Fish and the water

Louis Jenkins blurs the lines between poetry and prose

I seem to never discover things directly. Music, movies, books, writers, we find each other at random, moments without obvious serendipity.

I watched the Tony awards a few years ago. Mark Rylance, the English stage actor, considered by many to be the greatest of his generation, won an award for his performance in the Broadway revival of “Boeing, Boeing.” Rather than thank a list of family, friends, and collaborators, Rylance began to speak, seeming to tell a story. The audience was thoroughly confused. It became apparent, at least to me, that he was speaking someone else’s words. But whose?

Thanks to Google, I learned that these words belonged to the Minnesota-based, Oklahoma-born poet Louis Jenkins (b. 1942, Enid). The name meant nothing to me. But the words just wouldn’t leave my mind.

The poem in question, “The Back Country,” is a paragraph-long meditation written like advice. “If you’re in the woods, the back country, some place far from any human habitation, it is a good idea to wear orange…” Yeats this is not, but the simplicity stuck with me.

A few years later, while picking up yet another Tony, Rylance struck again, treating the audience to Jenkins’ “Walking Through a Wall.” Between those awards, I immersed myself in Jenkins’ work, following his new projects, catching him from time to time in his own voice on A Prairie Home Companion, a show for which I usually have little patience. I’ve yet to read a work by Jenkins that didn’t make me laugh or think about something in a new light. Some people with whom I’ve shared his work don’t agree that it’s poetry, even, comparing it instead to very short stories. Somewhere in the space between is the prose poem which, according to your local dictionary, is a piece of writing in prose having obvious poetic qualities, including intensity, compactness, prominent rhythms, and imagery. National Book Award-winning poet Robert Bly once said, “Most people writing prose poems now agree that Louis Jenkins is the contemporary master.”

A poem isn’t a story, it’s an idea. And few working poets have as many ideas as Louis Jenkins. It’s nothing new for poets to write about the seemingly mundane details and objects of everyday life. Billy Collins made a career of it. The late Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda wrote dozens of “Odes to Common Things.” 

Few obsessions from my adolescence still blow my mind the way they did at the time. One that still does is T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I’ve read it hundreds of times, each with a new appreciation. It’s the work by which I judge (perhaps unfairly) other poems and poets. Jenkins hasn’t written anything on par with “Prufrock.” But many of my favorite musicians won’t ever reach the heights of “Sgt. Pepper.” Most of the time, it’s unfair to compare. But if J. Alfred Prufrock read poetry, he would read Louis Jenkins.