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, but a subtle pivot in language propels the reader into an unexpected and oftentimes humorous perspective from which to view the world anew. Herein the blue moon is unhappy as it gazes into car windows, clouds sweep across the horizon as if serving Genghis Khan, and the poet considers the benefits of retirement:
Retirement
I’ve been thinking of retiring, of selling the poetry business and enjoying my twilight years. It’s a prose poem business, so it’s a niche market. Still, after thirty some years, I must have assets worth well in excess of $300. Perhaps the new owner of the business will want to diversify, go into novels or plays, or perhaps merge into a school or movement. It won’t matter to me once I’ve retired. Maybe I’ll do a little traveling, winter in the Southwest. Take up golf. Spend more time with the family. Maybe I’ll just walk around and look at things with absolutely no compulsion to say anything at all about them.
Louis Jenkins lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. His books of poetry include An Almost Human Gesture (Eighties Press and Ally Press, 1987), All Tangled Up With the Living (Nineties Press, 1991), Nice Fish: New & Selected Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 1995), Just Above Water (Holy Cow! Press, 1997), and The Winter Road (Holy Cow! Press, 2000). Some of his prose poems were published in The Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribner) and in Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003).
