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
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