An Ever-Bigger Table

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Poetry Center, and to mark the opening of the Poetry Foundation's latest exhibition, "A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center," on view through September 14, 2024, we put scholar James D. Sullivan in conversation with B. Metzger Sampson, the Poetry Center's executive director. — The Editors

Tell me about the origins of the Chicago Poetry Center.

It starts at the Chicago Review in 1959, with Paul Carroll as poetry editor and Irving Rosenthal as editor. The two of them were in contact with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and they were excited to get new, contemporary voices into the Chicago Review. Ferlinghetti put them in contact with the Beats. They published some of this early work, and an article was written [in the Chicago Daily News] with the great title, “Filthy Writing on the Midway.” The University of Chicago hadn’t paid much attention to the magazine, which they sponsored, until that article. Then they reacted, making trouble for the editors. Carroll and Rosenthal walked and founded Big Table magazine, and ultimately the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC) formed as the public readings arm of that magazine. Big Table was set up with an expansive idea: a table big enough to include all literary voices.

Early readings were hosted in the basement of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. The first reading was called “Poets Look at Paintings.” This flexible informality reflects much of the Poetry Center’s style for the last 50 years.

What is the mission of the Poetry Center now?

The mission of CPC is to connect people and poetry, equitably engage poets and communities, and foster literacy in our city and beyond. We’re always thinking about the poets and the poetry going out, looking at both sides. How do we support our audiences with accessible and diverse readings, and how do we support our students with relevant, engaging poetry lessons in their classrooms? That’s the outside. And then inside, how do we support the poets? It’s always about the poets and the broader community.

How do you support poets?

Some years ago, when we had nothing—no resources, no money—our reading series functioned the way many reading series do, which is that nobody got paid, although we hoped it was useful for someone to have an audience. We didn’t account for poets’ time, labor, and the cost of getting there. We were able to grow into an organization that pays poets for their time. Our reading series is a paid reading series. There is a paid interpreter there. We’re in an ADA accessible space.

“Critical Conversations” is our program where we use poetry to facilitate necessary and challenging conversations around issues like anti-racism, gender, and sexuality. We wanted to jump a hurdle that often happens in DEI programs, which is that some of the most marginalized people in the room are required to bring their trauma to the surface for the conversation to advance. We bring in contemporary poetry by poets who have spoken about these issues in their work as a way to have a personal voice, a personal experience in the room, without asking anyone in the room to share. Each of the poets whose work is foregrounded in the facilitations is paid royalties every time we use their work. That is an important part of the equity work. If we are using your work to talk about anti-racism, you should be getting paid every time we do that.

CPC’s education programs are also a big part of its mission.

Our education program is the biggest part of how we financially support poets as laborers in the industry of poetry. When I started as executive director in 2014, there was one set rate that felt low for the skill set that these professional educators brought and the time and energy they put in. Teaching artists and adjunct professors encounter this same issue in pay equity: the true hours aren’t accounted for, and we wanted to change that. We began by gathering literary organizations in Chicago to do an anonymous survey on teaching artists’ pay equity, and ultimately sharing those results out to all who participated. On our end, this gave us the information we needed to restructure program costs, increase our pay rate, and add prep and other hours to compensate for all the work Poets in Residence do outside their official teaching hours. We have ensured in our new structure that poets get an hour of paid prep time for every instructional hour; they get pre-prep and midterm prep for syllabus building. Training hours are paid, hours spent supporting student performance are paid. We want to make sure that poets feel valued as professionals at CPC, and ensuring that you are compensated for your time and creative energy is one of those ways.

In the 1990s, an excellent director for the organization, Kenneth Clarke, took over, and he built the Poetry Residencies program for Chicago schools, which he built with Kenneth Koch, who engineered the original program in New York.

Today, our Poetry Residency program is in 28 schools and 96 classrooms—so we’re supporting around 2,700 students with weekly poetry programming. Our program is highly collaborative with our school partners, ensuring we address their specific interests and needs. The school may need a bilingual poet able to teach in Spanish and English, or it may be a school with a vibrant performance culture, and they want a poet who can run an open mic and engage students in the performance aspect of poetry. Another school might be excited to make bound books or installations of visual art and ekphrastic poetry. We have different curricula we’ve built out to address these areas and we also support poets in designing their own lessons and syllabi tailored to the school and focused on the poet’s areas of interest—excited, passionate teachers make the best educators.

How do the Center’s broadsides fit into these initiatives?

We don’t publish broadsides regularly anymore. Part of that is a matter of resources for a small organization. They’ve become special one-offs for significant occasions. Naimah Thomas designed a broadside for Jane Wong, our featured writer for our 2023 Summer Poetry Party. This year, Ben Blount is designing a cento written by Helene Achanzar to celebrate our 50th anniversary.

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. To create this materiality out of something that is otherwise ephemeral is wonderfully significant. Also, it’s a moment of hybridization when an artist responds to a poet. What does this poem evoke for them that they want to turn into materiality?

So, what did it mean back in the early 2000’s when the Center published broadsides for every reading?

That was both the business and the art form—prescient expression. In the ’90s and early 2000s, the Center had a membership model, and readings had a great deal of fanfare. When you went to a reading with a significant poet who had flown into Chicago for the event, you could then purchase this commemorative artwork, freezing and honoring that moment visually.

The organization has always stayed close to other art forms. We’ve done a great deal of collaborating with artists, musicians, and dancers. In the early days, not only were they in the basement of the MCA looking at and responding to paintings, but they were also making these really great posters for the events, their own cool visual ephemera. After that period, the organization moved on to broadsides.

What has your own journey at CPC been like?

My first role with the organization was as a Poet in Residence in graduate school. In the time after, when I was away from Chicago, the organization hit hard times. The board dwindled and a few remaining members took a vote to potentially dissolve, which failed. The members thought the organization and its legacy was worth saving, but all they had was the promise of a single donation to restart the organization over a year. I returned to Chicago, adjuncting and editing part-time, and added to my list of part-time roles CPC program director. They could pay me for four hours a week, and there was no other staff. With no resources and little staff history in the room, rebuilding was slow for years. It was like starting over, but with nearly four decades of content and legacy in a suitcase behind you.

The organization you see now—a staff of poets, an amazing crew of Poets in Residence teaching across Chicago, newer programs like Critical Conversations and Queen Zee—all of this has re-blossomed in the last five years, following seven years of grind to get there. Having a thriving board, teaching artist, and staff teams who come together to build and inform the values of the organization has been one of the most gratifying professional accomplishments of my life. I love this community and am moved by all that it generates on the regular. I love being at a CPC event and seeing people in this community take care of and love each other and celebrate each other’s creativity.

You see a logo and a website for an organization or a publishing house, and you think, wow, they must have a lawyer and an HR department and payroll, a clear division of labor among multiple people with an org chart. That’s incorrect. These organizations are often just a person in sweatpants. Not being an organization that has an endowment, CPC has always been at the whim of the financial moment, the cultural moment. There’s a great, strong history of people reinventing this organization in a way that keeps it in line with those original values of a bigger table, but rebuilding it for its time.

How has CPC evolved for our current time?

When the pandemic hit, we had poets in classrooms all over the city. We honored those contracts while teaching artists were on an instructional pause at home, and we rebuilt the curriculum to work in the early asynchronous Chicago Public Schools (CPS) virtual classrooms. We were the first arts partner back in “the classroom” in spring of 2020. In a time when students were at an all-time low of interacting with school, we were receiving student poems from home every week. Our programs have always been about pausing from the rush of life and honoring your creativity and humanity—this type of connection was needed more than ever that spring.

Simultaneously, we launched a virtual reading series and highlighted our own teaching artists. These quick pivots ensured we kept our community intact in a fractious moment and built the technological footprint to stay accessible at the height of the pandemic quarantine, and to maintain accessibile practices to this day.

Watching early asynchronous video lesson recordings from Poet in Residence Leslie Reese gave me great comfort in dark times—and the idea for a streaming, interactive poetry web series. A grantor saw an article on our early return to classrooms and invited us to apply for a special one-off grant. We used that to make five episodes of Queen Zee’s Poetic Adventures. QZPA is modeled on Mister Rogers and other beloved PBS shows from my youth that were educational, kind, and playfully creative. In every episode we visit a different Chicago neighborhood, hear poetry by real CPS student poets, and, of course, write a poem. Meanwhile, a viewer might also learn a little helpful tip on meditation, tree pose, or honoring our feelings and friendships. I’m eternally grateful to Leslie for her gifted instruction of young people, seeding this idea, and, ultimately, agreeing to step into the role of Queen Zee herself.

We wanted to make poetry accessible for any educator—including a parent or guardian at home. The series is free to all on our site and includes worksheets, as well as educator guides to deepen the conversation, if you wish to. It was such a fun thing to make and another evolution of the “bigger table” idea. We see it’s getting downloaded all over the country and sometimes beyond. People are using it for teenagers and adults, not just the second through fifth graders we designed it for. I’ve always found that to be true of our programs. We plan things to be scaffolded for certain age groups, but we also know these lessons work for literally any human. Poetry’s magic is poetry’s magic at any age, and CPC is especially good at welcoming folks to an ever-widening poetry table.