Sea Smoke [Paperback]

Louis Jenkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2004

“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

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).

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Louis Jenkins lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His poems have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Among his books of poetry are An Anlmost Human Gesture, All Tangled Up With the Living, Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (winner of the Minnesota Book Award) and Just Above Water. He has read his poems on A Prairie Home Companion and was featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996. Two of his prose poems were published in The Best Ameriacn Poetry 1999.

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930100131
• ISBN-13: 978-0930100131
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,827,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Louis Jenkins' SeaSmoke, February 20, 2005

By 

Bill Booth (Laporte, MN USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sea Smoke (Paperback)

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

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sea Smoke, January 6, 2008

By 

J. Bloom "Writer" (Suffolk. UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sea Smoke (Paperback)

Louis Jenkins is a wonderful prose/poet and Sea Smoke, in my opinion is one of his best books. If you like reading about everyday life in detail that will have you nodding in agreement, then read this book. He captures each moment perfectly and very often with humour and/or irony.

My only grouse is that his books are not available in England, but thanks to Amazon I get them from the USA site.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Go with the Flow, September 14, 2011

By 

L. King "Eclectic Reader" (Toronto Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sea Smoke (Paperback)

I first heard a Louis Jenkins poem earlier this year while listening to Mark Rylance's narration of "Walking Though A Wall" at this year's Tony Awards, which led to my seeking out this book, which doesn't contain the above poem. "Walking" can be experienced again on youtube so I was OK with that as I wanted to find more.

Jenkins' free flowing gently self deprecating word poems,are usually typeset as a single paragraph abandoning the common practice of using line breaks and spacings in a poem to delineate the pace. They are best read aloud to feel the rhythm.

These are poems of whimsical ideas. The first, "Imaginary Reader", tasks us with considering the relationship between the poet and reader, what each imagines the other might be and might demand of each other. Perhaps the reader is a beautiful woman, perhaps it is God. "Retirement" has the author musing about giving up the "lucrative" word poem business. ;-)

Several strong poems play upon with the mundane - a sign "free lawn mower" has him wonder what freedom would really mean for a lawn mower; a fisherman apologizes to his lure for casting it out into the world, all the while reassuring it that he intends to bring home safely. Some break the fourth wall in literature: In "Sleeping Beauty" he wonders about the 100 year age difference between the Prince and his wife, and what of the multi-generational difference between the in-laws; In "Fictional Character" a well written antagonist in a mystery balks at murder and wonders at his motivation. Still others play with metaphors: Can "Sublimation" explain why everything seems to get smaller with age; In "Body and Soul" - if the body is the home of the soul then perhaps it is a motor home and the soul is a really bad driver.

As with any collection there are hits and misses, but Jenkins' does much much better than average and his wry observations make this a worthwhile read.