Big Table 4: Burroughs, Kline, and the New American Poets

Description

By the time Big Table 4 hit the stands, William S. Burroughs was already infamous for Naked Lunch, banned and celebrated in equal measure. I love the ads in this issue, especially the full-page ad from Auerhahn Press for The Exterminator No. 1, co-written with Brion Gysin—a chaotic, prophetic work that pushed further into Burroughs’ experimental cut-up technique. For Beat completists (are there any more completists left?), Burroughs sightings in little mags like Big Table are part of the thrill: fragments of a larger, unwieldy narrative, scattered across decades of mimeos, manifestos, and magazines.

Big Table was born from controversy. After the University of Chicago censored an issue of Chicago Review for content deemed too obscene—namely, Burroughs and Ginsberg—the editors left and founded Big Table (which Kerouac famously named). The magazine quickly became a key organ for the New American Poets and the counterculture’s literary vanguard. Issue 4 keeps that energy alive, complete with a tipped-in foldout reproduction of Franz Kline’s 1959 painting Mister. It’s an artifact that bridges the Beats, Abstract Expressionism, and the restless spirit of mid-century American letters.

A literary time capsule with Burroughs, Kline, and the rebel pulse of postwar poetics.