Molly Peacock, Walker Percy, Mark Perlberg, Marjorie Perloff, Katha Pollit, Patricia Powell, Jack Prelutsky, Alice Randall, Adrienne Rich, Paulette Roeske, Alane Rollings, Kay Ryan, Michael Ryan, Srikanth Reddy, Cin Salach, Sonia Sanchez, James Schevill, Lore Segal, Charles Simic, W.D. Snodgrass, Gary Soto, Stephen Spender, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Gerald Stern, Lucien Stryk, Arthur Sze, James Tate, Marvin Tate, Studs Terkel, John Updike, Mona Van Duyn, Helen Vendler, Derek Walcott, Anne Waldman, Miller Williams, Christian Wiman, Charles Wright, Dean Young, and Adam Zagajewski.

Each name in the list represents a Poetry Center event and the event posters, fine art broadsides, handbills and brochures from these readings are now a part of the University of Chicago Library's Archive.

A press release from 1974 describes the center's first official event. Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the reading included more than 20 Chicago poets. Publicity for that event "Poet's Look at Paintings" read: The Poetry Center views the evening as an illumination of one art by another…. This will be the first event of the new Poetry Center, which was recently organized on a not-for-profit basis. In its affiliation with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Center proposes a program of activities geared to make poetry more accessible to the public and to provide a common ground for poets and poetry...

Continuing in the spirit of this and other first events, The Poetry Center includes multi-media presentations of poetry, including performances by major recording artists like Billy Corgan and Lucinda Williams. Major novelists, writers and playwrights such as Scott Turow, P.J. O'Rourke, David Mamet, and Michael Crichton have been featured in the series well. Taking a cue from Big Table, The Poetry Center continues to feature visual art through the lens of poetry. Work by emerging and established visual artists is featured on season brochures and through the Broadside Series, including Claus Oldenberg, Aaron Siskind, Dessa Kirk, Richard Hull, Wesley Kimler, Ed Paschke, Laura Letinsky, Vera Klement, Ivan Brunetti and Tony Fitzpatrick. The Poetry Center was established at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is now in residence at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, two great visual art institutions.

In recent years, The Poetry Center has enjoyed a growth spurt. The organization employs three full time staff members and 28 contract employees and two interns. The board of directors is comprised of marketing professionals, editors, business executives, foundation heads, small business owners, poets and artists.

Through Hands on Stanzas, The Poetry Center hires Chicago poets to be in residence at a public school and to conduct sixty poetry classed over the course of twenty weeks. They lead Chicago school students in the reading and discussion of published poems by established artists and then based on these lessons, the writing and presenting of their own poems. At the end of the year, The Poetry Center publishes many of these students and then gives each a copy of the professionally published anthology. Most of the students are from low-income, minority families. Since 2001, ten-thousand students have been through the program and like the Reading Series, this Hands on Stanzas fits perfectly with the goals mission of the organization. Nearly 7,000 public school students have been published and as many anthologies have been distributed - the anthology is a "best seller" by any poetry standard. And, as much as any Reading Series event attendee, these students are most certainly an audience for poetry. In addition, recent studies using brain imaging technology show that reading and listening to poems improves the way youngsters and adults learn and remember. Other studies find that arts education levels the playing field for inner city students and other socio-economically disadvantaged youth.

In addition to enhancing and professionalizing its programs and staff, The Poetry Center established a web site that annually hosts more than 200,000 visitors. The Poetry Center produces a limited edition art print Broadside Series in coordination with The Reading Series, and the Broadside Series is regularly shown in art gallery shows and museums. Hundreds of thousands have access to Reading Series events rebroadcast on Chicago Access Network Television, a public access cable television company. Its programs and activities have received national media attention from places like RollingStone, The New York Times and a host of other major and local media outlets. In 2003, The Poetry Center and its second Executive Director, Kenneth Clarke, were awarded Columbia College's Paul Berger Arts Entrepreneurship Award, joining a short list of accomplished winners. In 2004, Kenneth Clarke was appointed to the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Advisory Board by Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Fueling all this activity is a conglomeration of grants and gifts from corporations, foundations and individuals, and the support of the School of the Art Institute, for which The Poetry Center can never be thankful enough.

In the year 2005, The Poetry Center has a lot of work to do. The audience for poetry, like The Poetry Center itself, is still small. Furthermore, The Poetry Center's founders envisioned The Poetry Center as a storefront where people can gather everyday, a place for readings, celebrations, learning and exploration. There was a time when The Poetry Center was all but alone in providing poetry reading after poetry reading for the enjoyment of a general public. Now, The Poetry Center is surrounded by friends, allies, competitors and critics. Pop culture itself is embracing poetry and corporations are using poetry to sell everything from trucks to soft drinks. The table is definitely bigger. It will be fascinating to watch what poetry accomplishes in the coming decades, and where it leads us. And of course, The Poetry Center will be there, doing its part.

Essay by Kenneth Clarke. A version of this essay is being published by The University of Chicago to coincide with the exhibit From Poetry to Verse: The Making of Modern Poetry.

Historical Perspectives



The Poetry Center 1974: Pictured is the founder Paul Carroll, some of the original board including Lisel Mueller, Mark Perlberg, and John Rezek and the advisory board at the time (then called the "guiding council") including Barry Schechter, Bill Knott, Paul Hoover, Michael Anania, Bill Hunt, Candance Rackenger, Rich Friedman, Peter Kostackis, John Rezek, Neil Hackman, Rose Simon, Maxine Chernoff. 1974 Photo by Norris McNamara. Photo donated to The Poetry Center by Mark and Anna Perlberg.

"The Poet in His Skin: Remembering Paul Carroll, founder of The Poetry Center"
By Paul Hoover

Read the Court Opinion of Big Table VS. The United States Post Office

Author James Campbell writes about Paul Carroll and Big Table in his book This is the Beat Generation. "Big Table had become a cause. Its defiance of the academic establishment, which had attempted to wish away the contents of the Chicago Review, placed it instantly in the best tradition of twentieth-century little-magazine publishing."

www.poetrycenter.org webpage banner photo credits: Main Page, South Side Towers by K.C. Clarke; Reading Series page, by Deborah Johnson; Hands on Stanzas page, by Cecilia Pinto; About Us page, Deborah Johnson; Sponsors Page, Deborah Johnson; Membership, Deborah Johnson, News & Happenings page, Prairie, by KC Clarke; Contact page, Smoke & Sky, KC Clarke.