Ed Foster: The Poetics Laureate of Talisman House

February 22, 2026

As far as I can tell, Ed Foster’s literary archive, encompassing his writing as a poet as well as all of his editorial projects, remains on the market and has not yet settled into the special collections of a university library. I suppose eventually his papers will find a secure residence for scholars to make us of, but until they are available, the nuances of Foster’s contributions to avant-garde poetry over the past half-century will remain unaccounted for in any literary history of contemporary poetry. In the meantime, we do have several interviews with Foster available on-line to help tether the oncoming avant-garde in poetry with the culminating provocations of the writers that Foster published through Talisman, his publishing project.

The list of poets Foster devoted attention to is among the most diverse avant-garde ensembles featured by any post-World War II independent publisher: Leslie Scalapino; Paul Vangelisti; Susan M. Schultz; Samuel Menarche; Michael Heller; Dennis Phillips; Timothy Liu; William Bronk; Burt Kimmelman; Elinor Nauen; Alice Notley; Ron Padgett; Stephen Paul Miller; Dodie Bellany; Gerrit Lansing; Leonard Schwartz; and Gustaf Sobin.

Along with James Sherry of Roof Books and Douglas Messerli of Sun & Moon Press, Foster embodied a selflessness as a cultural worker that is all the more remarkable in the larger context of institutionalized aggrandizement represented by the self-promotional efficiency of enterprises such as AWP. Neither Sherry, Messerli, nor Foster appear in A POETICS OF THE PRESS: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers, edited by Kyle Schlesinger, which was published five years ago, but that should not be taken as an indication of any neglect by Schlesinger, whose protagonists include Keith and Rosemary Waldrop, Lyn Hejinian, Johanna Drukcer, and Charles Alexander. If anything, I would encourage everyone to read Schlesinger’s book (published by Cuneiform Press and Ugly Duckling Press) before clicking on these links to interviews with Foster.

INTERVIEWS AND REVIEWS: ED FOSTER

http://www.tygersofwrath.com/EdwardHalseyFosterInterview.htm

Interviewer: Rob Couteau

https://yaleunion.org/secret/Howe-Talisman-interview.pdf

For background information on the books published by Ed Foster through TALISMAN:

https://talismanbooks.org/Edward-Foster

For a list of the contents of Ed Foster’s archive, see:

https://granarybooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/images/upload/talisman-prospectus-gb.pdf

For a review of Ed Foster’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS:

https://archive-vol-ii.weebly.com/ed-foster.html#:~:text=His%20terse%20language%20and%20short,most%20felicitous%20in%20short%20poems.

Ed Foster Interview

http://www.tygersofwrath.com/EdwardHalseyFosterInterview.htm

Let’s imagine William Carlos Williams’s “Poem” running backwards, as in a film that reverses itself:

Into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

the cat first

dipped

carefully

the right

forefoot then the

hind

as it climbed

over the top of

the jamcloset

****

When “Poem” is inverted with a slight amendment to facilitate the syntax, the word “top” emphatically pulls the camera’s concluding shot. The trajectory becomes an ascent: the escape from the “pit” of the empty flowerpot conjoins with a sense of triumph at the summit of the poem. Not only is it a much less subtle poem when it’s inverted, but it also leaves one wondering about what the effect would be if the entire “jam closet” stanza were cut from the poem.

I, of course, prefer WCW’s version of the poem, though I must say that what took me years to notice and write about in an article for the William Carlos Williams’s Review — that the key word in the poem is “pit” — would probably have gotten more attention from previous commentators if it had been in the poem’s first line.

Michael Silverblatt: The Quintessential, Omnivorous Reader and Compassionate Interviewer

February 15, 2026

The LA Times has posted an obituary for Michael Silverblatt, the legendary interviewer of authors on the Santa Monica-based radio station KCRW. The article stated that Michael died yesterday, at age 73.

Born in Brooklyn, and educated at the State University of New York, Buffalo, he arrived in Los Angeles around 1977. I first met him when he was living in Santa Monica in an apartment just north of Wilshire Blvd., and about halfway between Intellectuals & Liars Bookstore and the Palisades Park. Michael frequented that store and its reading series throughout the summer and fall of 1978, during which time I was running the reading series and putting together an anthology of Los Angeles poets entitled THE STREETS INSIDE. I held a New Year’s Eve party to celebrate the book’s publication at my apartment in Ocean Park and invited Michael to it, at which point he had his first extended conversation with Jim Krusoe. Michael began visiting Jim’s apartment, which was barely more than a hundred yards from my place, on a regular basis, and quickly found himself to be a rising star in a literary firmament that was by that time attracting the attention of a younger generation of poets such as Dennis Cooper and Amy Gerstler, who were gravitating to Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, in Venice.

Michael, however, was forced to recognize eventually that his most passionate identity — that of an extraordinarily close reader of novels and poems — was the way that he would best be able to make a memorable contribution to the Republic of Literature. “Bookworm” was his destiny, and only his friends from those early years truly comprehended the arduous journey he undertook to bring it about. No tenured professor ever endured an equivalent regimen of graduate students and unpaid adjunct work as daunting as that which Michael submitted himself to. The admiration writers felt for him was earned at an enormous price, but the secret triumph was how Michael always shifted that admiration elsewhere by implicitly urging listeners to attend to larger cultural issues. If he made a penetralia out of overlooked details in a writer’s work, he did so not to show off his remarkable acuity as a reader, but to encourage others to dig even deeper into themselves to discover how a book might restore a semblance of legitimate order to the disorder of contemporary life.

If the end is in one’s beginning, it is perhaps appropriate that the last time I saw him was at Beyond Baroque, speaking with great fondness for his memories of those early years, as he addressed a gathering in honor of the late poet and novelist Kate Braverman that had been organized by novelist Janet Fitch.

R.I.P., Michael. I still remember you at the party on Hill Street, New Year’s Eve, looking like someone for whom the new year meant that you had finally begun to find your niche.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-02-15/michael-silverblatt-dead-kcrw-bookworm-host-73?sfmc_id=6532a4c325b3640666c6aaca&utm_id=44142765&skey_id=37c43a5c3a11da12bdc55f9c622d0baf0ec7493490d9327a7099d22dd53e6a5e&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ALERT-Email-List-Michael%20Silverblatt%2C%20%27genius%27%20host%20of%20KCRW%20literary%20show%20%27Bookworm%2C%27%20dies%20at%2073-20260215&utm_term=Alert%20-%20News%20and%20Entertainment

I would then recommend you turn to KCRW’s special show on Michael’s tenure as their resident professional reader.

https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/remebering-kcrws-bookworm-michael-silverblatt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookworm_(radio_show)

UPDATE: A week after his death, The NY Times has also posted an obituary. Given that New York City is the home base for the mainstream commercial book industry, and that Michael’s astute advocacy of novelists and poets also immensely benefitted their publishers, it is only fitting that Michael receive the honor of an obituary in the New York Times. As testified to by my account of his arrival in Los Angeles, Sam Roberts got the date wrong by which time Michael first settled in Los Angeles. Nevertheless, I thank him for mentioning other details that have been left out of other obituaries, such as his disenchantment with both academic life at Johns Hopkins as well as the haughty choke-chain of editorial exclusiveness in the New York publishing scene. If Los Angeles is a haven for those for whom self-invention is a necessity, then L.A. indeed redeemed its literary soul by giving Michael a chance to lift all of our spirits, whether the reader was in Duluth, Minnesota; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; or Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(Updated February 21, 2026)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/books/michael-silverblatt-dead.html

Please join me in supporting this book project, edited by S.A. Griffin and Richard Modiano, which has already raised through its sales a couple of hundred dollars on behalf of two recovery efforts.

I have heard myself referred to as a “local” poet, a phrase that almost implicitly is meant to diminish the status of any artist or poet. Of course, I am hardly the only one besmirched with that term. I remember giving a talk at the Getty Research Institute in the fall of 1996 about the poets of Venice West and being challenged about the value of their insularity. “Who wants to be local?” Michael Roth asked me in front of a roomful of professors who were known for their scholarship on the city of Los Angeles.

At the time, I didn’t have an answer that adequately provided an escape hatch from my seeming intellectual provinciality. The point of the year-long seminar I was part of for a few months was to examine Los Angeles as a primary instance of what Peter Schjeldahl called a “transmission city,” a status long accorded New York, Paris, and London. The culture industry, with its global capacity to replicate hypnotic cinematic images, made readers of literary magazines with circulations of less a thousand people seem utterly irrelevant. That poets wanted to generate a gift exchange economy in direct opposition to the corporate seizure of cultural capital was regarded as too confined to be a serious strategy. Such an evaluation had consequences: a person sitting by herself, and reading a book published by Red Hill Press or Bombshelter Press or Momentum Press or Little Caesar Press or rare avis press or Mudborn Press was not endowed with any sliver of literary enfranchisement; in the 1970s, and yet… (yes, let’s pause here…) and yet it was poetry published by dozens of “local” small presses around the country that largely set in motion the multiculturalism that eventually aroused demands known as DEI. The fact that the backlash has been so ferocious in the past decade only shows that the “local” efforts of small presses and independent arts organizations (including Beyond Baroque, the Woman’s Building; the World Stage; and Tia Chucha) have been more than coterie efforts. Their antagonism toward centralized control of culture has earned its place as a form of pragmatic resistance.

In particular, I would like today  to point to an example of a publishing project launched by Harry Northup and Holly Prado that is still at work: Cahuenga Press. While subsequent collectives, such as What Books, have emerged and made an enormous contribution to a vivacious literary ecosystem imbued with nektonic energy, Cahuenga has distinguished itself with a series of volumes that directly confront the issue of being “local.”

Here is an early flyer. As briefly as I was a working contributor to this project, it remains one of the efforts I am most proud to have helped get underway.

On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 2025, Los Angeles area poets gathered at Beyond Baroque to read some of Cathy Colman’s poems. Colman was educated at San Francisco State University and she received her M.A. degree there in the mid-1970s after studying with Stan Rice. The poems in her M.A. these were already mature, memorable pieces of work and were far more substantial than one might expect of a person at her age.

Colman’s first book, BORROWED DRESS, did not appear until she was 40 years old, however, when her manuscript won the Felix Pollak prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. The book was popular enough soon after its publication that it made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Her poems were also gathered in two other collections, BEAUTY’S TATTOO (Tebot Bach) and TIME CRUNCH (What Books). Some of the magazines her work appeared in included Colorado Review, Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, and Plume. Her poems were also translated into Italian, Russian, and Croatian.

CATHY COLMAN
June 16, 1951 – April 30, 2025
BEYOND BAROQUE’S RECORDING OF THIS MEMORIAL EVENT:

(THE PROGRAM ON THE VIDEO DOES NOT BEGIN UNTIL ABOUT 17:17, so simply guide the red button to that point and Elena Karina Byrne will appear on the screen as one of the prime organizers of the event.)

I had hoped to attend, but I am no longer able to make long trips around Los Angeles two days in a row anymore. I had been at both DTLA and Beyond Baroque the day before, and traffic had been exhausting. Everyone at the Beyond Baroque event had spent at least an hour and a half getting to the event from where they lived.

The poem I had planned to read, if I could have attended as originally intended, was “While Deuterium and Tritium Spread,” which begins with an image from the 1950’s Cold War:

through animal and mineral, braiding
through my hair,
throwing open the window to the sky’s
cracked plate
of oysters and pearls, as

the clouds’ gold isotopes sail
through middle air’s
muddle, I can smell the wet pavement
from childhood rain

The poem ends with the kind of understatement that makes a theater script the most tantalizing form of imaginative literature. “the future waits offstage.” One feels the tremor of an haunting cue about to be spoken, and the effort it takes stay calm even as one knows that this Vesuvius will have a tsunami of lava that will obliterate almost all life on the planet.

Many of the poets who spoke at this event had known Cathy for years and spend considerable time with her or had studied at UCLA Extension with her or in private workshops, but I had hardly known her. I recollect once talking with her in the lobby of Beyond Baroque for about five minutes. Only afterwards did I revisit Suzanne Lummis’s WIDE AWAKE anthology and realize that Colman was inexplicably not in that collection, which came out in 2015. Colman was in Lummis’s most recent anthology, however, POETRY GOES TO THE MOVIES. with a two-page, three-part poem, dedicated to Chantal Akerman, entitled “News from Home.”

Colman’s metaphorical dexterity was on full display in the poems that her friends chose to read. One in particular stood out: “Happiness is a houseguest with an amiable smile after using all of the hot water to take a shower.” I don’t have the poem that image is from so that I can quote it exactly or with line-breaks, but I’ve not often encountered such a droll assessment of the motive and opportunity of happiness’s role in our lives.

Listening to Colman’s poems being read by her friends, nevertheless, will help assuage the sudden loss of yet another outstanding poet in Los Angeles.

Many thanks go out to Leslie Campbell and Elena Karina Byrne for making this event happen.

“o po-ets, you should getta job.” — Charles Olson

And if no one will pay you more than minimum wage, why not just set yourself for hire?

Meet the Long Beach typewriter poet helping strangers navigate heartbreak

As a thought experiment, imagine the Venice Boardwalk with fifty such individuals as Nico Patino offering to write a poem for anyone who stopped and requested one. It’s probably the case that Patino would get more requests than many of the other poets. There are several conjectures I could offer about why Patino would attract more passersby, but all of them involve trust. It’s not that easy to write a poem that doesn’t judge the subject of the poem with words “not untrue and not unkind.” With that talent at work, Patino has become the founder of “The Predisposed School of Poetry.” I don’t mean the title of this school in any way to disparage Mr. Patino. In fact, I hope he pounds out a short statement along the lines of O’Hara’s “Personism” that he will attach to his first self-published collection.

I cannot help but admire him.

Friday, December 5, 2025

Inspired by Jack Spicer to join the Berkeley Renaissance in the early 1950s, Bruce Boyd pivoted to align himself with the nice West scene in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, only to return to Berkeley and San Francisco in the late 1950s, and then look back to Venice in the early 1960s. As a friend of both Gary Snyder and Robin Blaser, Boyd was the quintessential maverick poet on the West Coast. He is also the ONLY contributor to Donald Allen’s canonical anthology THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY (Grove Press, 1960) never to have had a collection of his writing — not even a chapbook — published. TOWARD MORNING is Bruce Boyd’s first book of poems.

Boyd was born in San Francisco in 1928 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in philosophy. None of the letters written by Snyder, Blaser, or Spicer to Boyd have survived, but Boyd’s letters to those poets can be found in their archives. In addition, a considerable number of copies of letters by Donald Allen to Boyd can be found in Donald Allen’s archive at the University of California, San Diego’s Archive for New Poetry.

Boyd’s poems appeared in such magazines as Evergreen Review, Yugen, The Floating Bear, and J: A Magazine of Poetry.

Bill Mohr will read with Dennis Phillips and Jessie McCarty at Beyond Baroque, on Saturday, December 6, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. to celebrate the launch of Paul Vangelisti’s Magra Books.

Dennis Phillips / The Cartographer’s Lament
Bill Mohr (editor) / TOWARD MORNING: Selected Poems by Bruce Body
Jessie McCarty / Pretty Punks (forthcoming in the spring 2026)

Many thanks go out to Sean Pessin and Mckensi Bond for their assistance in bringing Bruce Boyd’s book into circulation.

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, California
90291
(310) 822-3006

Almost forty years ago, Ron Silliman’s anthology IN THE AMERICAN TREE served as a definitive punctuation mark in the emergence of Language poetry. Was it a period or a semi-colon in marking the end of the “first” portion of the practices of writers who were almost uniformly on either the West or the East Coast? In any case, one of the poets whose work in Silliman’s anthology most impressed me was Tina Darragh, whose contribution was entitled “Raymond Chandler’s Sentence.” To my knowledge, it has not been reprinted in any other anthology, even though it is one of the best poems I’ve ever read. I still remember where I was sitting when I read it for the first time, as well as my most recent encounter. It’s a visibly embedded text in the midden of my lifetime of reading poems.

I spotted an obituary for her the other day and wondered yet again why so few people in Los Angeles have taken note of her passing. No doubt Doug Messerli and Diane Ward were the first to hear of it, and maybe then Harold Abramowitz. I know of no plans to honor her at Beyond Baroque, however.

Here is the biographical note that George Washington University has posted for her literary archive at that institution’s library.
“Tina Darragh (November 21, 1950 – November 18, 2025) was a poet and librarian. Born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, grew up in McDonald, Pennsylvania and moved to Washington D.C. to attend Trinity University. While at Trinity, Darragh became interested in writing poetry and met many other local writers. Darragh would meet up with these writers at Mass Transit and later at Folio, local community bookshops. She worked with Some of Us Press (S.O.U.P).
Some of the poets Darragh knew as fellow writers as well as friends included Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, Tim Dlugos, Bruce Andrews, Terrence Winch, Beth Joselow, Lynne Dryer, Doug Lang, Douglas Messerli Welt and P. Inman. These poets and others came together to form the east coast branch of the Language group of poetry. This style of poetry emphasizes the reader’s role in the work. Darragh spent much of her professional life as a librarian working at Georgetown Univeristy firt in the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature and later as a more general refernce librarian.

She and the poet P. Inman were married and have a son Jack and two grandchildren.

Tina Darragh died November 18, 2025 in Washignton D.C.”

Her cohort of exuberant comrades includes an all-star team of her generation’s most judicious members of a poetic avant-garde: Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, Tim Dlugos, Bruce Andrews, Terrence Winch, Beth Joselow, Lynne Dryer, Doug Lang, Douglas Messerli Welt and P. Inman. I repeat the list because I think readers tend to skim such lists without reflecting on how different these poets are from each other. Anyone who can’t detect how different they are simply isn’t willing to put in the work that poetry demands of those who would claim to be its advocate.

Here is a link to the notice of her passing posted in JACKET2:

https://jacket2.org/commentary/tina-darragh-obit

And here is an interview with her:

https://www.dcpoetry.com/history/darragh

My condolences go to the poet, Peter Inman, her husband, who also had admirable work in IN THE AMERICAN TREE and Tina’s and Peter’s family.

Saturday, December 6, 2025
2 p.m.
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

Bruce Boyd was born in 1928 and was close friends with Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, Gary Snyder, and Stuart Z. Perkoff. He also corresponded at length with Donald Allen, who included Boyd in his canonical anthology, THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY (Grove Press, 1960).

Yet Boyd never had a book of his poems published. Not even a sixteen-page chapbook came out with his name on the title page!

After years of effort on my part, I found a publisher for an initial collection of Boyd’s poems. Paul Vangelisti, who published two Venice West poets fifty years ago through his Red Hill Press, now adds a third poet associated with Venice West to his publishing credits. Magra Books has just issued TOWARD MORNING, Bruce Boyd’s first book of poems!

I will be at Beyond Baroque this coming Saturday, at 2 p.m., to celebrate this accomplishment along with Dennis Phillips, L.A.’s most philosophically lyrical poet.

Please join us.