MFA
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Tragically Unhip
Thinking of updating my bio. Mark Folse is a UHF poetry ghost drifting in from the 20th century, transparent as the thin banker paper of old Norton Anthologies and just as relevant to today’s million-transistors-to-the inch Poetry Industrial Complex. He echoes 60+ years of reading like a theremin humming Tennyson. He idolizes Wallace Stevens and… Continue reading
20th Century, accentual verse, aging, alliteration, Arthur Sze, Best New Poets, Charles Bukowski, craft, cryptical envelopment, Eulipion, Ezra Pound, FYYFF, Jericho Brown, John Berryman, lyric poetry, MFA, modern world, Norton Anthology, old age, poète maudit, poetics, poetry, Poetry Industrial Complex, Richard Brautigan, sonnet, Tennyson, The Canon, The Classics, UHF, W.S. Merwin, Wallace Stevens -
The Sonnette
In an effort to curb my voluability, let’s consider a poem of two stances of four and three lines for a total of seven or have a sonnet, with a clear Volta. A Sonnette “I was cured, all right.”—Alex DeLarge in Kubick’s A Clockwork Orange It’s not enough to be possessed.You must enter the… Continue reading
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Reading Myself to Death
Tie me to the chair first, honey. I’m a glutton for delicious torment. I’m reading all of Czeslaw Milosz which is not as emotionally fraught as reading through all of Louise Glück. I enjoy the change of tone, from feminine to masculine reflection, like one of those flip over bathroom mirrors. Much of Glück is… Continue reading
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Out of a Canon
without a net… This was originally written in verse as an appendix to a resignation letter to the MFA program I’ve dropped out of mostly because I can’t afford it but also because of subtle but pervasive age incrimination An ancient whale washed up on Lakeshore Drive with barnacles as old as the the University’s… 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
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).
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Well Bottom Blues 