….a fierce and uncompromising poet ….

Ed Foster was a fierce and uncompromising poet who bore witness to what Emily Dickinson would recognize as “the soul in its extremity.” I suspect Ed wrote poems from his early life on, but for a long time he kept them secret. In the copy room at Stevens Institute of Technology, I once saw him crumple a poem and toss it in the bin rather than have it be glimpsed by even the most collegial passerby. Ed thought long and deeply about his art. He was the most formidable and inspiring interlocutor about all things poetic I have ever met. Hid conversations, his researches, and above all his own poetry, when he finally accepted and entered his public life as a poet, has been for myself and for many others, a profound initiation into an ancient art form which Ed honored and advanced with his every living breath, and will continue to do so with every spiritual breath of his written work. 

Ed was devoted to and schooled in many forms of creative arts: architecture, music, film, philosophy, visual art, religious thought and practice of many traditions, and of course literature and poetry. The breath of his interests was astonishing, as was his attention to the particulars of the practices, the artworks that were the fruits of his various interests. I remember Ed rereading Augustine. I remember Ed researching the architectural styles of the late nineteenth century. I remember him searching out wallpaper that William Morris might approve of. I remember his love of classical music. I remember peeking into his office one day to find him working out for himself the German of the first of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. One of my fondest memories of teaching alongside Ed in my years at Stevens was simply walking by the open door of his classroom. I’d linger for a bit, just to hear his insights as they arose from whatever he was teaching. I used to envy those students and I hoped that someday, if not in the midst of their arduous study to become engineers, they would have some sense of the extraordinary education in culture and art they were getting.

Ed Foster helped others, all the time. All. The. Time. He made a life in poetry possible for many. He somehow kept poets on the payroll at Stevens. He organized readings and conferences where poets and translators could share work and form bonds of friendship. He created a magazine and then a publishing house, Talisman, that somehow managed to be both generous and edgy in its tastes. Through Talisman, he kept alive ancient concerns while devoting pages to the innovative and new. He pushed back against the nationalist biases of American publishing with a multitude of extraordinary anthologies of poetry from other places. (And we should remember the countless hours that go into such publications. Talisman was a one-man operation. Ed was indefatigable in the service of art.) Those familiar with his poetry will recognize that it is not a figure of speech when I say Ed served the ancient gods who presided over art, expression, and love. His contributions to American poetry are far-reaching and profound.

It has been an honor of a lifetime to have known Ed Foster, to have called him a friend, to have learned much about my art from him, both from conversations with Ed and especially from his own poetry, which is there, accomplished, complete, drawn from a life by turns both tormented and ecstatic, books from which solace can be drawn in the face of the devastating disappearance of such a wonderful man. His poetry speaks for him. Tensely at times, capaciously at others, speaking about the passion and pain and wonder of all our lives, which we get to continue within for a bit longer, with Ed’s words for the best company one could ever have.

— Joe Donohue

…from those years…

Ed, I knew you first as a fellow poet, but ultimately, in the spaces where words lost their meaning, as the best kind of friend.  What I take from those years with you is a sense of quiet light, enduring support, and the striving for excellence in all you touched, Embedded in the Wyncote fireplace were scattered, glittering stones.  To me, they reflected the deep glitter of your spirit, subtle and sparkling beneath an exterior reticence. When I built my own fireplace, a thousand miles away, I used stones that glittered so that I could keep you near. Godspeed, my dear, dear friend. I will miss you deeply. May your words sing forever. 

— Zoe English

One mixes sorrow and gratitude.  Ed’s decline and passing were like water wearing down a stone.   His many accomplishments remain, hard, impermeable: Talisman in its many manifestations, the books, the events he organized.  Ed was my editor, advisor and publisher for many years.  He was also one of the kindest and gentle souls I’ve known.  One mixes sorrow and gratitude.

— Michael Heller

—for Ed

There was a sanctuary on the other side of cliffs they often walked to. A city of some kind at some time had been there. A book of sand, or a tree of events. A soccer field, playground, the basketball courts the boy remembered—but no longer remembered were of memory. The memory itself a place, a parenthetical pause like the monkey bars he & the girl would swing on, and the ghosts or prayers of match sticks, of books & burnt leaves by the library. Where had all the people gone–she would often write imaginary letters to the children somewhere else in the sea now. There were so many things of awe, and hunger, and cities.

—-

The fine breeze earlier when his alphabet arrived.

An earlier syntax of desire & the father walking a dirt rode.

The film clip of a man hovering there in a circle of geese.

You, who you are, you, in whose movie?

A horse in a field.

Faint smell of hay & manure.

You who are in the body, these pages of leaves gesturing above trees.

—-

In translating where do you go she asks the bicycle man. Rain on dank smell, source of river, the boy smoking with a monk & the dead in their breathing. A ladder leaning against a wooden altar & a stone gutter’s trickle of water rising in mists. Stones & all ash fallen from hands. Willow branch in a dream of circus mules we could ride outside these letters of time.

—

It was the gratitude in a boy’s eye & the signal of birds & waves & you ashore, the preparation & scene/a backdrop where you and me saw an opening eastward, a place in the body or maybe that is it, or what is it really, & a moving sky, film waves as in you are here—no longer here—time vanishing & all back i see the hillside & then the day we all were walking the dog & talking in the script & it’s like this, & this too, Edward—a clouded grey stage set in our eyes & that gratitude no longer separate as a being or longing or who you were & no longer need to be, and then you and me appear as a

wintering sun from our voices rising together in all that is and will be

— John High

Ed was a true scholar with multiple books on American literature to his credit as well as a poet (multiple publications there, too) and motorcyclist. He was a lovely, generous man, always encouraging both Zoe and me in our writing endeavors. In spring 2001 I spent a week or so with him in Istanbul, where he had an exchange teaching fellowship. (A Turkish prof and he exchanged positions for a semester). It was also because of him that I attended many talks at Stevens and at his home in Hoboken and met prominent literary people: Richard Wilbur, Kenneth Burke, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, etc.

— Ted Kharpertian

Ed Foster’s Labor of Love

Something has gotten lost in our phrase “labor of love.” “A task done for pleasure, not reward,” “a labor voluntarily undertaken without consideration of benefit,” “work done for one’s satisfaction rather than monetary recompense”—surely some definition of what this phrase must have, at one time, meant to people needs resuscitating. My sense of labor of love—in pondering the life of Edward Halsey Foster, now that it’s concluded—honors a life well lived, an exemplary life, a life forged from love as well as trauma. 

Ed Foster’s singular and exemplary life recast postmodern American poetry, actually, nothing short of this. Yet Ed was an assiduously unpretentious man—whose severity (mostly by way of his self-regard, also in what he said and did) always gave me pause. That he was a brilliant thinker who was capable of glowing originality—poet, thinker, activist within a world of arts and letters—cannot not be mentioned. And he was a dear friend—within a community, several communities, in which we thrived. 

Toward the end of his life—his timing was acute—Ed invited a sizable number of friends, mostly poets, to a long and luxurious weekend in his run-down mansion in Northfield, Massachusetts. This was in the sweet spot of the summer there. It was a time made for love and friendship, the rest of the world forgotten for a while. 

Ed insisted on waiting on us all—he alone, by himself—resisting our attempts to help. He wanted to serve us—delicious food and drink—in that majestic house, its spaces, its delicate and vast interiors, and the surrounding hills and woods. No, I don’t believe this hospitality was, on his part, an act of contrition or even just affirmation. 

There was, though, as I recall, an unstated solemnity in that house—that weekend—which not only I felt. Was it awkward—Ed, someone I admired, looked up to, felt deep affection for (I liked him), loved—him serving me my lunch? The repast he’d prepare for each of us—the dinners as well, chef and host, yet more elaborate, just as delicious—was central to an act of obeisance he carefully had curated.

                              Love

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                           Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                            From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                            If I lacked any thing.
 
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
                           Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
                            I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                           Who made the eyes but I?
 
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
                           Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
                           My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
                           So I did sit and eat.

                              — George Herbert (1633)

Ed’s early years may have at times been terrifying, not least in the eyes of a boy. It strikes me as impossible not to view him—suddenly poverty stricken, neighbors who threw his family some crumbs—as somehow redeeming his childhood that was the precursor of his great achievements in maturity, principally within the world of poetry. 

The Butler Library at Columbia University hired a curator who knew the world of the American avant garde. She was lifted up by her superior’s instructions to “get”—it was to be her foremost task—the Edward Foster papers and with them, of course, the Talisman papers, for the library’s archives. These professionals who understood the value to posterity of what survived him, knew what they were after.

Ed, the man, self-effacing perhaps to a fault, lived on in his modest way, nearly having tossed this material legacy—all these documents and much else such as historically significant works of art—on the garbage heap. Was this self-effacement, in him, an act of contrition or revenge, possibly aimed at a society that barely managed to sustain his mother, brother and him, a mother with children who had to live nearly anonymously in someone’s attic, on charity? Was his notion of trashing his legacy a grand, nihilistic gesture of self-cancellation? Where was Ed’s ego? One could journey in search of it, in an endless maze. (His papers are now in good hands, being arranged to be proffered to one of our great archives.) 

Ed and I first met in person after some correspondence, at a national poetry convocation in Cleveland in the mid 1980s. I’d organized a panel on the work of William Bronk. Both Ed and I, and a small handful of other young poets, had been befriended by Bronk—whether or not any of us had an inkling of the community he fostered; it was just such a circle of people who came to celebrate our lives that summer at its height in Northfield.

Whether Ed meant for this to be a celebration of his life or not, the gathering, in his eyes, was just the serious concern we, many of us and others of our ilk, were moved by. Ed’s generous and ambitious idea was to bring us to his home in Northfield, where we’d come to be feted—by Ed! This was one of his many labors of love.

My girlfriend, the writer Diane Simmons (now my wife), and I were holed up the summer before Talisman magazine first appeared, at the historic Cummington Community of the Arts. Ed had a house nearby, where he happened, then, to be staying. Having learned we there, he came to visit us. 

This visit was a matter of no particular consequence to others—but his “friendly persuasion” (the title of a wonderful Gary Cooper vehicle of the 1950s, which depicts Quaker life during the Civil War and which I now remember as teaching a boy about love, respect and duty) set my future life as a poet and scholar on its trajectory. Years afterward, Ed and I delivered talks on Bronk and Susan Howe at a conference of the National Poetry Foundation in Orono, at the University of Maine. We were two of Bronk’s sons who’d realized their fraternal bond. 

So much else might be remembered now, on this sad yet uplifting occasion—as we mourn and celebrate the death and life of Ed Foster, a great man of letters, a great friend and, in a way, my brother.

— Burt Kimmelman

Ed Foster: An Appreciation

A few years ago, Ed told me that he’d never been to a baseball game, so my husband and I took the train from New York up to Massachusetts and got tickets for a minor league game at historic Waconah Park in Pittsfield. For someone who knew little or nothing about the sport, he caught on quickly and was soon sharing brilliant observations.

He had picked us up from the train and indulged Johnny’s and my eagerness to see the then-newish legal pot stores. You could see that the young clerks had heard everyone our age come in with identical “in our day” stories. Ed said he wasn’t interested in buying anything, but when we reconvened he had bought more than we had. He couldn’t help taking an interest in whatever was in front of him. 

Ed was so self-effacing that I knew him a long time without realizing how smart, accomplished, and talented he was. Seeing documents on his wall was how I found out about his PhD from Columbia: I had certainly never heard him referred to as Dr. Foster. I probably went to dozens of poetry readings he arranged before I finally heard him read his own work and discovered what an excellent poet he was.

One thing that impressed me about his huge, sprawling, book-filled house was that when I pulled a book off a shelf in a far corner (there were a lot of far corners), it was never dusty. His respect for books and literature was at least as great as that of anyone I’ve ever known. He tirelessly and generously put together events; hosted all the readers — even Ed didn’t know exactly how many bedrooms that house had; and made dinner for everyone as well. A lovely man.

— Elinor Nauen

Elinor Nauen’s Now That I Know Where I’m Going was published by Talisman House in 2018.

My Last Few Hours With Ed

The last time we met Ed recognized me before I did him.

When I arrived at the nursing home, already knowing its number, I went directly to his room. It was empty. I was told he was in the activity room, the nurse pointing me to a room at the end of the corridor. When I reached it, I saw about twenty people sitting around little card tables, all watching a tv high on the wall, except one little group playing cards in one corner.

I recognized Ed around one of the tables, but I quickly changed my mind — a new image replacing my recognition, like a déjà vu. Though looking like Ed, the person was too emaciated, too bent, too grey to be Ed, only a person, for a moment, resembling him. Then he smiled at me.

I smiled back and walked to his table. He was sitting next to a woman younger than him with smooth, unshrunk cheeks. I sat next to Ed, joining them watching the tv. The show was about cute kittens and puppies, with cute names, a narrator’s voice in the background describing their activities, in dulce tongue, around toys and toddler’s table. We did not talk. My dear friend Ed was completely absorbed, with a light smile of ecstasy around his lips, watching.. We did not say much, almost nothing, while the lady sitting at our table kept looking at me and smiling, to which I felt compelled to smile back. At one point a nurse entered the room and began to distribute frozen fruit bars to the residents. I asked Ed if he wanted one. He said yes. As I was removing the paper wrap for him, about a third of the bar broke off. He took the rest and consumed it quickly, without licking, swallowing it in chunks. I asked him if he wanted another. He said yes. I called the nurse and asked her for another bar and gave it to him, which he swallowed, equally in chunks.

At one point, he began to roll out of the room propelling his wheel chair — in which he was sitting —  using his feet, without saying a word. I followed him a few feet behind. He went to his room. His nursing home bed was unusually, depressingly, low, almost level with the floor. I was ready to help him to the bed, but he made it clear he preffered the wheel chair. I had brought Ed a bunch of flowers which I had not had the occasion to present properly to him. It had lain on the table, while we were watching TV in the activity room. I took the flowers to the bathroom in his room where the nurse had left an empty vase. Before seeing Ed, I had asked the nurse on the floor where I could get a vase, and she had told me she would leave one in his bathroom. I filled the vase with water, poured the enriching powder that came in a plastic container with the bunch into the vase, removed the cellophane paper from around the flowers, cut the thin rubber band holding the stems together and put the flowers in the vase. Carefully, I arranged the loose stems with my hands. By the time I walked out of the bathroom, Ed was gone.

This time, when I caught up with him, I began to push the wheel chair, which Ed let me do. We wandered in the corridors of the nursing home floor, many times returning and wandering in the same corridors. At one point, I asked Ed if he wanted to go out out. He said yes.  I rolled the wheel chair to the elevator; but when I pressed the button for the ground floor, the elevator would not move, despite how many times I tried. We found the nurse on the floor. She came with us, used her key in a socket in the elevator and stayed with us to the ground floor and then walked with us to the main door exiting the building. As I was pushing Ed out with me, she alerted me, “Dinner time is at 5.”

We strolled on the rolling, secluded grounds around the nursing home close to an hour, completely in silence. Then I pushed the wheel chair to the gazebo that was located on the grounds and sat on a bench under it, Ed next to me. For the first time during my visit that day, Ed began a conversation. “It’s a good place to rest,” he said. “Yes,” I said, “isn’t it?” I told him that I’d heard Lisa [Bourbeau] had visited him from Puerto Rico and Tim [Liu] was visiting him regularly, not living far in Woodstock. Yes,” he said. “They are good souls.” It was a few minutes before 5. I pushed Ed’s wheel chair back to the door of the cafeteria, which was on the same floor as him room. At the door, without turning or missing a beat, using his own legs, Ed entered the cafeteria. When I tried to follow him to say good-bye, the nurse at the door stopped me. “No visitors allowed inside the cafeteria,” she said.

I made a u-turn in the corridor, walked to my car and drove back to Hoboken, New Jersey.

— Murat Nemet-Nejat, March 23, 2026

The Dream of the Book

	i.m. Ed Foster


In the dream of the book all the names
appear as green lights
and as each word is murmured 
it splays the burnt sky – the sky re-arrayed.

What is a word? asks the book.
Is it a test of melody against
cornflower blue, the hour of 
roundness that makes the sky at noon.

Inside the dream of the tree 
leaves sing, a breeze completes
its passage from light to dark.
It marks a lord of form alone.

Green smoke to shelter, minnowing shade.
What is a word? asks the smoke.
It dreams of the book.
The one that writes us all into its pages.

                                          -	Patrick Pritchett

Remembering Ed Foster

"The heart stops briefly when someone dies,
a quick pain when you hear the news, & someone passes
from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts
to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely."

(Ted Berrigan's lucid observation on grief)

My heart's still adjusting with Ed.

Here's a little elegy I wrote on Ted's death, back in 1983
( I'd like to rededicate it now to include Ed too); 

"O wait a minute, there's something in my eye no,
wait it is an eyeball, no wait, there are 
Two of them, and they are, looking at you but they are not
Regretful oh no  they are not, and they are not sad, no,
Tho'  he is no longer among us , and we so dearly loved
- and still love - him " 

"so dearly love him" - all of his friends, all those who had the pleasure of his intimacy (if only he knew!)

ah, but of course, secretly, he did know!

Ed's was an exemplary life - a life in pure devotion to literature and poetry. I think of him first as a friend 
and a brother-in-arms - The English man and the New England man. We worshipped at the same altars, 
poetry devotees.

I think back on that extraordinary generosity that was his hallmark (Talisman - all of the magazines and books! - 
all the festivals, all the activities!).
The eclectic hand he dealt in that one was not narrow, coterie, ego-driven, or dominating, but solely on behalf of
a higher calling....Poetry!

Poetry as Gnosticism,  Poetry as the truest ethical position. Poetry as the real place of hearth and (if it were ever possible) release.
To do everything he could possibly do to facilitate that.

"I can be glad in my death that, selfless
the beauty of the world goes on, and then more:
even wordless, that beauty still."

(writes his hero William Bronk).   

Beauty Still

                      - Simon Pettet, March 2026, NYC