Little Joe’s Italian Restaurant — Paul Carroll Lineage Site
Chicago, Illinois — early 2000s Photograph by KC Clarke
This photograph documents Little Joe’s Italian Restaurant, a longtime Chicago establishment associated with poet Paul Carroll.
During KC Clarke’s tenure at the Poetry Center of Chicago, Don Marshall—then Chair of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a close associate of Carroll—met regularly with Clarke to discuss Carroll’s work and institutional legacy. These conversations often took place while walking through Chicago neighborhoods connected to Carroll’s daily life.
Little Joe’s was identified by Marshall as one of Carroll’s regular gathering places.
Carroll was the founder of the Poetry Center of Chicago (1963), founder and editor of the literary magazine Big Table (1959–1960), and founder of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (1970). Through these efforts, he helped establish the civic and institutional foundation for Chicago’s postwar literary culture.
These walks functioned as informal transmissions of institutional memory, connecting Clarke’s contemporary stewardship of the Poetry Center to its founding generation.
During one such meeting, Clarke and Marshall encountered Reverend Jesse Jackson in the neighborhood, speaking casually with residents at a street vendor. The moment reflected the permeability of Chicago’s civic landscape, where literary, political, and everyday public life intersected without ceremony.
This photograph documents one of the physical sites associated with Carroll’s lived presence in the city and forms part of the broader geographic and cultural context underlying the Poetry Center’s civic lineage.