I didn’t appreciate until much later that my professor cast a long shadow on the turf and the times. Carroll was hired in 1957 as poetry editor by Irving Rosenthal of the Chicago Review at that school down the road I hadn’t been qualified to consider. In October of 1958, Chicago Daily News columnist Jack Mabley wrote that “A magazine published by the University of Chicago is distributing one of the foulest collections of printed filth I’ve seen publicly circulated.” The column resulted in the University of Chicago suppressing the Winter 1958-9 issue of the Review, the resignation of Rosenthal, Carroll, and several other staff members, and culminated in the founding of the new journal Big Table. The “filth” that Mabley referred to consisted of excerpts of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. It was Carroll’s idea to have a San Francisco issue of the Review and so he had written to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, who replied with a torrent of names and addresses of potential contributors, along with a sample of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch manuscript. During his classes, Carroll reminisced openly about his friendship with those Beat luminaries. Recounting typically scandalous activities by Ginsberg that made local headlines, Carroll spoke as if chastising his friend: “Oh Allen, what are you doing?” The class also served as Carroll’s personal open mic. It was a treat to hear him read from his own work, in one case from a draft of the poem he had been commissioned to write for the dedication of Swedish artist Claes Oldenburg’s controversial “Bat Column” sculpture located outside the Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building. Local dignitaries, including Chicago Cubs baseball legend Ernie Banks, attended the dedication in April, 1977. The lengthy poem may or may not have been read, possibly falling victim to censorship. Full of vivid references to local landmarks and personalities, Carroll couldn’t resist commenting on the sculpture’s obvious phallic nature. The poem, “Endless Ode to Oldenburg’s Batcolumn for Chicago” appears in his book New and
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