Art
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Reading Pablo Neruda
and all the other reprobates, I think: broken people make art—and do other reprehensible, sometimes horrific malfunctional things. Artists step outside the bounds of propriety to describe it. Some are cast out because of social deformity. They are inherently transgressive. They sit away from the communal fire. They wander long in the woods. Some transgress into the… Continue reading
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A Limited Number of Miracles
This poem is inspired by Jonathan Penton’s excellent book A Limited Number of Miracles from Lavender Ink (2025), in which each poem is inspired by a piece in the Bestoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art. It’s not just that fhey took Hercules down in front and moved him to the sculpture… Continue reading
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EL JOROBADO
EL JOROBADOBeen living on the outskirts. My leather bag of sweet corn, my cane of resentments. Been taking my time, my proper salutations to the Hood, this deep embarkation toward you, hermana-remember me?Day one: when you introduced me to your servants. Day two: when you guessed at my deep accent, the one you said was… Continue reading
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No to inhumanism and post-humanism
Answer to Robison JeffersTo keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not wish for evil; and not be duped By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams willnot be fulfilled. – “The Answer” Robinson Jeffers A delineated and revised poem. Yes and yes and yes and yes but no, not duped… Continue reading
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The catalogs and the particular
One problem with leaving school is that I have no one to ask if the meticulous catalog of Marianne Moore’s poem “People’s Surroundings” (and many others, but this poem in particular prompted this thought) influenced Gertrude Stein’s odd inventory of the particular, so as to break intricate verse into a new geometry of the modern… 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 