poetics
-
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
-
I Sing The Body Plasmatic
I’m not struck by lightning when I write. Rather I am a neural magnetic container of a creative plasma which occasionally escapes into recombination, condensing into words. This is the creative disease which fluctuates between melancholic contemplation and maniacal creative discharge. Like an instrument it must be tuned to a certain contained waveform so that… Continue reading
-
Marginalia to Andrei Codrescu’s “comrade past and mister present”
“Our job,“ said brother/Blaga, “is not to uncover it but to increase its mysteriousness.” I am not a surrealist and it’s probably too late to try at 68, unless I start taking LSD and shrooms again and write while tripping in the way the lines sometimes erupt when I’m drunk and land as obsidian, but… Continue reading
-
The Rhythm of Human History
My comment on this Substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/poeticknowledge/p/an-introduction-to-the-rhythm-of?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3ibxf As a poet of 68 years I find that I and many of my contemporaries use accentual lines of a certain number of beats without regard to syllable count. We were all schooled in both canonical English verse and the free verse that emerged in the 20th century.… Continue reading
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
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).
.
Well Bottom Blues 