Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, will read at the Bal Tabarin Room, Sherman Hotel, on Thursday, January 29, at 8:00 p.m., in a benefit for Big Table, the new Chicago literary review. The first issue of Big Table, due February 15, will feature writers suppressed by the University of Chicago.
Chicago is famous as the birth-place of great controversial “little magazines.” Back in the 1910’s, world famous POETRY magazine and Little Review were born here. Big Table was founded on Christmas Day by the former editors of Chicago Review, The University of Chicago literary quarterly. They resigned last November 18 when the University banned three writers.
The writers are: Beat Generation spokesman Jack Kerouac; poet Edward Dahlberg; and novelist William S. Burroughs.
The Autumn issue of the Chicago Review was attacked last October 26 by Daily News columnist Jack Mabley in an article: “Filthy Writing on the Midway.” As a result, University officials told editor Irving Rosenthal that he must not print any more San Francisco writers. The Winter issue was in press at this time, and Chancellor Lawrence A. Kimpton ordered the University of Chicago Press to halt typesetting.
On November 18, Rosenthal and five of his editors resigned. (They were: Paul Carroll, Doris Nieder, Eila Kokkinen, Barbara Pitschel and Charles Horwitz.)
Rosenthal received permission from Kerouac, Dahlberg and Burroughs, to withdraw their manuscripts and get them printed elsewhere. These manuscripts will be printed in the first issue of Big Table.
Big Table will be a quarterly, featuring literature, art, essays and photographs. Carroll will be the editor.
On December 12, in the Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago student weekly, Chancellor Kimpton attacked editor Rosenthal for being “completely infatuated with the San Francisco school to the point that he seemed to feel no one else worth publishing.” The Chicago Review, Kimpton continued, “was clearly in a rut.”
The facts are:
(1) The Summer Chicago Review, devoted to Zen Buddhism, sold 5200 copies, highest in the magazine’s history. The Spring issue also went into a second printing.
(2) Among the distinguished writers and critics who were printed in the four issues Rosenthal edited, are: Arthur Schlesinger Jr., D. T. Suzuki, David Riesman, Alan Watts, Robert Vigneron, C. F. MacIntyre, Hugh Kenner, John Logan, Oliver LaFarge, Brother Antoninus, O.P. and Parker Tyler.
The suppressed manuscripts, which Big Table will print include; “Old Angel Midnight,” experimental prose by Kerouac; “The Garment of Ra” and “Further Sorrows of Priapus,” a long poem and essays by Dahlberg; and chapters from Naked Lunch, a novel by Burroughs.
Poet Allen Ginsberg, 32, is the author of “Howl”, the controversial long poem called “the most significant poem to be published in this country since World War II.” In 1956 San Francisco Customs Officials seized “Howl”. Then San Francisco police brought the book to trial on the charge of “obscenity.” Famous criminal-lawyer Jake Ehrlich and two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys defended the book without charge. On October 3, 1957 Judge Clayton Horn of Municipal Court, San Francisco passed a judgement dismissing the obscenity charge.
Corso is the author of Gasoline, a book of poems. Of Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac has said: “I think Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg are the best poets in America…. Gregory was a tough young kid from the Lower East Side who rose like an angel over the rooftops and sang Italian songs as sweet as Caruso and Sinatra…”
The Shaw Society of Chicago will sponsor the Ginsberg-Corso reading.