Nature Lovers

by Charles Potts

Poetry. This collection of poems is hard-hitting and no-holds-barred, filled with poems of wit and satire, politics and ecology. When my conscience goes south for the winter, I turn to the fearless Charles Potts, a moralist with a sense of humor. If he had an 800 number I'd call him every day! -- Ronald Koertge.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1929355041
• ISBN13: 9781929355044
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Pleasure Boat Studio
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Mountain Man

I met Charles Potts in 1970. I was living in Minneapolis and was starting a writing workshop, so I took the unusual tack of tacking postcard notices around in the West Bank neighborhood. No one locally ever contacted me about the postcards. But a visitor to Minneapolis, in the visage of a bona fide bearded beat poet from the west, who was passing through Minnesota in his microbus on a poetry tour of America, found himself, as poets do, standing and copying a stranger's phone number from a telephone pole. Charles Potts called and asked to visit me. We huddled as equals, drank iced tea, sized up one another's poetics, and agreed to stay in touch. We have been friends ever since. Good friends. I sometimes feel Charlie knows what is in my heart better, and respects it more, than I myself do. Charles was vastly more advanced than I was. He, even in his twenties, knew who he was, knew how the world worked, and knew what he wanted to do. I'm still working on all three. Talking to him, and corresponding later, I felt I was communing directly with the wild prophetic side of American poetry. Most poetry I read in the early 70s was elliptical as all get-out, dreamy, posey, and mainly about the self's deep interest in itself. Charlie was doing something nearly the opposite. You could feel the gravel under his poems -- they were roughcut, fearless, and unfailingly straight about what they wanted to say. You didn't wonder what psychic level Charlie was writing from (8? 13? lingerie and notions?) any more than you'd wonder what level a gun pointed at your darkest suspicions and prejudices was on. Even when his poems were funny they were dead-on serious, like Lenny Bruce on a good night. I had to be reminded he was a youngest, not an oldest child, because of that quality of gravitas. Anyway, on to the poems in Nature Lovers. Charlie wrote these poems in 1989, under the influence of his study in the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming, and readings in the microstructure of cognition. The title is a tip-off to Charlie's ragged irony -- because it is impossible for humans to truly love nature, because we are helplessly separated from it by language and consciousness -- the makings of poetry itself. "I go way back with writers who identify themselves with nature," he writes in an afterword. "Wordsworth, for the mystifying and mystical unity to be fond there; Menzu (Mencius) for his insistence that the entire state has to operate in obeisance to natural law; and Lucretius, who said poets should never lose the power to irritate." Each poem is a meditation, or an editorial cartoon, about some aspect of nature. Listen to the fussy cadence and the caustic syllogistics, and tell me you don't hear the unmistakable ring of Menzu in the following: Natural Causes"He died of natural causes."How many times have you relaxed while reading That sanguine phrase and paused to wonder:What causes would not be natural? Car wrecks, overdoses, the fall of Flight DC 10?Mechani

Unique poetry of language, images, and mind/heart speaking.

Charles Potts is an experienced poet with more several published works to his credit. Nature Lovers is the latest of his collections and continues to document him as having a unique style and gift for language, images, and speaking to the mind and heart of his reader. The Code Of The Olde West: Get a load of Charlie Coyote,/Hauled before the magistrate by the grammar police/For hunting verbs without a license.//The judge demands to know:/How did you learn the vernacular?/There are correct ways to say the same thing,//Cheap talk from fatigued Sierra Clubbers/Cannot change my mind, your honor./I'm outside the purview of Standard American Englishizers.//Like the taxidermist he will be/If he ever catches anything Stoic,/Sniff this poem and make it snappy naturally./Fill it with linguistic drift.