poetry
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Digital Creep
AI creeps into everythinglike cat’s claw devil’s weedno flower to recommend itripping apart what workedonce before they made it better like monster TVsrequiring tools to mountswallowing the room youeverything into programminglinked friendships punctuatedwith bot-curated advertising anesthetic phantom agoraof algorithmic community Continue reading
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Emic and Etic
“I find interesting the distinction anthropologists make between an emic and an etic point of view. Emic has to do with the perspective of a member of the society itself and etic is the point of view of an outsider seeing the society in his own terms.”— Anne Carson I first encountered these terms in… Continue reading
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Teach me to dance again
“I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.”— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet… Continue reading
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Fragments of Grammar and Longing
I am reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater — Essays and Poetry, Part IV: The Life of Towns and pondering her deliberate sabotage of punctuation. Every line begins with the old habit of capitals and tends with a period without regard to syntax. Emily Town Riches in a little room. Is a phrase that haunts. Her since… Continue reading
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I Ask The Trees
I ask the trees how to grow old slowly I see my face in a century of live oak barkRemain evergreen they say Welcomebirds & weather each season equallyStudy deadfall what rises out of it thrivingThe most ancient live oak is not eternal Continue reading
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No Signal
Under placid waves of WiFithe last generation withdrewinto their algorithmic avatars The stars vanished into constellations of LED streetsas dwindling fireflies flickered silent unnoticed into extinction Continue reading
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Choler Ever After
Anger, he smiles, Towering in shiny metallic purple armour —Jimi Hendix, Axis Bold As Love An itch inside you can’t scratchthe afterburn of anger nervesknotted reverberations of thunderAdrenal Medulla choleric monsterunfliches as the body cannot lockedin combat long after the dust settlesCarrion crow memory lingersover the remains relishesan eye once fixed on revenge Continue reading
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On Robinson Jeffers and Revision
“Clearly [Robinson Jeffers] did not linger over brief passages to the degree Ezra Pound might have urged him to, and he felt none of the urgency to revise and refine his work that is characteristic of modern poets as diverse as Eliot and Marianne Moore. Not that Jeffers is crude, or simple-minded, for he is… Continue reading
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Old New Poets Prize
On the anniversary of my first published poems 17 years ago at age 52 (archived link below) I will take a moment to lament all of the publications which seek to glamorize the young, whether its an “emerging poet prize” with a ridiculous age limit or those “30 under 30” articles in the local lifestyle newspaper/magazine.… 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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