Archives West Finding Aid

The "Published and Unpublished Written Works by Charles Potts" section of the collection contains Potts' diaries, notes, and manuscripts. One part of this section that gives more of an insight into Charles Potts' inner life is a series of annual goals that Potts wrote up for himself. The goals fall under categories such as mental, emotional, physical, financial, and spiritual. Spanning for over a decade, these documents provide a sort of timeline of activities, almost like a diary, that Potts intended to accomplish or had accomplished between 1985 and 1998.

"Business Records" contains documents from the numerous businesses as well as community events that Charles Potts organized or began. The Walla Walla Poetry Party, for example, is documented with pamphlets, programs, and other papers. Files from Temple Bookstore, Tsunami Inc., and Litmus Inc., Chinese Computer Communications Inc. are likewise preserved in this section. Next, there are also many articles about marketing in Asia, linguistics, and realty. Finally, this section contains a large amount of rough drafts, graphics, and copies of Temple Magazine as well as other documents associated with running the magazine.

The "Correspondence" section contains a large amount of correspondence between Charles Potts and his friends, colleagues, business associates, and poets. Some of the letters contain samples of poetry. This section is organized alphabetically by the last name of the writer of the letter.

"Events, Projects, Catalogs, and Publishers" is filled with pamphlets and mail from numerous publishing companies and information about poetry events; both focus primarily on the Pacific Northwest. In addition to publications from and about China and Japan, this section also contains some articles about the creation of keyboards in Chinese and Japanese by Yamada Hisao.

"Published and Unpublished Written Works by Other Authors" contains samples, and even entire books, of mostly poetry by authors that were sometimes in contact with Potts. These are mostly organized by the last name of the author with the last part of the section containing poetry magazines. The last part of this section contains poetry magazines produced by independent publishers.

This collection also contains numerous video and audio recordings collected and produced by Charles Potts. There is a collection of audio recordings on CDs of the 2003 Walla Walla Poetry Party as well as many other poetry events sponsored by Potts. In addition there are also over 100 cassettes, most containing recordings of poets reciting their work. Finally, there are many VHS recordings containing video footage of poetry gatherings such as the Walla Walla Poetry Party in addition to other events.