Charles Foster — Collected Poems

February 12, 1922, Boston or Newton, Massachusetts–July 30, 1967, Sonoma County, California

Charles Foster carried poetry through Venice, San Francisco, Marysville, Mexico, and the California road like a charged private mythology. A visionary break in the late 1950s gave him the central figures of his work: the Great Lady, the poet as charioteer or shaman, the Tarot as a working grammar, and the poem as force passing between bodies and worlds. Close to Stuart Perkoff and present in Wallace Berman’s Semina circle, Foster tried to transform addiction, marriage, fatherhood, rage, travel, and mystical experience into one field of language. No book appeared during his lifetime; friends and small-press editors later assembled the manuscripts and notebooks. Collected Poems restores Victoria Mundi and Outrider for the Lady, including Foster’s prose statements on poetry, and preserves the eccentric capitals, slashes, spatial turns, and notebook structures of a difficult, generous, and intensely visionary Los Angeles writer.

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Catalogue

Venice West and the New American Poetry

Associations

Beat and New American Poetry Psychedelic Los Angeles Venice West

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Foster, Charles. “Paleolithic dawns…” Semina, no. 4, 1958 or circa 1959. Hand-printed loose insert; complete text not yet recovered.

———. “The Troubled Makers.” Evergreen Review, vol. 4, 1957. Reprinted in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (June 1962), Writers in Revolt (1963), and The Evergreen Review Reader (1968).

———. Victoria Mundi. Privately printed by Judith Foster, 1968. Trade edition edited by Charles Potts. The Smith/Litmus, 1973.

———. Outrider for the Lady. Edited by Karl Kempton. Rainbow Resin, Nov. 1974.

———. Dial Artemis. Aldebaran Review/Galactic Approximation Press, 1975.

———. Peyote Toad. Litmus, 1975.

———. “How Everything Was in the End Resolved in California.” Academy of American Poets. Authorized online text.

———. “Venice West Poetry Reading.” Circa late 1950s. Lawrence Lipton Papers, tape 158, side 1, part A, USC Libraries. Audio recording; four readings begin at 25:55.

Mezey, Robert, editor. Poems of the American West. Knopf, 2002.

Potts, Charles, editor. Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry. Walla Walla, Washington, 1998.

Works About the Author

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. “Semina 4, circa 1959.” Wallace Berman papers, digital item 9932.

“Charles Foster.” Beat-history biographical index, with notes attributed to Daleth Foster identifying Bancroft as the destination of Foster’s papers and naming Alexander Trocchi as an associate.

“Charles Foster: How Everything Was in the End Resolved in California.” Los Angeles Times Poem of the Week, 2020.

“Charles Foster. Victoria Mundi.” Charles Potts Collection, Thomason Special Collections, Sam Houston State University.

Dotson, Bill. “The Lost Sounds of Venice West.” USC Libraries, 3 May 2019. Describes the Lipton recordings and names Foster among the recorded Venice West poets.

Flint, R. W. “Upbeat.” The New York Review of Books, 14 Nov. 1963.

Kempton, Karl. “thread.” Outrider for the Lady, by Foster. Rainbow Resin, 1974. Friend’s memoir, poetics, and editorial colophon.

Mezey, Robert. Notes on Charles Foster in connection with Poems of the American West. Friend’s recollection.

Potts, Charles. “Break-in.” Introduction to Foster, Victoria Mundi. The Smith/Litmus, 1973.

“Semina, Issue 4, 1959.” Outskirts of the City, 15 Dec. 2023. Detailed contents list identifying Foster’s “paleolithic dawns.”

Spencer, Catherine. “Coral and Lichen, Brains and Bowels: Jay DeFeo’s Hybrid Abstraction.” Tate Papers, vol. 23, spring 2015. Identifies Foster’s Semina 4 poem in the Jay DeFeo archive.

“The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #133, June 1962.” SF Magazines, 11 Sept. 2017. Reviews “The Troubled Makers” and records the unresolved Mark Ganes attribution.

Trace, no. 27, June 1958. Review notice of “The Troubled Makers.”

Stefans, Brian. “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras.” A History of California Literature, edited by Blake Allmendinger, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 260–80.