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Ghosts of the Flood
Originally published on Wetbankguide.blogspot.com om October 2005 ” . . . so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many . . . “The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot Sometimes I feel them, my wife told me, their spirits, as I’m driving down the street. All that suffering, she explains, all those people. As… Continue reading
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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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Spare me Lear and Hamlet
for Nancy Spare me Lear and Hamlet.The height and depth of madnessmeet together in The Tenantwho drags their battered bodyup the twisted stairs and backto that window to plunge again. Continue reading
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Lost
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside youAre not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,Must ask permission to know it and be known.The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,I have made this place around you.If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.No two… Continue reading
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Not Quite Wilderness
This is not wilderness, this curated forest arboretum: planted by the WPA then left undeveloped until Couturie Forest Arboretum was created. The boles are not blazed for lost wanderers, thankfully neglected by knife-wielding lovers in heated search of soft-yielding bowers. There are occasional labels on posts naming the trees as if a native son practiced… Continue reading
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Tell Me About It
” I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.” — Richard Brautigan Continue reading
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Not Hurricane Katrina; The Federal Flood
I don’t think I going to watch the documentary on Hulu. I don’t need a documentary to tell me what happened, or how it happened. I watched closely from a distance until I returned home Memorial Day 2006 reoorting and editorialising the tens of thousands of words on my blogs for the next several years.… 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 