writing
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Warriors in Words for New Orleans
I see that Loyola University is having a Katrina/Federal Flood Memorial conference with two panels of literary writers titled Writers on the Storm, composed only of established literary writers. Ignored are the citizen journalists and powerful diarists of the event who came to call themselves the NOLA Bloggers. These people, not writers by trade, poured 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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They Lifted Me Up
Lee Meitzen Grue when she came up after open mike at the Gold Mine and suggested a journal for the poem I’d just read and later solicited a poem for New Laurel Review. Darrel Borque, before a large crowd as he handed on the state laureate ‘s crown to his successor, when he said, So Continue reading
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We’re really beyond that
One woman wrote, “I am afraid that what I want to say will not be important enough.”on reading this statement, another student remarked: “You should drop that part. we’re really beyond that.” “Notes re: Echo,” Sept. 8, strophe 3Kathleen Fraser The books I brought to the beach: Epic Postmodernism an Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries. Continue reading
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Becoming
“I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.”– Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Continue reading
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The sound of an oud
“I resolve to see anew, to take sight into my hand to spill the blood of the sacred wounds of witness…” “Fill your pen with love or don’t bother picking it up.” From Piedra by Luis Alberto Urrea It is difficult to bear witness to this world without anger. There are worlds of oppression that Continue reading
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Do The Work
I recognized over a decade ago that writing wasn’t all inspiration. Yes, I revised and revised when I first started writing seriously, but I didn’t get up every morning and think: what am I going to write today. After my long silence ended last year I tried to focus on Doing The Work. I don’t Continue reading
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Why I did not grow more conservative with age
More on this after I finish organizing my thoughts. Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, & to mystify the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. — Toni Morrison Continue reading
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Equilibrium
After years of chemically-modulated equilibrium it’s strange to wander once again the chase light calliope streets and the beckoning, threatening alleys my mind maps onto the world. Yesterday was work and errands and writing and a fine poetry reading. Today is a tree under which I will sit and contemplate the war of the oaks Continue reading
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Suttree
I was mumbling last month about starting up a Bloomsday reading again a few weeks ago but dropped it. And I haven’t cracked my much sticky noted and underlined disintegrating binding copy this year. Instead I am currently readinf Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, and I’m feeling disposed to call it the American Ulysses. It’s as 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 