poetry
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Shatter Complacency
“Poetry should be written so that if you throw a poem at the window, the glass will shatter.” – Daniil Kharms, 1930 Continue reading
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Homily
Do we need to shine black light to illuminate the blood? Look: it’s on your hands. Continue reading
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Reading the News at Breakfast
they break us like eggs to feed their insatiable hungerleaving us nothing—just their careless mess expecting us to clean up in quiet obedience it’s time to press theiruncalloused hands into the fire untiltheir grasping fingers sizzle like bacon Continue reading
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The Island of Doctor Jeffers
Reading the long, narrative poems in the stout Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers takes me back to a book I read long ago: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. So many of his characters are monstrous deformities, half human and half animal. Not that such people don’t exist-the news today is filled with them-but Continue reading
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THIS SPECIES OF MADNESS
THIS SPECIESOF MADNESS This species of madnessWhich isn’t just talentGleams in the dark reachesOf my thinking self Without bringing me happiness.There is always, in the city,Clear or cloudy skies, but in meI don’t know what there is. —Fernandi Pessoa 6 OCTOBER 1926 Continue reading
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Searching for a voice for a new humanism in Jeffers
I’m descending into the The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers (758 pages) just as 11 years ago about this time I was deep into the Cantos of Ezra Pound at Castle Brunnenburg. I went to the castle as a strange holiday celebrating completion of the B.A. in English literature started almost 40 years earlier. The Continue reading
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Not Enough Death
The crows are crying for peanuts.I guess there’s not enough death in the world today. There is no newsfeed in Crowin the wires where they waitI guess. I’ve got doom enough to shareand so I keep my carrioncousins close. I feed them peanuts untilI can get my hands on more worthy fodder. I have a Continue reading
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The West has gone to die in Palestine
The West has gone to die in Palestine as God-certain as the Crusaders and just his doomed, for what they do desecrates the lands where spirits walked as it contorts their frozen souls beyondrecognition, into a crooked cross or star. Continue reading
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Conquer the Impossible
It was impossible to make it through the tragedy Without poetry. — Joy Harjo 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, 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 