More of this Feature • Part I, Close Encounter of the Small Press Kind • Part III, So Who Is This Guy Again? • Part IV, “The 62nd Best Little Town In America For Art” • Part V, The Temple School of Poetry • 4 Poems by Charles Potts

Related Articles • Poetry in a Time of Fire (small press in Australia), by Chris Mansell • Hearts and Hands, an interview with Luis Rodriguez • Herman Berlandt’s International Poetry Museum, by Marj Hahne • 95 Theses: Mission of the Machines (Marc Awodey’s poetry vending machines)

Elsewhere on the Web • The Temple Bookstore • The Temple School of Poetry

THE TEMPLE AND ITS KEEPER
For over twenty years, dynamo-slash-lightning-rod of underground letters Charles Potts has lived and worked in Walla Walla, Washington, a small, unhurried border town in the southeastern corner of the state, an hour due west of Idaho by truck, and a short ten-speed spin into sales-tax-free Oregon below. To most, Walla Walla registers faintly if at all, and then as the punch line to a recycled crop of Podunk one-liners. Potts, though, hails from the far smaller and more remote Mackay, Idaho, and his retort to the hegemons of high-sheen Big Government Literature can be found in issue 16 of his influential magazine, The Temple, tucked beneath the masthead: “Each generation the great Latin poets came from farther and farther from Rome. Eventually they ceased to go there at all, except perhaps to see the sights.” (Or so said Kenneth Rexroth, who knew everything.)

Between 1997 and 2002, Potts issued The Temple quarterly with no outside funding and a small shifting staff. Twenty issues of the ambitious 80-page poetry miscellany came out bang on schedule in runs of between three and ten thousand -- a feat which recalls Bill Knott’s drip-dry defense of another Idaho boy: “at least he / made the quatrains run on time.” The good name of The Temple, which included interviews, bilingual translations, reviews, essays and a dollop of Pottsian self-promotion, needs no such rescuer, save perhaps from the shoddy cartography of the official Thomas Bros. Po-Biz Guide.

The magazine (co-named El Templo) proclaimed itself “a postnational journal of spiritual elevation; to create and maintain a state where the state has no jurisdiction.” Chinese characters round out the front cover masthead. Despite a hardy core group of subscribers and a continually morphing slew of madcap distribution schemes, it never really “sold” well, but nevertheless got around -- to places including Mexico, with additional readers in Central America and even China. A taste of its helmsman’s dead serious humor jumps off the back cover of issue 6. In the aftermath of a very real event, a teaser chimed: “Editor has heart attack -- Temple in ruins.” (Perhaps coincidentally, immediately above this announcement appears a photo of a decomposing coyote carcass.) Potts recovered, abandoned basketball and stuck to his daybreak, go-for-broke tennis matches with poet/professor/on-court nemesis Dan Lamberton.

My introduction to The Temple came through a cold submission before I had seen, much less purchased, a copy. (Bad small press poet!) A month or two later, a handwritten note signed by Stephen Last Name Indecipherable (later identified as Seattle poet Stephen Thomas) informed me that the mag would be “using” two of my poems. “We’ll be in touch.” Two weeks later, ten copies of the issue showed up, professional in design if rather unusual, the format that of an unspined newsprint digest, with an anti-gloss cachet all its own. In a preemptive strike against production cost status seekers, Potts had planted another sly quote within: “The less expensive the paper, the more valuable the information.” Presumably the source of this aphorism, old school mutual fundmeister Peter Lynch, should know.

Lynch’s statement is pure Potts, and keys into an overlap between his predilections and those of Hailey, Idaho’s long lost native son, Ezra Pound himself. Throughout his many writings and projects Potts displays traces here, heavy footprints there, of the pedagogical impulse, and won’t admit to giving a damn for entertainment value, averring that he’s after energy transmission, and the down/uploading of information. (His editorial tastes, and even his own work, however, often confound these stated operating principles. [See Whitman, Walt, on self-contradiction.])

A hardheaded realist, Potts nevertheless remains hellbent on bringing poetry to the prose-weary masses, or at least reminding them it still exists. (Updating the Williams chestnut about people dying every day for lack of poetry, Potts once allowed, with a broad, wicked laugh, that as far as he could tell most people don’t seem to miss it at all.)

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