New Orleans
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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
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Not Quite Wilderness
This is not wilderness, this curated forest arboretum: planted by the WPA then left undeveloped until Couturie Forest Arboretum was created. The boles are not blazed for lost wanderers, thankfully neglected by knife-wielding lovers in heated search of soft-yielding bowers. There are occasional labels on posts naming the trees as if a native son practiced… Continue reading
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Not Hurricane Katrina; The Federal Flood
I don’t think I going to watch the documentary on Hulu. I don’t need a documentary to tell me what happened, or how it happened. I watched closely from a distance until I returned home Memorial Day 2006 reoorting and editorialising the tens of thousands of words on my blogs for the next several years.… Continue reading
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Look Away, Look Away
New Orleans would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. –Jimmy Reiss, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2005The Bricks laid carefully byCreole craftsmen demolished,replaced with mock historicalstick & Tyvek by Latino refugees. Less than halfas many homes built to makethe Federal Flood… Continue reading
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Sad Baritone Saturday
A sad baritone blowing big round. Jello-tremulous Os of the blues. That’s what started this ramble into a pleasant melancholia, a fizzy afternoon beer buzz of sadness not quite cheerless, simply there like a color in the air, a sky so blue and clear you can hear it, a faint hum beneath your feet, a… Continue reading
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Not Enough Death
The crows are crying for peanuts.I guess there’s not enough death in the world today. There is no newsfeed in Crowin the wires where they waitI guess. I’ve got doom enough to shareand so I keep my carrioncousins close. I feed them peanuts untilI can get my hands on more worthy fodder. I have a… Continue reading
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Drunk Bigots Blowing Shit Up
My German and French Acadian people, who arrived 50 years before the “American” revolution, were sold to “America” a century after they arrived here, unconsulted, along with the slaves in the fields and the “merciless Indian Savages” who showed the founders true democracy and were crushed for it. All just another colonial commodity to the… Continue reading
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The One Who Vanished into Silence
My first wake-up-to-anxiety attack in more than a month, since I started changing medications to get the hell off Prozac which aggravated my REM sleep disorder. Personal stress meets the Big Bastardly Bill, the realization as Independence Day approaches at the constitutional United States is now a failed state, that everything I was raised to… Continue reading
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Looks Like It Might Be Fixin’ To Storm Rag
Where should we direct our prayers now that the government is decommissioning hurricane weather satellites? I don’t do Catholic anymore so the city’s Lady of Prompt Succor is out. And many people in the United Christian States of America think that idolatry. Burnt offerings seem a bit much in our new heat regime, although the… 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 