Rain Taxi Spends Time With Charles Potts

Join Rain Taxi's Paul E. Nelson for a discussion with poet and publisher Charles Potts. Nelson introduces us to Potts, writing:

Based in Walla Walla, Washington for decades, Charles Potts says he has "blazed a clear path thru the wilderness of the times I was fated to live in." An author of numerous volumes of poetry whose work first appeared in Wild Dog magazine in 1963, he's also been a publisher (of Litmus Magazine and a press of the same name, which published the likes of Philip Whalen, Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn, Charles Bukowski, and others); an editor (of the anthology Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry and the magazine The Temple, A postnational journal of spiritual elevation to create and maintain a state where the state has no jurisdiction); a curator/producer (of at least seven versions of the Walla Walla Poetry Party); and an author of creative non-fiction (most notably How The South Finally Won the Civil War, published by Tsunami, Inc. in 1995). In extra-literary pursuits, in the last decade he's become a breeder of Appaloosa horses. We spoke at length this past summer about his poetry, which I asked him to read several times during our session, so the reader of this interview can get a taste of this fine writer.

After reading his poem "Coyote Highway," Potts talks about the poem's dedicatee, poet Amalio Madueño: 

PeN: You dedicated the poem to Amalio Madueño; tell us about why you did that and about your friendship with him.

CP: Well, Amalio is probably the best under-appreciated poet in this country. I can say that without fear of contradiction, Amalio Madueño is a great poet and he should have many, many books distributed in all kinds of manners; instead he has to crank them out more or less by himself there at Ranchos Press [his own imprint], although that's not a bad idea in many ways because if you're publishing your own books, you're in control of the process. Amalio, he is just a super, super, intelligent, musical, sensitive individual. I had no idea how important he was when I went to the Taos Poetry Circus, which was a year after my first heart attack—I thought, I'm going to go down there, I better go down there before it's too late. I don't know how the Taos Poetry Circus was put together, but I get the impression that he was pretty much the engine room.

PeN: For about ten years. And it was a production, it was a show.

CP: Yeah, it was kind of like entertainment of a sort. I don't mind that poetry turns into entertainment at one level, because they had big crowds. It was probably one of the most important series of readings that ever took place on this continent. And the guy who started it, Al Simmons, he is a great writer himself. And he started that stuff in Chicago.

PeN: Right, Mark Smith sort of took his method and turned it into the slam, which has its own story.

CP: Anyway, I enjoyed Amalio's presence and his poetry and I've reprinted a lot of it, published it in The Temple magazine when I was doing it again.

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