FYYFF
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
The Sunsetting
The Sunsetting “Good night, and good luck” — Edward R. Murrow.Burning red and orangeare the colors of sunsetand the President issunsetting on television.Welcome to the twilightof the United States.Our monuments are giltin Krylon metallic goldand the Capitol has become an unbarred madhouse.Visit the New and ImprovedSmithsonian museumsfull of Beautifulest American Truth in the fashion of… Continue reading
-
Shatter Complacency
“Poetry should be written so that if you throw a poem at the window, the glass will shatter.” – Daniil Kharms, 1930 Continue reading
-
Look Away, Look Away
New Orleans would come back in “a completely different way: demographically, geographically, and politically” or he and other white civic leaders would not return. –Jimmy Reiss, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 2005The Bricks laid carefully byCreole craftsmen demolished,replaced with mock historicalstick & Tyvek by Latino refugees. Less than halfas many homes built to makethe Federal Flood… Continue reading
-
Homily
Do we need to shine black light to illuminate the blood? Look: it’s on your hands. Continue reading
-
2025
On The Centennial of Benito Mussolini’s Assumption of Dictatorial Powers in 1925 let us string piano wire like holiday tinsel and hang memorial ornaments to resistance, dangle the masked fatigue green monsters by their ankles while singing the carol of the partisan, crack poppers heard round the world and wear paper tricorn hats of Lexington… 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, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, 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).
.