-
Promiscuously Autobiographical
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical, but it’s never gotten me into trouble.” Samuel R. Delaney, interviewed by The New Yorker Continue reading
-
Portal
Some days the forest is not far enough. I can still hear the cars speeding past just outside the gate and the distant rumble of the interstate that bisects the park. It is too close to what troubles, to what waits later, and chances are I have a list of things to do on the… Continue reading
-
Birth
Shame on all the advocates and aggregators of poetry that they have not gifted this one to the Internet. Birth Milovz CzeslawFor the first time he sees light. The world is garish light. He doesn’t know these are shrieks Of garish birds. Their hearts beat quickly Under enormous leaves. He doesn’t know birds live In… Continue reading
-
The Poet and The Machine
Will it swallow us whole as it has devoured all knowledge ever printed or filmed, every song ever recorded, as it digests your question and feeds it to build the threshing linkages driving it ever onward without a throttle? Let poets step forward and cast the first stone into the works. Sonnets to Orpheus: The… Continue reading
-
The Decrepit Classicist
An exercise in deliberate old fashionedness I will be remembered like Hector only in the lamentations of women.My brother scholars’ races are all runand the laurel’s ground into the soup.I wield only a walking stick to help me hobble to the library.The Great Work lies unwritten.I have digested manuscriptslike sandwiches and still sufferhunger unrequited. The… Continue reading
-
My Initiation in the Mysteries of the City
That memory is sharp and clear because I recognize it now as the first level of my initiation into the mysteries of the city, my first step toward leaving Robert E. Lee Boulevard behind, entering a broader and deeper city I was sheltered from even on those crosstown shopping trips and by my Uptown education. I… Continue reading
-
Sonnets to Orpheus
For a gnostic aquaintence: Where do we now locate that greater Spirit in this world of brick on brick, rising toward its fall? For me it moves in the woods, manifest, wearing many names. First Part – XXIVSHALL we reject our primeval friendship, the age-old,The great never entreating gods, because the hard-steeled Does not know… Continue reading
-
Killing Me Softly with K-9s
I go to the forest to manage the stress of living in this dysfunctional city and this cracker-ass backwards state and this disintegrating country. I go to hear song birds and the cries of the water birds, to the chorus frogs celebrating the puddly places after it rains, for the quiet when it comes. I… Continue reading
-
Welcome, you spirits
Latin: “Sunt mihi Dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovae! Ignis, aeris, aquae, terrae spiritus, Salvete!” Translation: “May the gods of Acheron be favorable to me! Farewell to the threefold spirit of Jehovah — the Trinity! Welcome, you spirits of fire, air, water, and earth!” —Czeslaw Miłosz’ adaptation of the invocation from Goethe’s Faust. I… Continue reading
-
My New Informalism
The first poet to seriously capture my attention was Wallace Stevens (thank you Raeburn Miller) who could roll those vowels around like the gods’ own thunder and Krupa those pine wood bantam tom toms from here to Azcan. Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
.
Well Bottom Blues 