Writers No One Reads

I asked Dmitry Samarov — author of Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab — to post about Chicago writers. This is his second in the series. Dmitry also painted the portraits.

No one reads Paul Carroll (1926–96). Carroll was a poet now best remembered for the writers he championed. He was an editor at Chicago Review and a founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago. When Chicago Review refused to continue publishing excerpts of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in 1958, Carroll resigned along with fellow editor Irving Rosenthal and founded Big Table in order to promote Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others. Kerouac came up with the name: Big Table occurred to him, Carroll recalled, when Kerouac found a note he had written himself: “Get a bigger table.” The first issue of the magazine was seized by the Post Office for containing obscenity in the locked-down ’50s.
Poet Paul Hoover told K. C. Clarke (as part of an appreciation of Carroll by those who knew him) that even as a tenured professor at UIC, where he founded the writers’ program, he was also driving a cab. “He was driving these people around, and they didn’t care about his subject, Pablo Neruda, so he stops the car and said, ‘Get the fuck out.’ That seemed to be the kind of guy he was.”
His wife, Maryrose, described their life in a 2004 interview [PDF}:

He had an ABSOLUTE passion for poetry.
When we lived in our loft, a factory building not too far from Lincoln Park, when he wasn’t teaching, he would go out on his bike and ride through the park, and make stops, to jot down notes about the weather, the trees, or a dead fish. When he came home the pieces would go into a first stew, and usually he would get up late at night, at 2:00, 3:00 o’clock in the morning, and he would be working again, on poetry. And whether these poems were published or not he kept on writing, rocking and rolling with the words.

***
“Song After Making Love” (published posthumously in 2008)
Sometimes I want to be a cloud drifting like a barnacle goose or a galleon into the winter home of God The green of these trees the grass green as oxygen the green of my excited heart Shadows of bird between the bones blood feels sweet as if moving in maple trees a part of me is grass I close my eyes I’m empty at the same time full like a galaxy in daylight
Carroll was suggested to me as a subject by Thomas Sloan, Professor Emeritus in Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His knowledge of lost and forgotten bits of history are rivaled by few people I know.
***
Dmitry Samarov paints and writes in Chicago.
[Writers No One Reads Facebook page]

I asked Dmitry Samarov — author of Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab — to post about Chicago writers. This is his second in the series. Dmitry also painted the portraits.

No one reads Paul Carroll (1926–96). Carroll was a poet now best remembered for the writers he championed. He was an editor at Chicago Review and a founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago. When Chicago Review refused to continue publishing excerpts of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch in 1958, Carroll resigned along with fellow editor Irving Rosenthal and founded Big Table in order to promote Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others. Kerouac came up with the name: Big Table occurred to him, Carroll recalled, when Kerouac found a note he had written himself: “Get a bigger table.” The first issue of the magazine was seized by the Post Office for containing obscenity in the locked-down ’50s.

Poet Paul Hoover told K. C. Clarke (as part of an appreciation of Carroll by those who knew him) that even as a tenured professor at UIC, where he founded the writers’ program, he was also driving a cab. “He was driving these people around, and they didn’t care about his subject, Pablo Neruda, so he stops the car and said, ‘Get the fuck out.’ That seemed to be the kind of guy he was.”

His wife, Maryrose, described their life in a 2004 interview [PDF}:

He had an ABSOLUTE passion for poetry.

When we lived in our loft, a factory building not too far from Lincoln Park, when he wasn’t teaching, he would go out on his bike and ride through the park, and make stops, to jot down notes about the weather, the trees, or a dead fish. When he came home the pieces would go into a first stew, and usually he would get up late at night, at 2:00, 3:00 o’clock in the morning, and he would be working again, on poetry. And whether these poems were published or not he kept on writing, rocking and rolling with the words.

***

“Song After Making Love” (published posthumously in 2008)

Sometimes I want to be a cloud
drifting like a barnacle goose or a galleon
into the winter home of God

The green of these trees
the grass green as oxygen
the green of my excited heart

Shadows of bird between the bones
blood feels sweet
as if moving in maple trees
a part of me is grass

I close my eyes
I’m empty
at the same time full
like a galaxy in daylight

Carroll was suggested to me as a subject by Thomas Sloan, Professor Emeritus in Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His knowledge of lost and forgotten bits of history are rivaled by few people I know.

***

Dmitry Samarov paints and writes in Chicago.

[Writers No One Reads Facebook page]