On “A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center”

“A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center” is on view at the Poetry Foundation through September 14, 2024.

The Chicago Poetry Center traces its origins to a headline that appeared in the October 25, 1958, edition of the Chicago Daily News: “Filthy Writing on the Midway.” Jack Mabley, a columnist at the paper, had seen a recent issue of the Chicago Review in which editor Irving Rosenthal and poetry editor Paul Carroll ran provocative new work by the Beats. “Do you ever wonder what happens to little boys who scratch dirty words on railroad underpasses? They go to college and scrawl obscenities in the college literary magazine,” Mabley’s column began. Alarmed by the front-page takedown, the University of Chicago, which sponsored the magazine, threatened to shut down publication. Along with all but one editor, Rosenthal and Carroll resigned. In 1959, they started a new literary journal, Big Table—meaning a table big enough to include all voices. (Jack Kerouac suggested the name after finding an old note he had written to himself: “Get a bigger writing table.”)

Big Table was influential though short lived; it folded in 1960 after only five issues. But it inspired an offshoot, Big Table Books, that Carroll promoted via local readings. Out of that series developed the Chicago Poetry Center, whose first event—held in the basement of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 1974—was a reading called “Poets Look at Paintings.”

It’s appropriate that the Center began with such a meeting of the arts, given that broadsides went on to be a beloved part of the organization’s work, largely under the leadership of Ken Clarke. A broadside—a large sheet printed on only one side—transforms a poem into an art object worthy of display. With the invention of the printing press around 1440, broadsides emerged as a popular form on the streets and in the marketplaces of medieval Europe. Many early versions functioned as advertisements or proclamations, although a genre of street literature in the form of printed ballads also took root. In 1908, W.B. Yeats’s sisters, Elizabeth and Lily, established Cuala Press, which published monthly broadsides until 1915. By the 1960s, broadsides were a fixture of the American poetry scene. The broadsides on view here, gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Poetry Center, exemplify that illustrious tradition.

Consider, for example, “Healing Earth” by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Along with the graceful, abstract art of Nicole Perez, this broadside offers lucid, legible typesetting embedded in an elegant design. Anyone moved by Baca’s words can now live with them, the poem always ready to be returned to at a glance.

Other broadsides include artwork that interpret or comment on the poetry. Ana Castillo’s “I Ask the Impossible” is rife with passion (“Love me with the single-mindedness of a monk”), and the drawing that accompanies it, by Marcos Raya, brings out the anarchic, erotic element to which the poem only alludes.

Moving in the opposite direction—artwork to poem—Molly Peacock’s ekphrastic “Celtic Lady Sex Gargoyle on Medieval Lintel” appears below an example of the sort of work she describes and interprets in the poem—a rubbing of a sheela na gig, the grotesque medieval carvings that ornamented buildings throughout Europe.

Some broadsides incorporate artwork as a more literal illustration for the text. James Tate’s “Shiloh” appears below an image from the poem: a wedding dress chalked onto a blackboard, drawn by Amy Rowan. Elsewhere, a scene by Mary-Jo Mostowy above Kevin Young’s “Busking” shows us what a head-bent busker would see: pedestrians below the knee as they scurry past.

Evan Sult’s design for “Room 3404” by Calvin Forbes invites us to glance up from the street at a corner building, presumably toward the room occupied by the poem’s speaker. Sult’s drawing, in two shades of blue, acts as an icon for the poem, citing it: “My blues won’t make you blue / Never regret the world left outside.”

In still other broadsides, the poem is an occasion for graphic artwork or the craft of fine print. Alicia Gaines’s rich tangle of branches forms the top half of a broadside whose bottom half features Natalie Merchant’s “Motherland.” That strong image draws in and rewards the eye, which then moves down to Merchant’s text.

In the 1990s, the Center published broadsides for every reading. Though the reading series continues, these days the Center publishes broadsides only on special occasions. As B. Metzger Sampson, the Center’s executive director, explains: “In the same way that poetry itself is a ritualistic marker—poetry is often an invocation at the beginning or end of something significant—a broadside is the concrete material version of that same ethos of what a poem does.”

You, reading this: stick a poem on a wall and see what happens.