The Yellow Christ - Valga Krusa Vol. 1
by Charles Potts
$10.00
Green Panda Press
ISBN - 0-9758843-4-4
Laffing Water - Valga Krusa Vol. 2
by Charles Potts
$10.00
Green Panda Press
ISBN - 0-9758843-3-6
Valga Krusa - 1977
by Charles Potts
$40.00
Limus Inc.
Valga Krusa - The Yellow Christ and Laffing Water
the Introduction to the re-issue of Laffing Water by Bree
i was reading Valga Krusa when i first met my husband Brian in the summer of 1997. we were strung together via smoking habits, while working a jazz club in Cleveland Heights. he was a server at the time, and i a cook. we’d stand in the dishroom.
'Yellow Christ?' he sed, 'Shit Crackers? sounds like some book'.
'u shld see the photo of the author, on the back cover', i sed.
and i explained it was by this poet who also made books, in Berkeley, circa Hippy. a couple times a week we spent a cigarette together like that, how i came to know he was down a paying roommate, and him to realize what i did was read this book.
'still on that Shit Crackers?' he'd ask.
it took me a good month to finish VK, unusual as i cracked the cases of The Brothers Karamazov in two weeknights. i read Potts slow, in increment, absorbing each hit. when i was finished reading, i moved my stuff in with Brian's.
pre-Krusa i had been living with a schizophrenic ex-con, a spiritual creature, also a poet. we were quite the item, freshly landed from a crash-course in Buddhism together at the Rochester Zen Center. i quit writing, as poems are want to designate a moment, (and which moment is more important than the next, in the scheme of things? & what authority had i, to choose?). i gleaned there's no such thing as mental illness. bad habits form round insecurities like a shroud, cover access panels to the perfect soul in each. the more trust placed in external authority, fewer the attempts at freeing that access. i found a beat-up copy of VK at an indy bookstore in the heights, named Mac's Backs, for five bucks. the book fit nicely into our regimen: my ex-con and i woke early, to meditate, run, meditate some more and breakfast, before he walked me to work at the jazz club. i'd come home to my own routine, of cook and read alone. each walk to work i felt a distance grow between us. and every nitely passage from Potts confirmed my waking spiritual. so, the night i set down to finish Krusa, and had me a vision of Brian before the close, i decided to inquire next day at work whether a vacancy remained.
Brian and i fell in love by fluke, and gradual. neither aiming at it, nor did we disallow. one thing i knew i wanted, was to know about making books. i picked up writing poems again almost immediately, after the move. quit my cooking, in lieu of writing more, and took on shifts at Mac's Backs. i sold books and did some of the PR for the store, while Brian stayed on at the jazz club, eventually managing the joint.
one day i had to write a press release for a Charles Potts, outta Walla Walla, who was coming to read at Mac’s. i had to google to believe it was the man who's book taught me to act on inklings, in order to get where. slitely after 9/11 Potts arrived at the store, with Steven Thomas in tow. the duo had us on the floor. few inklings later i glued, taped and stapled poems together, calling it Green Panda Press. and Potts has always been among the ones i print.
ten years since i read Krusa, and Brian and i still ain't kicked our habit. we sat smoking on opposing couches with Potts in our house this April, during the Patchen Fest in Cleve. it was in the wee hrs Potts and i gestured wild talk on getting VK back in hands. i told him as much as he did, i wanted it read.
i had visions when i was cooking up plans, and yet it was unwittingly i became a wife and bookseller. i see things, clearing dreck from that access, what gets me thru and points always, soul speaks. Potts is one soul that spoke and still speaks, to me. one revolution, a little nite vision, & Valga Krusa re-enters society. this time around, more poems, and one gentler subtitle. in two volumes, the latter part first, the snake eating its tail, u better believe.
--Bree
Cleveland Heights
May, 2007
"Beneath the Underground: Charles Potts' Valga Krusa: A Novel of the Bay Area 60s, and the Poetic Ferment in the Wake of 'The New American Poetry'"
I would like to introduce a neglected classic, the novel Valga Krusa by the poet Charles Potts. Potts -- aka Laffing Water -- arrived in Berkeley from Utah [sic Idaho] via Seattle in 1965, and quickly made himself a familiar figure in the poetry scenes not only of the East Bay but of San Francisco. He was a tireless organizer of reading series, a liaison between poets, revolutionaries, and the pacifists of the Peace and Freedom movement. He had already begun publishing the magazine Litmus before he arrived in California, and continued to issue it for many years thereafter. Valga Krusa, like Litmus records much about this time of social ferment and upheaval, and in doing so, affords a unique view of the poetry of the sixties. Published on Potts' own press, Litmus Inc., in 1977, the novel was written years earlier, concurrent with the excitement it records.
Those poets who matured in the previous decade, who were to some degree instigators of the excitements of the sixties -- Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Diane Di Prima, among many others -- look very different when viewed from the community of younger poets even further out than themselves. Potts and his peers exemplify the ways in which the New American Poetry shaded into poetry of the streets, the be-ins, the mimeo mags, even the Sexual Freedom League. Richard Krech (ed., Avalanche), Julia Vinograd (still the bubble-lady poet of Telegraph Ave), Andy Clausen (strips off, reads nude), John Oliver Simon (ed., Aldebaran Review), Alta (sexually outspoken no-b.s. woman poet), John Thomson (of FUCK fame), Pat Parker (who brought blackness into the largely white world of these writers), Herb de Grasse (wildly eccentric filmmaker), Mel Buffington (ed., Blitz), and Country Joe of the rock group C. J. and the Fish, are just a few of the colorful persons who undergo little literary transformation into the same-name characters of Potts' novel.
We see their impatience with the better-known poets, who are often at once their heroes and their villains, figures being transformed into the latest establishment. There is no doubt that the existence of this underground-the-underground community in the Bay Area had its effect on those poets whom we now think of as the principals of this period. Their appraisals helped keep them honest. While few among this loose-knit group are remembered today, their radical faith in the revolutionary power of poetry constituted an horizon for the times, an instigation and a goad. While much different in their formal approaches, some of the poets later to be known as Language started out in this ferment: Ron Silliman first met Barrett Watten on Telegraph Ave. (Nor should we forget that Lyn Hejinian lived on a commune during the 70s.)