Paul Carroll, 1927-1996, established The Poetry Center in 1973
Paul Hoover was the second president of The Poetry Center



Photo of Paul Carroll by Sheldon Goldstein

"The Poet in His Skin: Remembering Paul Carroll"
By Paul Hoover

I first spoke with Paul Carroll in 1971 when as director he called to tell me of my acceptance to the Program for Writers at University of Illinois in Chicago. The enthusiasm in his voice surprised me. I had applied on the basis of the ten poems I'd written up to that time and had no confidence in what I was doing. I soon learned as his student that his excitement for poetry--and his involvement in the work of young poets--was genuine. Editor of a well-known anthology of the time, The Young American Poets (Big Table, 1968), Paul was always drawn to younger poets. Influenced by a romantic line that comes down through Whitman, Neruda, and St.-John Perse, Paul was a poet of wonder. His many and various enthusiasms were contagious. He believed that poetry could change your life. Indeed, he frequently claimed that his own life had been saved by poetry. It seemed a poet's exaggeration until I learned of his personal difficulties, which seemed to have begun when his father, a prominent Irish-Catholic founder of banks (he owned eight including Hyde Park Bank) and property developer (he developed the suburban community of Homewood) died when Paul was young. His hero gone, the family's fortunes ruined because "Honest John" Carroll had paid back eight-seven cents on the dollar during the bank crises of the Great Depression, Paul was left to the care of his mother, whom he despised. This mother said to me, at Paul's Ada Street loft on our first meeting, "Yes, Paul is my son, I suppose," nodding with indifference in his direction.

One of Paul's favorite stories was of traveling with his family in a limousine on Sunday afternoons to visit the Miller family of Milwaukee, founders of the well-known brewery. He would often return to it, as he did to recollections of riding a pony on his father's weekend farm, learning poetry at the feet of Morton Dawen Zabel at the University of Chicago, his first reading of the poetry of Horace, and having slept with the beautiful woman, a Morton Salt heir, who had posed as the Morton Salt Girl. Such moments were part of his originary myth. Unfortunately, they were always matched by the dark side of his self-narrative, such as the time he nearly won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, only to be told by judge Dudley Fitts at a party that his (Beat-influenced) poetry had finally been too "profane." The same thing happened when Paul had a book accepted by Henry Holt, only to have its "coarseness" discovered by Mrs. Holt when she came across the manuscript at home. It seems extraordinary that a man of such learning, who loved poetry of spirituality, beauty, and even decorousness, could suffer such an accusation.

Perhaps because of his editorial support of the Beats and his appearance in Donald Allen's The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, Paul was considered to be more bohemian than he really was. As can be seen from his photo on the cover of his finest collection, Odes (Big Table, 1969), he was a dapper man in the mold of Tom Wolfe, wearing his signature boater, a suit and tie, and sunglasses. He drove, rather carelessly, a Mercedes Benz, and owned a handsome townhouse full of paintings on Lincoln Park's Mohawk Street. A Chicago poet among painters, his friends included Claes Oldenburg, Aaron Siskind, June Leaf, and Ed Paschke. But from the distant perspective of Dudley Fitts and those who believe they are defending the great tradition, Paul must have been seen as a minor bohemian, an Irish Midwestern Allen Ginsberg. Socially, however, he was more a man of Michigan Avenue and the galleries.

While Paul never had the publishing success he desired as a poet, he was often brilliant as a teacher, editor, man of letters, and literary entrepreneur. The Poem in Its Skin (Big Table Books, 1968), a collection of essays based on single poems by Robert Creeley ("A Wicker Basket"), Allen Ginsberg ("Wichita Vortex Sutra"), James Dickey ("The Heaven of Animals") and others, is a shrewd examination of what he calls "The Generation of 1962." The opening essay on John Ashbery's "Leaving the Atocha Station" is a masterpiece of balanced critical writing that acknowledges the poem's influences in Dada and Surrealism while joining it with the modernist mainstream of Hopkins, Eliot, and Pound. In many of its selections, The Young American Poets was prophetic and helped introduce the work of Charles Simic, James Tate, Louise Gluck, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, Robert Hass, Kathleen Fraser, Clark Coolidge, Tom Clark, Kenward Elmslie, Marvin Bell, and Mark Strand. Paul also discovered that genial eccentric, Bill Knott, who published his first book, The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans, under the pseudonym St. Giraud (1940-1966). St. Giraud was a "virgin and a suicide," in the words of the book's jacket.

Paul was unusual in his willingness to read, with equal interest and dedication, poets of divergent aesthetics. For this generosity, he was often treated dismissively by those he had supported. He also suffered the anger of those excluded from The Young American Poets. He said that when he sent a note of rejection to Bernadette Mayer, she used it as toilet paper and returned it to him in the mail. Paul founded Big Table, one of the leading literary magazines of the late 50s and early 60s; Big Table Books; and the Big Table Series of Younger Poets, which published the first books of Bill Knott, Dennis Schmitz, Andrei Codrescu, and Kathleen Norris. It is not widely known that Paul Carroll also founded The Poetry Center, Chicago's leading independent reading series, and organized the program for its inaugural year, 1973. More significant in the public mind was the January,1959, reading Paul organized for Big Table featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others that packed the enormous Palmer House ballroom. The tape of the event (done by the financial sponsor, the Shaw Society) became the Fantasy album, "Howl and Other Poems," that is the definitive recording of the poem. Paul Carroll helped usher in a new literary era nationally and was Chicago's dean of literary "hip" until the arrival of Ted Berrigan in the late 1970s. But his contribution to letters would be significant if only for his editing of the magazine Big Table. Although it ran only five issues from 1959 to 1960, the magazine was startlingly astute in representing new and often risky writing. The first issue, "the complete contents of the suppressed Winter 1959 Chicago Review" according to its cover, contained "Old Angel Midnight" by Jack Kerouac; "Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs; "The Sorrows of Priapus" and "The Garment of Ra" by Edward Dahlberg; and three poems by Gregory Corso. Subsequent issues contained "Kaddish" by Allen Ginsberg; "How Much Longer Will I Be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher" and "Europe," two of John Ashbery's finest early poems; and work by Frank O'Hara ("Naptha," later to appear in Lunch Poems), Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, Diane di Prima, Robert Duncan, Paul Bowles, Pablo Neruda, LeRoi Jones, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Creeley, Leon Golub, James Wright, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Edward Dorn, and Andre Breton. A sixth issue, on the subject of "Post-Christian Man," was announced in Issue Five but never appeared. It is remarkable how accurately Paul traced a volatile literature at the very moment of its explosion.

The title "Big Table" was provided by Jack Kerouac, who also named "Howl" and The Beat Generation. The concept was of a table big enough to hold a lot of diverse manuscripts. Inclusiveness was natural to Paul, perhaps in part because of his Chicago perspective, from which bitterly held aesthetic differences on the coasts seemed like so much quibble. Why not the best of all worlds? Paul's meritorian views were probably an inheritance of prairie populism, but they leave their own legacy in the form of magazines like New American Writing, ACM, and The Chicago Review as now constituted. One of Paul's disappointments was never being named editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. He had keen insights into the magazine's history and was perfectly situated, as a native Chicagoan and one of the city's respected literary figures, to take on the position. He understood that the magazine's best editors were Harriet Monroe and Henry Rago, whose excellence lay in their high standard and eclectic tastes. They did not edit the magazine out of ideological commitment or due to the pressures of friendship. Nor were they ambitious for their own poetry. In his best years, Paul would have made that kind of editor.

But the board of Poetry is conservative, and Paul had made his name through the cause celebre of having an issue of Chicago Review, of which he was an editor, suppressed by the University of Chicago. Trouble began when Jack Mabley, a newspaper columnist, wrote an article denouncing the "obscenity" of an excerpt of William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch. Dismissed as editors, Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal published the same manuscripts in their own newly founded magazine, Big Table. Its suspicions aroused by the Chicago Review furor, the U.S. Postal Service seized the 400 copies of the first issue. Paul was fired from his teaching position at Loyola University, and the editors were taken to court for the distribution of indecent literature. The magazine was judged to be of literary and social merit by Julius Hoffman, later of Chicago Seven fame. According to the introduction to the final issue of Big Table: Commenting on the two articles in Big Table #1 singled out by the Post Office [as obscene]--"Old Angel Midnight" by Jack Kerouac and "Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch" by William S. Burroughs-- Judge Hoffman ruled that both were in the broad field of serious literature. The Kerouac article was described by Judge Hoffman as "a wild prose picnic . . .which seems to be some sort of dialogue, broadly, between God and Man." The Burroughs novel, he said, was intended to "shock the contemporary society in order perhaps to point out its flaws and weaknesses."

Judge Hoffman concluded his ruling by quoting from the Ulysses decision: "Art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a field is more stifling to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique."

Thrust onto the national literary stage, Paul wrote a series of articles for Playboy that included an interview of Norman Mailer and advanced to a full professorship, with tenure, at University of Illinois in Chicago, where he founded The Program for Writers. Here his fortunes waned through a series of personal problems and competition with fellow faculty. In time, he was demoted to teaching only undergraduate classes, a sad development for those of us loyal to his cause.

Around this time, Paul was hospitalized. When Maxine Chernoff and I entered his room, the comedian Severn Darden was there cracking jokes. A Second City member at the same time as Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Darden liked to do impromptu comedy, such as commentary on randomly chosen television shows. One of Paul's finest poems is "Ode to Severn Darden About Angels, the Common Cold, Nuclear Disarmament, and Popcorn." The Whitmanesque catalogue, with its anaphoric phrase, "The weather today, Severn," was published in Odes as one continuous fold-out that stretched to the floor when opened. Paul was a great teacher, but he didn't offer keys to writing or understanding poems. His greatness lay in his enthusiasm for poetry, which radiated from him like heat. He had an inimitable way of pursing his lips as he prepared to speak. Then he would rub one eye with the heel of his hand. When he finally spoke, it was always in praise of a poem's finest qualities. His message was that poetry is intensely important. It is something to which you must dedicate your life.

In the spring of 1971, I presented poems to Paul that he liked very much. Immediately after class, he asked me to walk with him to his car. Although the sun was shining, it was raining. Paul and I stood under his umbrella at the entrance to Adams Hall as he told me that I was a "real poet" and that he planned to include a section of my work in a forthcoming second edition of The Young American Poets. Because Paul lost his position at Follett Books, the second edition never appeared, and the Big Table imprint disappeared. But none of this mattered. The gift Paul offered young poets was the confidence to continue. I can still remember the intense disappointment I felt when fellow poets such as James Leonard and Dean Faulwell, early co-editors of OINK!, the magazine that preceded New American Writing, quit producing poems. Like Paul Carroll, I had come to see poetry as a calling (my father was a Protestant minister, so bear with me) and a means to truth. To give up poetry is to abandon spiritual discipline. It sounds corny. But poetry is finally a kind of coherence-seeking even when employing dispersive strategies (Mallarmean method, language poetry, and so on). All poets are devotional to the act of construction.

Because I have a mail-order ministerial degree from the Universal Life Church of Oklahoma, I married Paul and the sculptor Maryrose Carroll in her Ada Street loft. Only six people were present. In addition to the bride and groom, they were Maryrose's mother; Maxine Chernoff and me; and Luke, Paul's son by his first marriage and the subject of The Luke Poems (1971). The service consisted of poems by Andre Breton (the surrealist blazon, "The Freedom of Love") and Walt Whitman and a brief exchange of vows. Then we went out to a Japanese restaurant in Old Town, Kamehachi, where the service was bad and the conversation awkward. Luke, who was nine or ten years old, said something like, "Who are you going to marry next?" But Paul's marriage to Maryrose, like poetry, saved his life.

When Paul disappeared one very cold winter night and had not been seen for two days, Maryrose called Maxine and me to help search for him. Using a photo of Paul on a poster for one of his readings, we searched all the homeless shelters in what was then Skid Row. He had been seen at the Pacific Garden Shelter on State Street, where he had been very noticeable due to his designer eyeglasses and expensive sheepskin coat. After midnight, as it snowed heavily, we saw police squadrols pull up at the shelters with loads of homeless men, an act of civic kindness out of a Damon Runyon novel. We then searched the area around Paul's far North Side apartment on Eastlake Terrace, its windows glazed with ice from Lake Michigan waves that had crashed against the building. When I searched a small nearby beach that was frozen and desolate, I was startled by the emergence of a large white rat that skittered along the shore and disappeared under a rock. Paul turned up after a four-day absence. He had been in the bus station on Randolph Street most of the time, where we hadn't thought of checking, sleeping on the seats and harassed by security guards. In the midst of our search for him, Maryrose revealed that it was the missing love of his father, who had often ignored him, that had made Paul so emotionally bereft. He had constructed the myth of an heroic father in order to disguise his pain. One morning in 1975 while Maxine was pregnant with our daughter Koren, Paul rang the bell of our Sheridan Avenue apartment at five in the morning and asked for a breakfast of scrambled eggs. He had been beaten up in his favorite bar, O'Rourke's on North Avenue, and his face and knuckles were raw. He ate the eggs quietly, had some coffee, and left around ten. He came to our apartment frequently during that time, attracted, we thought, by Maxine's pregnancy. He spoke of how John Logan, his best friend, had loved the taste of mother's milk when his wife was breast-feeding.

It was around this time that Paul began to supplement his teaching income, which was substantial as a full professor, by driving a Yellow Cab. He needed the money to pay his psychiatrist, whom he saw four times a week. One day a cab full of conventioneers treated him disrespectfully by showing indifference to his topic, the poetry of Pablo Neruda. He pulled over halfway to the destination and ordered the riders to "get the fuck" out of his cab, which they did. Paul was a good-sized man and impressive when angry. He also worked as a clerk in a men's store in the Hancock Building. It's hard to imagine this job lasting very long, given Paul's volatility at the time. Every week would bring some new concern among his friends. He was skidding out of control. Maryrose provided the warmth and safety that Paul needed. While he would still drink too much, his behavior became less self-destructive. He also began writing again, producing numerous manuscripts of poetry and memoir. The last few years of his work were done in Vilas, North Carolina, where Maryrose had located a rural property with studio space for her work. Paul retired from the Program for Writers and left the city that seems, even now, unimaginable without him. There are only a few writers of whom this is true: Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, and Paul Carroll of the postwar generation. Bellow moved quietly to the East, as Algren (bitterly and publicly) did before him. When Paul departed there was sadly little public comment. Gwendolyn Brooks and Paul Carroll are the mother and father of contemporary Chicago poetry, and all of us are in some way indebted to them.

Even though our relationship became more distant in recent years, Paul has profoundly influenced me. I will always remember him in his boater and Brooks Brothers three-piece suit, weaving through traffic in his Mercedes, as he talked excitedly about poetry, often turning to address someone in the back seat as cars blindly passed. Miraculously, we all survived the trip. Paul often said, sentimentally, that when he died he wanted to be seated at a big table in heaven with the poets of eternity. But I prefer to think of him riding around Lincoln Park on his bike, wearing a watch cap and yellow rain slicker, dreamily reflecting and chatting with friends. He remains one of the great spirits of Chicago poetry--brash, romantic, and undisguised in his dislikes and affections.

This article first appeared in the Chicago Review, Spring 1998

About The Poetry Center
When The Poetry Center's founders wrote its charter in 1974, they established three guiding principles: to promote and develop the public's interest in poetry; to stimulate and encourage young poets; and, to advance the careers of poets by offering them professional opportunities. This is exactly what The Poetry Center has done for 30 year.