More of this Feature • Part I, Close Encounter of the Small Press Kind • Part II, The Temple and Its Keeper • 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

SO WHO IS THIS GUY AGAIN?
Charles Potts grew up on a family ranch in the above-mentioned Mackay, Idaho, survived the 60s (barely) and kept on trucking, eventually facing up to the conundrum so assiduously avoided by most middle-aged bohos of my acquaintance -- earning a real living, building a life, raising a family (well, several). He first became a publisher, under the Litmus imprint, in his early twenties in the late 1960s, during which he ping-ponged from Seattle to Berkeley (where he went clinically bonkers and began the searing autobiographical novel Valga Krusa) to Salt Lake City where he toiled miserably in a bank. The young publisher’s list, totaling some fifteen books, included 40-something postal worker Charles Bukowski, whose Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window (1968) went through several printings. Potts paid out over a thousand dollars in royalties to Bukowski, whose At Terror Street and Agony Way (later self-parodied in a short story as All the Damn Time Screaming in the Rain) launched Black Sparrow Press later the same year.

Potts eventually resettled in Walla Walla, dropped off the map and went into real estate. When I came to know him through the mails and phone, I pictured him as some kind of ‘agent’ showing houses. Turns out he’s a small town wheeler-dealer, owner of rental property, in a locale and on a modest enough scale as to be a dicey proposition. I don’t think even he knows from cycle to cycle whether he’s a burgeoning kingpin or sitting on an almost literal house of cards. (Much of what he makes seems to get pumped back into literary endeavors.) Regardless, he is no desk jockey but every inch the hands-on owner-operator. In a hangar-sized dance studio, I saw him change a ceiling fixture light bulb while standing nearly atop an unsupported, OSHA-nightmare of a 16-foot tripod ladder. Armed with an aluminum extension pole, itself culminating in a bizarre looking grab-claw, he untwisted the dead bulb, retrieved it, reloaded the claw with a new one, then repeated the outstretched surgical process in reverse. I didn’t know they even made three-legged ladders.

After early-90s stints in Japan and China, by now in his early fifties, he decided to reenter the literary fray and formed Tsunami Inc. In addition to The Temple,

Tsunami has published five poets individually, the whopping 380-page Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry (an anthology featuring Edward Dorn, Sharon Doubiago, Darrell Gray, Maureen Owen, and 58 others, among them a host of Potts’ discoveries), and two of his own books. One of these, an exhaustive, closely argued political analysis, and the fruit of a decade’s research, bears the modest title How the South Finally Won the Civil War: And Controls the Political Future of the United States. As well, from the late 1960s on he has consistently published poems with the usual array of bewilderingly-named little magazines and fugitive presses. His multi-dimensional work has roots and branches tangled in many family trees -- Mencken, Bernard DeVoto, Rexroth, Duncan, Olson, McGrath, for starters (he’s an apostate when it comes to the jewel in the Northwest’s crown, Theodore Roethke) ---and begs for a well-edited, roomy selection with mainstream distribution.

Next page > “The 62nd Best Little Town In America For Art” > page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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