poetry
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Gone
I don’t have a memory like a sieve:I have a memory like the big asscolander you use to drain spaghetti with the huge holes you could drive a whole day right through and out of sight, with all its names faces dates flavors aromas chocolate ice cream stains down your shirt the kissthat made you… Continue reading
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History II: Revenge of the Stupid
There is nothing quite as vacuous Americanas the remake, the failure of imaginationafter the MBAs and the accountantstake control, repeating the same stories over and over like a time-tested lullabyuntil everyone is sufficiently asleep. Are you ready for the AI directeddo-over of Kent and Jackson Stateor for Detroit 67 and Watts 68?Japanese Internment? Operation Wetback?The… Continue reading
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Lines on His 68th Birthday
(much) after Everette Maddox Atop the spoil pile left over from digging the lagoons whichslowly slides and subsidesback to the natural flatof this river bottom city In June’s mock-August swoon, after a difficult ascent withan old man’s AWOL big toesand the huff and puffof 50 years of cigarettes So many battles of my youthfought nearby,… 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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Interrupted by Hummingbirds
Compose your life like a prose poem suddenly interrupted by hummingbirds mistaking a woman’s perfume for wildflowers in Arles. A fast and bulbous moon the only excuse necessary for hallucinatory episodes at the Starbucks counter, visualizing Cthulhu in the foam and blocking the concoction of monstrous coffee drinks. When confronted with a Don’t Walk sign,… Continue reading
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Bury me in that warm country
There is a primordial order, transcendent / of languages, the form for casting poetry. Continue reading
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Down Into and Through and Out of Darkness
“this is the cold doing” — Charles Olson, “in cold hell, in thicket I do not know if I want another pill or a drill to trepan this malevolence that hangs like a dark shroud or a straight razor to slice life out of time. This is not a threat or letter in an unsteady… 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
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The Man Who Knew Godot
Long ago when I first started as an undergraduate I was at a bar speaking to an old man and told him I was an English major and he asked me to recite a poem. I couldn’t. Maybe I could manage Poe’s The Bells for I had that by heart once. Memorizing poetry was a… Continue reading
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The One Who Vanished into Silence
or My Creative Aphasia 2015-2023. When I decided I wanted to have some business cards in my new career as poet, I chose the title ghost of a poet, risen and when I signed up for Instagram I used the same as my first screen name. At first I thought ghost of a poet, a… 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 