poetry
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Oh! That Holy Ghost!
They’re dead to me, the judgemental ones—Bad tempered sky daddy and even his gentle sonif He will one day come back riding Wrath likea fifth horse of the Rome-gone-wrong apocalypse.But Oh! That Holy Ghost!She comes to me on colorful wings, speaking in the tongues of susurration, of bird song and call.And I am her evangelist,… 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 -
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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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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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
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Grinding Ink
My partner and first reader/editor thinks this is a little preachy if not in fact curmudgeonly ranty. Thoughts? Grinding Ink“To whom do we tell what happened on the earth, for whom do we place everywhere huge mirrors in the hope that they will be filled up and will stay so?”—Czeslasz Milosv, “Annalena”I want to swallow… Continue reading
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Sing, Goddess
I decided to reread Emily Wilson’s Odyssey before I consider seeing the movie and then start again decided well why not read her Illiad first because my eyes are always bigger than my plate. I never thought I’d fall into a list of men and ships until I read Emily Wilson. I dreaded Book Two for… Continue reading
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Birth
Shame on all the advocates and aggregators of poetry that they have not gifted this one to the Internet. Birth Milovz CzeslawFor the first time he sees light. The world is garish light. He doesn’t know these are shrieks Of garish birds. Their hearts beat quickly Under enormous leaves. He doesn’t know birds live In… Continue reading
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The Poet and The Machine
Will it swallow us whole as it has devoured all knowledge ever printed or filmed, every song ever recorded, as it digests your question and feeds it to build the threshing linkages driving it ever onward without a throttle? Let poets step forward and cast the first stone into the works. Sonnets to Orpheus: 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 