Kiot - Selected Early Poems 1963 - 1977
by Charles Potts
Kiot drawings by Robert McNealy
$10.00
Blue Begonia Press

Kiot

"You'll see right away this is a mode of address unlike any other." - from the introduction by Janice Faye Fiering

His style is more elegant and eloquent than the Beat poets and more engaging than post modern symbolism. Potts sets himself apart from the rest with earthy turns of phrase and cunning metaphors. Not one word or syllable is wasted or extraneous….The dead earnestness of Charles Potts is highly recommended.

Laurel Johnson

The Wandering Hermit Review #1, Summer/Fall, 2005

Charles Potts remains what he has always been to the poetry community: A savage outsider, a voice crying in the wilderness with the song of a coyote, an innocent wrecking the temple. "My position is awe, and wonder, "he writes, and we can only stand with him similarly stunned…The formatting of the book is lovely, with some fine limber line drawings of coyotes by Robert McNealy and good readable 12 point type so that the eye races across the poems as, no doubt, the poet meant the reader to do.

Mark Bruce

Small Press Review , May-June, 2005

Akira Kurosawa once said that an artist is one who never averts his eyes. Hemingway said an artist needs a bullshit detector. Charles Potts has a finely tuned bullshit detector and I'll bet he's won some staring contests in his day. This is not the warm, fuzzy slippers and a mug of cocoa poetry of Billy Collins. Potts looks our weird, wonderful, shitty world dead in the eye and tells us what he finds there without any hemming and hawing or sanitizing the reality of his experience.

Kiot is an excellent collection of early poems by a poet deserving much wider acclaim.

Steve Potter

Raven Chronicles , Fall 2005

If in fact, our culture is becoming more intellectually demanding, rather than less, and if we are increasingly more sophisticated, then surely, Charles Potts, the writer-thinker is racing far ahead of the normal curve. His methodology of cognitive labor probes mysteries encountered. He analyses value objectives via argumentation that thoughtfully anticipates mind challenges, to bring even skeptics around to his point of view. With short, satirical passages, Potts can, and does, avoid instilling passivity in his readers. He will draw you in as an active participant, rather than, create a feeling of submissive powerlessness, that would tend to annihilate you.

Joyce Metzger

Charles Potts's wise, intelligent, and poignant collection of poetry is for anyone who loves wit and language combined with profound honesty.

One after another, in a book that fits well in the palm of your hand, we encounter these rather short-lined poems of simple wisdom. Each seems to combine the personal with the universal to create an openly-accessible read whether he is looking back over his life or, as in the poem, Roots and Greens: "Every year I get a little/Closer to the earth," he is looking forward.

These poems are precious gifts from a generous man. It would be inappropriate to compare Charles Potts with anyone but himself. I read his work and I think, 'This poet has dedicated his life to language.' And it's a language grounded in his belief that one of our culture’s largest problems is that there isn’t enough poetry being read. Well, lucky for us, we get to enter his world poem by poem, a journey I absolutely craved when the book arrived in the mail as if it were a letter from an old friend, an extended hand beckoning me to listen.

Mary Lou Sanelli

When you first start reading Kiot , it seems...normal camping grounds and mountain-river English, but the more you immerse yourself in Potts' work, the further you go back into time, into the orient, into Buddhism, into the Paleolithic-man-floating-in-space-as-at-peace-with-the-universe-as-anyone-can-get….The poetry here, under the sometimes-surface of Gringo Potts, essentially is one big OMMMMMM... Kiot isn’t a book to simply read, but a book to drift into every night during meditation-time, getting your soul ready for the long night and the even longer next day, learning how to put everything in infinite perspective.

Hugh B. Fox

Chiron Review , #79, Summer, 2005

Charlie Potts' is a poetry of high mental energy, kinetic "open field composition" in the mode of Charles Olson, dense with fast talk images and insights, streaming through planes of time—political awareness—environmental commitments—relationships—mental interiors—like the waters running through this book ultimately causing him to rename himself "Charlie Kiot" and finally "Laffing Water." ...Trusting the truth of impulse, Olson's "go with it" method of composition, Potts writes what he sees and feels, floating it all in the stream of his subconscious...Blue Begonia Press in this compact compression of the early poems of Charles Potts has given us a book worth carrying around. Potts has spent a lifetime believing in the rite of poetry to keep us sane and move us forward. The poems here feel like one long song, in the same conversational voice with many movements...

Larry Smith

Heartlands 2005

The poet doesn't consciously admit to any dichotomy in his writing between Western & Chinese thought. Would he have suffered less in his early years had he been able to recognize such having formed the basis of the schizophrenia alluded to in poems of his San Francisco period? In his excellent long poem "The Trancemigracion of Menzu," for example, he begins: "the new west and the old east/ have united gunfight at the OK corral..." Yet this irreconcilable conflict perhaps perturbed Charlie Kiot (coyote), the fact east & west could never be brought together to palliate America's troubled Viet Nam-era divisions, and the possibility he couldn't be a true coyote in Chinese sheep's clothing. American materialism doesn't equate with the spiritual nature of poetry, Chinese or otherwise; those who protested the U.S. war machine were lambs for the proverbial slaughter back then ... The transmigration of cultural thought across a continent of writing embracing all meanings is what proves worthwhile reading The Temple's mentor; perhaps youth has its immanent wisdom in these early poems older age can't rival ...

Peter Magliocco

ART:MAG Nov. 05 Issue #28