poetry
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Sing, Goddess
I decided to reread Emily Wilson’s Odyssey before I consider seeing the movie and then start again decided well why not read her Illiad first because my eyes are always bigger than my plate. I never thought I’d fall into a list of men and ships until I read Emily Wilson. I dreaded Book Two for… Continue reading
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Birth
Shame on all the advocates and aggregators of poetry that they have not gifted this one to the Internet. Birth Milovz CzeslawFor the first time he sees light. The world is garish light. He doesn’t know these are shrieks Of garish birds. Their hearts beat quickly Under enormous leaves. He doesn’t know birds live In… Continue reading
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The Poet and The Machine
Will it swallow us whole as it has devoured all knowledge ever printed or filmed, every song ever recorded, as it digests your question and feeds it to build the threshing linkages driving it ever onward without a throttle? Let poets step forward and cast the first stone into the works. Sonnets to Orpheus: The… Continue reading
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The Decrepit Classicist
An exercise in deliberate old fashionedness I will be remembered like Hector only in the lamentations of women.My brother scholars’ races are all runand the laurel’s ground into the soup.I wield only a walking stick to help me hobble to the library.The Great Work lies unwritten.I have digested manuscriptslike sandwiches and still sufferhunger unrequited. The… Continue reading
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Sonnets to Orpheus
For a gnostic aquaintence: Where do we now locate that greater Spirit in this world of brick on brick, rising toward its fall? For me it moves in the woods, manifest, wearing many names. First Part – XXIVSHALL we reject our primeval friendship, the age-old,The great never entreating gods, because the hard-steeled Does not know… Continue reading
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My New Informalism
The first poet to seriously capture my attention was Wallace Stevens (thank you Raeburn Miller) who could roll those vowels around like the gods’ own thunder and Krupa those pine wood bantam tom toms from here to Azcan. Continue reading
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Ekphrasis: The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa
Hokusai’s The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa Through the lens of imminent disaster Fuji—the anchoring backdrop of ten thousand pastoral moments–—is a disinterested bystander. The mountainous water towers over the iconic peak and the doomed boats. The sailor’s backs are turned to the crest of threatening fingers, their hands clasped in muscular prayer… Continue reading
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Quiet Fireworks
I thought Yates’ bee loud gladewas all fanciful talk until I heardthe elderberries’ high mass sung 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 