Organized by Don Wilsun and Joe Scozzy as a grass-roots outlet for poetic expression across cultural and societal boundaries, it became an alternative to the academic reading series controlled ("captive" was the Dogtown term for it) by University of Washington professor Nelson Bentley.
Readings were often attended by winos seeking heat and a free cup of wine, tourists who wandered down from the Market, poetry fans, and a cadre of restless young Seattle poets who found the open atmosphere liberating and challenging.
Many authors read at Dogtown, including Steven "Jesse" Bernstein, a multi-published legend who toured with punk groups and recorded albums on the same SubPop label that brought Nirvana to the world.
The material presented there was as eclectic as is possible to get:[citation needed] wino blitherings, romance poems by starry-eyed ingénues, strict academic forms, and performance art (such as playing recordings of conversations in Market bars while passing around samples of trash and cigarette butts gleaned from the tables where they were taped).
But Dogtown was an important part of the poetic blast of that time,[citation needed] dovetailing in with SubPop and other grunge, Eidolon, precursors of The Stranger in forging a verbal esthetic that was more influential on Eighties and Nineties culture than is widely known.