Inside Idaho
The legendary poet Charles Potts, born in Idaho Falls in 1943 and educated at Idaho State University, returned to his Idaho roots in two books of poetry, 100 Years in Idaho in 1996 and Lost River Mountain in 1999. These books concentrate on the physical and human geography of his family’s habitation on the land. The present volume includes two sections taken from these works and three later sections, "Lullaby of the Lochsa," "Sunburnt Romantic," and finally "Wild Horse," written after his wife’s death in a tragic accident in 2004. In the completed work, Potts’s meditation on family and geographical memory comes full circle. Observant, scrupulous, passionate, and courageous, he describes his life as it embraces the lives and events that came before it.
Charles Potts emerged as a counter-culture poet in Berkeley in 1968, challenging the liberal consensus of his day in his volume Little Lord Shiva (1968) and calling for a poetry of intellectual precision. While continuing his poetic production, Potts documented his Berkeley experience in the two-volume prose account Valga Krusa (1977), written in Salt Lake City. He moved to Walla Walla, Washington in 1978, where he continued to study the relationship between language, causality, and politics. West End Press produced a selection of his writings, The Portable Potts, in 2005.
Charles Potts is also an important literary publisher and cultural organizer. He founded the magazine Litmus in Seattle and Litmus, Inc. in Salt Lake City, publishing eighteen books there in the 1970s. In 1996 he founded Tsunami, Inc. in Walla Walla, published the magazine The Temple for six years, and continues to support The Temple Bookstore.
