poetry
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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
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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
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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
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A Factory of Reinvention
The first time Sam (her chosen name)went down to the riverI stayed on the stepstipped a musicianfor St. James Infirmarywhile her husband Davescattered Rebecca(her given name)into the Mississippi. New Orleansis a factoryof reinvention.Come as you are.Be who you wish.Leave by the river. I only called herby her pen name–rather her personna–in the boisterous bohemia of… Continue reading
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We will conquer the stars
O. hearing of Elon Musk’s idea to move AI data centers into space with huge solar arrays. We will conquer the starsby obliteration So many satellitesto feed the porn and propagandaconjured from ourselves by orbital AIthe stolen works of old mankindWe will struggle to find the full moonWe will name new constellationswith what little human… 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 