New Orleans
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Thoughts from the U.S. plantation colony of Louisiana
Colonialism is a defining political framework of our time. I’m trying to consider my own family line through that lens. At one time I was inclined to call Johan Jacob Folse a settler rather than a colonist, but Likud Israel has poisoned the word settler. In my view Bienville and John Law were the colonizers,… Continue reading
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The Genie-Soul of the Place
The godsons of cotton who run the place regardless of elections try to erase what is incomfortably alien, the lazy anti-Anglo, our insistence that we work to live and do not live to work, ask each other not “what do you do” but “where did you go to (high) school.” They would likd to contain… Continue reading
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Killing Me Softly with K-9s
I go to the forest to manage the stress of living in this dysfunctional city and this cracker-ass backwards state and this disintegrating country. I go to hear song birds and the cries of the water birds, to the chorus frogs celebrating the puddly places after it rains, for the quiet when it comes. I… Continue reading
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An Ode-ious History of New Orleans
I can’t think of anywhere I could try to publish this so I’m putting it up here. After the “Beautiful Times” and “The Capital”sections of Czeslas Milosz’s “A Treatise on Poetry”“I remember everything.”—”Natura”, MiloszThe calas woman calling over the muddy road,mounted by her tignon like the loa of womanhood. German bakers shape the baguettes, smell… Continue reading
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Fifth of July
Yesterday I posted here a poem titled Moloch which was basically me riffing on part two of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl out of my own and more contemporary experiences. Shortly after I took it down and replaced it with Quiet Fireworks. I then posted a video on the socials of a small upside down American flag… Continue reading
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Forest Thoughts
Is it my imagination or am I simply growing more perceptive the longer I walk in the forest? It seems the overcast filtered light spreads a Pantone rainbow of greens of the sort I’ve only seen in photos of the Northwest, and once in the Portland Japanese Garden in a drizzle. The soft scent… Continue reading
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Easter Hangover Monday
It’s Easter Hangover Monday, that peculiar New Orleans holiday when nothing is accomplished except perhaps some half-priced drug store chocolate consumed in the car. Bunny ears and flower crowns wilted on the television couch not watching the quiet green parade of a golftournament strictly for the green and trees and lagoon blue, that soft ambience… Continue reading
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Eating Cookies in America
Eating cookies while readingTrout Fishing in America They are molasses forwardwith a crisp ginger finish like driving from cane countryback home to New Orleans Continue reading
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East of the End of the World
An hour east of the End of the World sign somewhere just inside Delacroix a city is vanishing into America, dissolving wholesale in a Starbucks blender, as if buried in the contaminated sediment of The River; a Las Vegas scale, prime-time vanishing act in which a city is transformed into a waterfront Disney attraction, minus… Continue reading
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The Spirit of the Mask
Something I wrote 17 years ago for sadly departed friend Victoria Slind-Flor, formerly of New Orleans, for the guests of a Carnival Ball in miniature she was hosting in Oakland, CA, To the Honored Members and Guests of the Krewe of Baubo and Ame no Uzume: When one is called to Carnival, the first question… 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 