Sea Smoke

by Louis Jenkins

"Louis Jenkins captures--nails down really --whole moments in time and space, completely decorated with all the essential textual things needed to make them vibrate and shudder with life."--Clarence Major Several of these poems are included in the performance script of NICE FISH, the play. The 60 new prose poems in Sea Smoke continue Louis Jenkins' imaginative glimpses of scenes from contemporary life. Many of these pieces begin with the ordinary,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0930100131
• ISBN13: 9780930100131
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Holy Cow Press
• Length: 72 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Louis Jenkins' SeaSmoke

The writers and critics who love Louis Jenkins' poems usually don't start out by saying that they are tremendously entertaining. They are. I've heard Jenkins give readings where the audience responded to him as to a stand-up comic. But the glint of humor that is present in almost every one of his prose poems shines out of his thoughtful and sometimes dark enjoyment of life. Sea Smoke is a fine new collection of his prose poems. Take the poem "Popples." Here in Minnesota, where Louis Jenkins lives, popples, or "poplars," or "aspen," are trees as common as weeds, and we forget to look at them. Jenkins looks and listens, with a little smile: "Popples are excitable, quivering all over at the slightest hint of a breeze, full of stupid chatter, gossip, rumor, and innuendo." And he takes off from there, his impressions getting a little more bizarre: "The proletarian tree, growing, optimistic, got the kids all working, grandkids on the way." But the comic view might miss the beauty of the popples, and Louis Jenkins doesn't: "Popples are lovely in fall when the leaves turn yellow and gold, or in winter with a new moon caught in the branches, and in spring when the rain enhances the delicate grey-green color of the bark. I wouldn't mind a view like this when I come to the bottom of the slide into old age and senility: a stand of popples judiciously framed by the bedroom window to exclude the junk car and the trash cans just to the right." If you're curious about why Robert Bly said of Louis Jenkins, "Every generation has eight or ten good poets, and he is one of those in his generation," and why Garrison Keillor keeps bringing him back to read his poems on A Prairie Home Companion, and why one of the foremost literary critics in the U.S., Sven Birkerts, has extolled Sea Smoke and loves, as I do, the "elusive alternation of comedy and pathos" in the poems, read this book. Bill Booth