Soucy, Donald L.

English

DigitalCommons@Providence

© Providence College  The author(s) permits users to copy, distribute, display, and perform this work under the following conditions: (1) the original author(s) must be given proper attribution; (2) this work may not be used for commercial purposes; (3) the users may not alter, transform, or build upon this work; (4) users must make the license terms of this work clearly known for any reuse or distribution of this work. Upon request, as holder of this work’s copyright, the author(s) may waive any or all of these conditions.  The Prose Poem: An International Journal is produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) for the Providence College Digital Commons. http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoems/ THE PROSE POEM: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL  Volume 7 | 1998 Louis Jenkins’ Just Above Water Donald L. Soucy  Louis Jenkins.  Just Above Water.  Duluth:  Holy Cow! Press, 1997. Coverpainting by Ann Jenkins. 73 pp. $10.95.“One must have a mind of winter . . . and have been cold a long time . . . not tothink of any misery in the sound of the wind. . . .”(—The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens.)One can’t help feeling that Louis Jenkins must have had Stevens’ poem inmind when he gathered this latest collection of prose poems, Just Above Water.Winner of the 1995 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry for his book Nice Fish:New and Selected Prose Poems, Jenkins continues to astonish us with hiscogent, comic observations of the cold, hard struggle we call living.  Many ofthe poems, as a consequence, focus on winter:  the snow, the cold, the bitter-ness of endings.  A quick glance at some of the titles from the collectionreveals that Jenkins has a mind of winter indeed.  “Snow People,” for example,argues that because we are “mostly water . . . it’s not so bad living in a coldclimate like this one.  It gives you a certain solidity.”  And as the speakerobserves in “A Patch of Old Snow,” even in the depths of spring, winter, or thememory of winter, helps us to define who we were, and who we have become:“It’s startling to come upon this old snow on such a warm day.  The record ofanother time.  It’s like coming across a forgotten photograph of yourself.”Furthermore, as if to reinforce the notion that the “nothing” that is winter candefine us, the speaker of “February” anguishes about the snow “[piling] up onthe roads, mile after gray mile . . . like debt, like failure.”On the other hand, the title of the book suggests a wider theme than winterand explores images that go beyond snow.  The selections in Just Above Waterdescribe in turn a fishing lure that rides just above water to attract the unsus-pecting; a young woman who “looks far away across the water”; rocks that“stand waist-deep / in the water and refuse / to come into shore”; a piece of atree limb riding above a rushing torrent caused by a storm; a skiff riding intothe wind—all of these images reminding us of the tenuousness of life, thedangers of survival, and the rush of experience that is over much too soon.The run-off of melting snow fills the pages of this book with the transcendentmusic of passing time, and as the arrival or exodus of each season is signaledby some kind of precipitation, so are the stages of living and dying reflected inthe glistening images of these poems.  That existential flicker has never beenbetter dramatized than in the tightly controlled mini-scenario of “The Skiff,”which describes a sailor suddenly disappearing overboard without a sound.His partner is startled to find half of a peanut butter sandwich on the seat, witha “bite out of one end. . . . That sandwich was the only thing to prove Jim hadever been here at all.”But in describing these thematic ideas, I am not suggesting that the bookserves as a kind of documentary of living.  As Stevens himself suggests in“The Snow Man,” the reader of poems is the listener “who listens in the snow,/ And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing thatis.”  In other words, poems suggest truths about life that often have littlerelation to the perceived reality we experience in life.  The poem is a constructof words, the play of an imagination floating in illusion.  Words, in a sense,create the reality of the poem and of its speaker.  The reader of the poem is thenhimself/herself created by experiencing the poem, by “beholding the nothingthat is not there”—an illusion constructed of words— “and the nothing thatis”—the lesson in living.  Take for example, the most enigmatic poem of thecollection, “Gravity.”It turns out that the drain pipe from the sink is attached to noth-ing and water just runs right onto the ground in the crawl spaceunderneath the house[. . .] It turns out that the house is not reallyattached to the ground but sits atop a few loose concrete blocksall held in place by gravity [. . .] .The poem continues to detach seemingly solid, concrete objects (rocks,trees, water itself) from the ground until everything hovers tremulously, andreality becomes a trick of illusion, a mere stage on which are conjured thenarratives that make up living.  Gravity, as the speaker understands it, means“seriousness,” and indeed poems have a serious purpose. Moreover, serious-ness implies “firmly in place,” but nothing in the poem is “all that firmly inplace.” There is nothing to anchor the poem to reality except gravitas:  theseriousness of the language, the seriousness of the poet’s intention, the seri-ousness of the reader who seeks meaning from the poem.  As is suggested bythe speaker of “Autumn,” a companion piece, “our brains are unable to makesense of our own lives.”  It may turn out, then, that what actual living teachesus about our lives may not be enough for us to know what it is to live.But, that’s the crux, isn’t it?  Our lives in constant flux, even when weappear to be in the same place, in a world continually changing, even as itappears changeless:  what are we to make of it all?  Writer Joseph M. Ditta putsit this way in his essay “Imagination and Technology”:  poetry presents theimaginationwith an enormously complex task of synthesizing, interpreting,and grasping a meaning whose truth is not to be found in reality[. . .] a truth moreover that, the more deeply we grasp it, the moreprofoundly it confirms our suspicions that our notions of realityare inadequate.Thus, poems compliment and enhance our inadequate grasp of reality, andJenkins’ well-turned poems specifically offer us the opportunity to experienceother truths.  That these poems take the form of prose poems contributes totheir impact, for prose poems demand a compactness of means and a colloca-tion of elements within very conscious limits to achieve their purpose.  Jenkinshimself suggests in his introduction to Nice Fish that he chose prose poemsbecause they are made “for travel, quick and light.”  One might say that thepoems in the present collection are like finely crafted skiffs, similarly made fortravel, quick and light.  Reading them, we are buoyed by the experience, and weare also grateful that, in Jenkins, we have at the tiller a poet who is willing todisappear and let us get on with the business of riding “just above it” all.Donald L. Soucy

Louis Jenkins\u27 \u3cem\u3eJust Above Water\u3c/em\u3e

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https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1526&amp;context=prosepoem

Louis Jenkins\u27 \u3cem\u3eJust Above Water\u3c/em\u3e

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