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Promiscuously Autobiographical
“I’m promiscuously autobiographical, but it’s never gotten me into trouble.” Samuel R. Delaney, interviewed by The New Yorker Continue reading
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Tragically Unhip
Thinking of updating my bio. Mark Folse is a UHF poetry ghost drifting in from the 20th century, transparent as the thin banker paper of old Norton Anthologies and just as relevant to today’s million-transistors-to-the inch Poetry Industrial Complex. He echoes 60+ years of reading like a theremin humming Tennyson. He idolizes Wallace Stevens and… Continue reading
20th Century, accentual verse, aging, alliteration, Arthur Sze, Best New Poets, Charles Bukowski, craft, cryptical envelopment, Eulipion, Ezra Pound, FYYFF, Jericho Brown, John Berryman, lyric poetry, MFA, modern world, Norton Anthology, old age, poète maudit, poetics, poetry, Poetry Industrial Complex, Richard Brautigan, sonnet, Tennyson, The Canon, The Classics, UHF, W.S. Merwin, Wallace Stevens -
Thoughts from the U.S. plantation colony of Louisiana
Colonialism is a defining political framework of our time. I’m trying to consider my own family line through that lens. At one time I was inclined to call Johan Jacob Folse a settler rather than a colonist, but Likud Israel has poisoned the word settler. In my view Bienville and John Law were the colonizers,… Continue reading
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Sonnets to Orpheus XVII
XVII WHERE, in what blessedly-watered gardens, on what trees Out of what tenderly unleaved bloom, Do the exotic fruits of consolation ripen? These Delicious fruits, of which perhaps one In the trampled meadow of your poverty, you find. From time to time you wonder over the fruit,— its size, Over its soundness, the smoothness of… Continue reading
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Kama Sutra of Cuddles
She can’t bend her aging body to love like that, but next to her in bed I just lay my cheek on her arm and settle in,skin to skin, and she lays her cheekon my head and at my age that’s practically skin to skin and we just settle in, some painter’s portrait of love,exploring… Continue reading
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The Last Temptation of Elvis
Was it really Him in that pearlescent robe, gold belted with a halo in the spotlight shadow? Is there a Bible School Jesus and a Vegas Jesus? He told me I could kick because he’s the higher power that rules over shaky basements of midnight coffee. I’m shivering with the need-a-pill chills and squinting at… Continue reading
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Safe As Milk
Gay zoned, a particular space in the friend zone in which she says, I loved my gay friends. It was so safe there. You could be yourself. You could be sexy without worrying about someone trying to get into your pants. She said this after I confessed again it wasn’t her cheek or forehead I… Continue reading
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Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit
(16) Writing poetry is an unnatural act — Elizabeth BishopNothing kinky. Think cuddles: the collapseof two into one, of that one into comfort:the innocent–the long hug, the movie couch–and the afterwards, coming back from blisswhere union is fully consummated by touchskin to skin, hands measuring from shoulder to hip the full depth of desire, while… Continue reading
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Just a Dancing Bear
I was a dateless and frustrated kid, only getting a little lucky if we both were drunk, which started so damn young when I was a teenager as if at once to ease and to drown adolescence. I was spectrally bashful like a ghost around young women and spending adolescence in an all boy’s school… Continue reading
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The Sonnette
In an effort to curb my voluability, let’s consider a poem of two stances of four and three lines for a total of seven or have a sonnet, with a clear Volta. A Sonnette “I was cured, all right.”—Alex DeLarge in Kubick’s A Clockwork Orange It’s not enough to be possessed.You must enter the… Continue reading
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“To find my home . . .”
To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. —Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley–Paris–Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981–1983 Which brought Wallace Stevens “The Idea of… 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).
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Well Bottom Blues 