literature
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Game Over
If the AI revolution brings about an age of abundance, as Elon Musk has begun to suggest lest we bring out the guillotine, and no one goes hungry or burns with avarice; if the computers not only cure all our diseases and extend our lives but solve every puzzling mathematical theorem and scientific mystery for… 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 -
Reading Myself to Death
Tie me to the chair first, honey. I’m a glutton for delicious torment. I’m reading all of Czeslaw Milosz which is not as emotionally fraught as reading through all of Louise Glück. I enjoy the change of tone, from feminine to masculine reflection, like one of those flip over bathroom mirrors. Much of Glück is… Continue reading
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Bob Kaufman
One exception to my suspicion of full on surrealism is Bob Kaufman. Postwar atomic automaton America could not be viewed straight on like the industrial films of 1960s early morning television. It required hallucinatory ViewMaster snapshots to portray its twisted Twilight Zone reality. Imagine this was the only possible approach. Unlike Ginsburg’s angelic screeds like… Continue reading
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Down to the Bottom of Things with Horselover Fat
THE MACHINERY OF divorce chewed Fat up into a single man, freeing him to go forth and abolish himself. He could hardly wait.— PKD, VALIS Rereading VALIS by Phillip K. Dick I find I identify entirely too much with Horselover Fat. The trippy, cheap Mexican Seventies. The attempts at success (brief but it paid for… Continue reading
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The Android Cried Me A River
I wrote this while rereading the Valis before I went to an art show opening of works dedicated to celebrate the anniversary of the 79th occasion of the birth of Philip K Dick The Android Cried Me a RiverOn the occasion of the 97thanniversary of the birth of Phillip K. DickTake heart, the AI chatbot… Continue reading
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Out of a Canon
without a net… This was originally written in verse as an appendix to a resignation letter to the MFA program I’ve dropped out of mostly because I can’t afford it but also because of subtle but pervasive age incrimination An ancient whale washed up on Lakeshore Drive with barnacles as old as the the University’s… Continue reading
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Finding Cortázar’s La Maga
Surrealism and synchronicity: I happened onto Andre Breton’s Nadja while trying to find a new book on my Kindle. My Kindly suggestions are usually overwhelmed by my partner’s voracious appetite for light reading. Fortunately my decision to drive into László Krasznahorkai has led to other interesting books. I noted in the book’s description that it influenced… Continue reading
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No to inhumanism and post-humanism
Answer to Robison JeffersTo keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams willnot be fulfilled. – “The Answer” Robinson Jeffers A delineated and revised poem. Yes and yes and yes and yes but no, not duped… Continue reading
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Warriors in Words for New Orleans
I see that Loyola University is having a Katrina/Federal Flood Memorial conference with two panels of literary writers titled Writers on the Storm, composed only of established literary writers. Ignored are the citizen journalists and powerful diarists of the event who came to call themselves the NOLA Bloggers. These people, not writers by trade, poured… 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 