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Laced with poetry, a play he describes as 'a Farce in Five Acts' and the occaisional blues lyric, the book functions on multi-levels. Existential, in that he walks an endless, narrow plank leading nowhere and with no gun pointing. He records both social and personal ferment and uprisings in what Hugh Fox calls "The War and Peace of schizophrenia".
Think of K. in his Trial, but with a Hippy in the charge of panthers, cops, poets, orderlies, kids on the street, the street itself, and those who pick up hitchers. At once a who’s who in the underground publishing poetry scene and a what’s what within a system supposedly on-level, ground up, seasoned with great sentences and served whole in paragraphs that charm the reader like a poem mite, getting you thinking, on your own rumination. And it does this while all the time telling an actual, sequential story, the hero of half-knowingly falling to his own tragic denial that any of it matters a bit.
and what some others have to say:
David Bromige: A neglected classic, beneath the underground.
John Oliver Simon: Charlie Potts had more energy than any poet before or since. A very solid book. Reminds of Kerouac, Dostoevsky.
Paul Hansen: I just ran across a copy of Valga Krusa, an important, neglected work.
Michael Murphy: The best technical report ever written from the inside of a flip.
F.A. Nettlebeck: This book will be used 80 years from now by those studying the subject - definitely an historic contribution to the wonderful saga of the 60s.
"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.)"
David Bromige
"I first discovered Gonzo Poet Charles Potts' underground classic Valga Krusa in a second-hand bookstore. Reading it, I was amazed that I had not found it on shelves reserved for such titles as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Potts presents a collage of artistic movement, social experimentation and revolution that was the 60's. With the absurdity of Dostoevsky, the rambling truth-searching of Kerouac, and the clarity of Hesse, he narrates the formation of a sub-culture, and the unraveling of a soul. His voice is at once profoundly real and surreal, when he writes about the mounting pressures of the Berkeley riots or the comradeship of a weekend poetry conference, under the heat of convention. Potts also confronts the more personal puzzles of manic-depression and survival instinct. Valga Krusa is an essential read for the younger generations who missed out on the sixties, but wish to understand the power of the word. It is on the "favorites" shelf at Mac's."
Bree, Bookseller at Mac's Backs~Books on Coventry in Cleveland Heights, and founding editor of Green Panda Press.
Valga Krusa was originally put out in one volume, published at $7.77 in 1977 in Salt Lake City by Litmus, Inc., containing 'Yellow Christ' and 'Shit Crackers'.