writing
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Spin the (pharmacy) bottle
The medication for REM sleep disorder, what leads me to occasionally smack Patrice with my left arm as I reach out to catch a baseball or assume yoga positions while asleep, foregrounds my amazing Technicolor dreamscape which I jokingly refer to as the Chase Light Calliope Fun House of Madness. It is overriding another medication Continue reading
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Warriors in Words for New Orleans
I see that Loyola University is having a Katrina/Federal Flood Memorial conference with two panels of literary writers titled Writers on the Storm, composed only of established literary writers. Ignored are the citizen journalists and powerful diarists of the event who came to call themselves the NOLA Bloggers. These people, not writers by trade, poured 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
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All Those Antecedent Predecessions
It is the imposing of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions of me, the generation of those facts which are my words. It is coming from all that I no longer am yet am, the slow western motion of more than I am.— Charles Olson, Maximus to Gloucester, “Letter 27” Continue reading
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They Lifted Me Up
Lee Meitzen Grue when she came up after open mike at the Gold Mine and suggested a journal for the poem I’d just read and later solicited a poem for New Laurel Review. Darrel Borque, before a large crowd as he handed on the state laureate ‘s crown to his successor, when he said, So Continue reading
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Becoming
“I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.”– Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Continue reading
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Do The Work
I recognized over a decade ago that writing wasn’t all inspiration. Yes, I revised and revised when I first started writing seriously, but I didn’t get up every morning and think: what am I going to write today. After my long silence ended last year I tried to focus on Doing The Work. I don’t Continue reading
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The Fun House of Madness.
In a comment on a post of on Facebook I came up with the perfect description of my nightly dreamscape: A film by Federico Fellini, produced by Luis Briñel, from a script by David Lynch, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Or as I like to to call it The Chase Light Colliope Fun House of Continue reading
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Equilibrium
After years of chemically-modulated equilibrium it’s strange to wander once again the chase light calliope streets and the beckoning, threatening alleys my mind maps onto the world. Yesterday was work and errands and writing and a fine poetry reading. Today is a tree under which I will sit and contemplate the war of the oaks Continue reading
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Bohemian Dreams
The online French Quarter Journal published a story On the Origin of Jackson Square Artists: “They were a rowdy bunch” and I immediately thought of my father, Sidney J. Folse, Jr. A senior architect at the prominent local firm of Curtis & Davis, from the age before computer driven design when architects had to draw 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 