poetry
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August Elderberries
August elderberriesengorged with summer begging to be plucked Continue reading
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Sea of Insomnia
I strap on the apparatus so I can breathpreparing for my descent into dreamfrom which I come up sputtering regardlessout of the twisting currents of the unconsciousthere is treasure somewhere in the wreckageof memory, today and childhood scatteredand then confusingly reassembled—when you laughed and when you trembledin anger or delight, all tossed togetheron the bottom… Continue reading
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This I Believe
Someone on the Threads poetry forum asked: I’m a poet. I write poetry. But still… I look at some ppls writing and just cringe. Like… you don’t actually believe that do you? You just put some words together that sounded nice, right? Does it even mean anything? Is this just me? And I answered: The… Continue reading
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Forgive Us Our Trespasses
For National Poets Day… Those sad poems longing for an oboeistand Wow, those trombones: Cool itDaddy-O. Cutting up like Krupaon those consonants, likeTito’s on timbales. Stop that.Sorry but I grew up with a soundtrackcourtesy of Top 40 before corporateresegregated the radio spectrum,and all that Album Oriented Rock,Bowie and Gabriel playing the stagelike transvestite Valkyries as… Continue reading
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Oh! That Holy Ghost!
They’re dead to me, the judgemental ones—Bad tempered sky daddy and even his gentle sonif He will one day come back riding Wrath likea fifth horse of the Rome-gone-wrong apocalypse.But Oh! That Holy Ghost!She comes to me on colorful wings, speaking in the tongues of susurration, of bird song and call.And I am her evangelist,… Continue reading
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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 -
Sonnets to Orpheus XVII
XVII WHERE, in what blessedly-watered gardens, on what trees Out of what tenderly unleaved bloom, Do the exotic fruits of consolation ripen? These Delicious fruits, of which perhaps one In the trampled meadow of your poverty, you find. From time to time you wonder over the fruit,— its size, Over its soundness, the smoothness of… Continue reading
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Kama Sutra of Cuddles
She can’t bend her aging body to love like that, but next to her in bed I just lay my cheek on her arm and settle in,skin to skin, and she lays her cheekon my head and at my age that’s practically skin to skin and we just settle in, some painter’s portrait of love,exploring… Continue reading
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Stop Reading Berryman’s Sonnets, Dammit
(16) Writing poetry is an unnatural act — Elizabeth BishopNothing kinky. Think cuddles: the collapseof two into one, of that one into comfort:the innocent–the long hug, the movie couch–and the afterwards, coming back from blisswhere union is fully consummated by touchskin to skin, hands measuring from shoulder to hip the full depth of desire, while… Continue reading
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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
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 