poetry
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We Live in Smoke
we live in smoke not as the ancestors did old stories around the fire passing a pipe, the dark flavor of roasted meat we suck the unburnt carbon of our world as if we each just lit a cigarette Continue reading
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Debussy
Reading Federico Garcia Lorca in the woods. Continue reading
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Aman Cara
In the Celtic tradition, there is a beautiful understanding of love and friendship. One of the fascinating ideas here is the idea of soul-love; the old Gaelic term for this is. Anam is the Gaelic word for soul and cara is the word for friend. So anam cara in the Celtic world was the “soul Continue reading
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Interview with myself
Which poets have the greatest influence on me? Do you mean capital P poet or little p poet, a stylistic division. Among Poets Garcia-Lorca and Wallace Stsvens stand astride them all. I would not be writing poetry if professor and poet Rayburn Miller had not wopped me upside the head with the Selected Poems of Continue reading
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Everybody Loves Rilke
Them: Rilke. Me: Really? Everybody loves Rilke. This seems to be a universal phenomenon. It’s like the attachment you still have to the first person you fucked with mutual pleasure as a teenager. A lover, not a girlfriend or a barroom romance. I get it. He speaks to the soul with an overwhelming and fluent Continue reading
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Weight of Witness
I DON’T KNOW HOW MANYSOULS I HAVEFernando Pessoa I don’t know how many souls I have.I’ve changed at every moment.I always feel self-estranged.I’ve never seen or found myself.From being so much, I have only soul.A man who has soul has no calm.A man who sees is just what he sees.A man who feels is not Continue reading
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Agoraphonia
Trying to read Bernadette Mayer’s Agoraphobia over lunch in a crowded food court is like a holiday in schizophrenia. The sentences run like rivulets after a wave back into the ocean of voices echoing off the walls & I can no more find the sense of it than I can explain the mathematics of fractals Continue reading
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I Refuse
“To your mad world, one answer: I refuse.” — Marina Tsvetaeva Continue reading
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How do you love this world?
How do you love this world? How do you, after you’ve ingested all its cruel lessons, all the poison and disappointment and rage and betrayal of it? Is it accomplished through religion? Do you pray without ceasing? The oak tree is always praying. But how do you love this life? How do you honor this 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 