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Poet and editor Paul Carroll was a vital force on the Chicago poetry scene. He was briefly an editor of the Chicago Review (1957-1958), but when he and coeditors were pressured by the university chancellor to remove controversial pieces from an upcoming issue from William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, he pulled the entire issue and resigned in protest. Carroll founded the little magazine Big Table, where he published the suppressed material; the United States Post Office then seized 400 copies of the first issue and refused to deliver them, declaring the magazine “obscene,” but their decision was appealed and reversed. Carroll would continue to publish work by innovative writers such as Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley. He also founded the Poetry Center of Chicago, and in 1985 he won the Chicago Poet’s Award.
Alice Notley was one of America’s greatest poets. She wrote across narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience. The artist Rudy Burckhardt once wrote that Notley was “our present-day Homer.”