poetics
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Galactic Vocabulary
Reading Author Sae’ collection The Glass Constellation and I’m grateful it’s on Kindle because of the ease of looking up his galacticly vast vocabulary. If, sitting assembled in that university workshop, you find my formal-leaning lines of poetry simplistic: it’s OK. I wasn’t writing for you. Continue reading
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I’m Auto-Tuned Out
I’m Auto-Tuned Out I have a voice that is not auto-tunedto the popular. Stanzas: what’s upwith that? And rhyme sometimes.Blame that Bob Dylan character,and Ian Anderson. And, oh, all those Norton Anthologies, starting us onVol. 1 so young and impressionable.I can carry a note but my ear is tunedto the page, however I might humas Continue reading
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The catalogs and the particular
One problem with leaving school is that I have no one to ask if the meticulous catalog of Marianne Moore’s poem “People’s Surroundings” (and many others, but this poem in particular prompted this thought) influenced Gertrude Stein’s odd inventory of the particular, so as to break intricate verse into a new geometry of the modern Continue reading
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Shatter Complacency
“Poetry should be written so that if you throw a poem at the window, the glass will shatter.” – Daniil Kharms, 1930 Continue reading
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The Island of Doctor Jeffers
Reading the long, narrative poems in the stout Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers takes me back to a book I read long ago: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. So many of his characters are monstrous deformities, half human and half animal. Not that such people don’t exist-the news today is filled with them-but Continue reading
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Searching for a voice for a new humanism in Jeffers
I’m descending into the The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers (758 pages) just as 11 years ago about this time I was deep into the Cantos of Ezra Pound at Castle Brunnenburg. I went to the castle as a strange holiday celebrating completion of the B.A. in English literature started almost 40 years earlier. The Continue reading
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Interview with myself
Which poets have the greatest influence on me? Do you mean capital P poet or little p poet, a stylistic division. Among Poets Garcia-Lorca and Wallace Stsvens stand astride them all. I would not be writing poetry if professor and poet Rayburn Miller had not wopped me upside the head with the Selected Poems of Continue reading
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Vulture Heavy
I am vulture-heavy. My stories are caskets filled with black feathers, But the dead, in their vast merriment, egg me on. Write the motherfucking poem. See why I love them? — “I am vulture heavy”, Diane Seuss I am capable of light verse but it’s not my natural tendency. I’ve been diagnosed variously with adhd, Continue reading
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Theory and Play of the Duende
“Tender cries to God….Not form, but the marrow of form…All the arts are capable of duende but where it naturally creates most space is in music, dance and spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed to interpret them…the duende wounds..the magic power of a poem consists of it being filled with Duende.” — Frederico Gardía Continue reading
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All Those Antecedent Predecessions
It is the imposing of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions of me, the generation of those facts which are my words. It is coming from all that I no longer am yet am, the slow western motion of more than I am.— Charles Olson, Maximus to Gloucester, “Letter 27” 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, 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 