Poems About Boats — From the Trawler Deck in Dulac, Louisiana

Most poems about boats are written from the dock. From the shore. From the safe distance where a boat is picturesque, where the light catches the hull in the afternoon and everything looks like a painting. In Dulac, Louisiana, nobody has time for that angle. The boat goes out before sunrise. It comes back when the work is done. The poetry of that life — the real boat poems — is written from the deck, not the shore. Mitchell Parfait grew up in that world. Dulac Poetry is the book that comes from it.

A Boat Is Not a Metaphor. It Is a Tool. It Is a Life.

Ask anyone in Dulac what a shrimp trawler is and they will not use the word “romantic.” They will tell you about the two outrigger arms raised like wings when the boat is running, the boom doors that hold the net open on the bottom, the winch that brings the whole rig back up when the captain decides the drag has gone long enough. They will tell you about the culling table — the flat surface at the stern where the catch gets sorted, shrimp from trash fish, by hand, fast, before the ice goes. The smell of it: diesel, brine, old rope soaked through with twenty years of salt water, fish smell that does not wash out of your clothes no matter what you do.

That is what a shrimp trawler is. It is not a vehicle for poetry. It is a working machine that costs more than a house, eats diesel the way a diesel engine eats diesel, and either pays for itself or does not depending on things the captain cannot control: the price of shrimp at the dock, the cost of fuel, the weather, the season, the regulation changes that come from Baton Rouge or Washington with no warning. The boat does not care about any of that. It does what it does — drags the net, brings the catch up, holds the ice, runs the engine. It is a tool. It is a life. Mitchell Parfait's book understands this from the inside.

The way a boat knows its captain is not a metaphor either. After years on the same hull, a man knows every sound she makes — the particular vibration through the deck when she is planing right versus when she is fighting the chop, the sound of the engine at the RPM that means everything is fine versus the sound at the RPM that means something is about to be wrong. He knows how she handles in a cross-current, how much she wants to weather-vane in a southwest wind, how she sits in the water when she is heavy with ice and catch versus empty on the run out. In Dulac, at the canal at night, you can walk the dock and read the boats the same way you read faces — rust streaks down the hull, names painted in faded white, the particular list of a vessel that has been carrying the same work for decades. These are the working boats that Dulac Poetry was written to put on the record.

The Shrimp Boats of Dulac — The Fleet Nobody Photographs

The boats that work the water around Dulac are not the boats of sailing magazines. Not the pleasure yacht with the teak deck and the stainless steel fittings. Not the romantic wooden sailboat heeling in a fair breeze. The working trawlers of coastal Terrebonne Parish are steel-hulled or fiberglass, stained with rust and fuel and years of use, built to do one thing at the deepest level of practicality: catch shrimp and come home. The flat-bottomed skiff that slides through a marsh bayou too shallow for anything else. The crawfish boat with its wire traps stacked on every inch of deck. The oyster lugger, wide and low, built for the bay bottom and the long drag of the dredge. Shrimp boat poems that know this world know which hull they are standing in.

Each boat is built for a specific piece of water. The skiff goes where the trawler cannot — through the marsh grass, into the cuts and channels that are two feet deep at high tide and dry at low. The trawler works the open Gulf, the passes, the offshore grounds where the brown shrimp run in summer and the white shrimp run in fall. The oyster lugger works the reefs in the bay, the shallow water where the bottom structure matters and draft is everything. A man in Dulac grows up knowing these distinctions the way a man in another town knows the difference between a sedan and a truck. You do not use the wrong boat for the wrong water. The water will tell you immediately.

Vietnamese crews and Cajun crews have worked these same waters for generations, often on different boats, sometimes on the same dock, always doing the same work in the same Gulf. The fleet has been shrinking for decades — regulations, fuel costs, climate, the slow collapse of the coastal communities that sent the boats out. The sons who grew up watching their fathers work the trawlers did not always come back to inherit them. Some went to college. Some went to the oilfield. Some went to cities. The boats they left behind sit tied at the canal with names painted in faded letters — the names of women, the names of saints, the names of daughters who grew up and moved away. This is the fleet that this poetry collection was written to remember. Read the poems →

What a Boat Teaches — Knowledge Nobody Writes Down

Reading the water from the bow is not something you learn from a book. It is something you learn from years of watching what the water does and what it means. Color tells you depth — the bright turquoise of a shallow sand flat, the dark green-brown of deep water, the milky white bloom of an algae rise that means the shrimp have moved. Current tells you what is happening below the surface — where the tide is going, where the bait is moving, where the net will drag and where it will pile up. Depth tells you everything else: the bottom structure, the channel edges, the places where the shrimp hold at certain tides and the places where they run. All of that is in the water if you know how to read it. Nobody teaches you to read it. You watch the old men do it long enough that your eyes learn what their eyes are seeing. Poems about working boats that carry this knowledge are poems about an education that does not exist in any school.

The sound a hull makes when it planes right — when the bow comes up and the stern settles and the whole boat finds its angle and the resistance drops — is completely different from the sound it makes when it is fighting the chop, nose-diving into the waves, spending twice the diesel to go half the speed. A captain knows the difference instantly, adjusts the trim tab or the throttle before he even thinks about it, the way a musician adjusts without thinking when something goes flat. Diesel engine maintenance by feel and sound is the same kind of knowledge — the subtle change in the exhaust note that means the injectors need attention, the vibration through the throttle handle that means the prop has fouled, the particular knock that means something is about to cost you a week on the hard. These are things you know or you do not know. They live in the hands and the ears of old fishermen, and they die with them if nobody writes them down.

Docking in a cross-current at a dock that is too tight is a skill that cannot be explained, only learned by doing it wrong enough times that the body understands what the mind cannot fully articulate. Night navigation in the bayou, where the markers are not always where the chart says they are and the water level changes with the wind, is the same kind of tacit knowledge — the kind that exists in the hands and eyes of a man who has run the same channel in the dark for thirty years and does not need to think about it anymore. When that man is gone, the knowledge is gone with him. This is why Mitchell Parfait could write boat poems that carry the weight of a real life on the water — and why no poet from a university, writing about boats they have visited, could write the same thing. You either know this world or you are writing around it. Grab a copy →

DULAC POETRY — The Only Book Written From the Deck

Mitchell Parfait was born and raised in Dulac, Louisiana — a fishing community at the end of the road in Terrebonne Parish, where the land runs out and the Gulf of Mexico takes over. His debut collection, DULAC POETRY, is 45 pages of verse written from inside that world — the boats, the bayous, the working waterfront, the men who go out before dawn and come back when the work is done. He did not visit this life to write about it. He came from it. The boats in these poems about the sea and boats are not symbols. They are the specific vessels of a specific place, carrying the specific weight of a working life in the Gulf South.

If you have been searching for poems about boats that were not written from the shore — for boat poetry that knows the smell of the culling table and the sound of the winch at 3am — this is the book. Available in paperback and as a Kindle edition for $3.99. Written in Dulac. By the man who knows what the hull sounds like when she is running right versus when she is fighting the water.

Boats in American Poetry — What's Missing

The tradition of boat poems in American literature is long and mostly concerned with freedom, solitude, and departure. Whitman's ferry crossing — the Brooklyn Ferry poem that meditates on continuity and the shared experience of crossing water — is about the ferry as a connector of souls, not as a working vessel with a schedule and a fare. In Longfellow, the Ship of State is pure allegory. In Mary Oliver, the small boat is a vehicle for attention and wonder in the natural world. The romantic tradition uses boats the way it uses most things: as vehicles for interiority, as metaphors for the soul's journey, as occasions for the kind of contemplation that requires distance from ordinary obligation.

What is almost entirely absent from that tradition is the working boat. The commercial fishing vessel. The man who does this not for pleasure, not for transcendence, not as a spiritual practice, but because his father did it and his grandfather did it before that and this is the boat they left him and this is what he knows how to do. The shrimp boat poems that should exist — from the Gulf Coast, from the working trawlers, from the men who made their lives on those boats across decades — are almost nowhere in the canon. Even poets who have written about working-class life — Gary Snyder in the Pacific Northwest, Philip Levine in the Detroit factories — wrote about labor from a perspective that still felt external to the people doing the work. Dulac Poetry fills that gap — not from the outside, but from the deck, from the inside of the life itself. Order your copy →

The Boats Are Still Out There

At 4am on a morning in shrimp season, the Dulac canal is already moving. Engines idling. Running lights on. The deck lights of the trawlers casting yellow circles on the black water as the crews prepare the gear — nets checked, ice loaded, fuel topped off, the outrigger arms still raised until they get to open water. By the time most of Dulac is waking up, the fleet is already out, already dragging, already two hours into a day that will not end until the catch is iced and the boat is tied back at the dock. This is the departure that no photograph has ever really captured, because the camera cannot hold the smell of it, the sound of it, the particular weight of a man leaving in the dark not knowing exactly what the water will give him today. This is the world that Mitchell Parfait's poems were written to hold.

By the time the sun is up, you can see the lights of the rigs on the horizon — the offshore platforms, constant and orange, miles out in the Gulf. The shrimper and the roughneck working the same water from different angles, the same Gulf that has been the economic foundation and the emotional landscape of this coast for as long as anyone can remember. The net comes up when the captain decides it is time — the winch engaged, the doors rising, the bag of the net swinging over the culling table, the catch spilling out. You sort it fast. Ice it fast. Set the doors back down and drag again. That is the rhythm of the work, and the poems about the sea and boats that carry it honestly do not sentimentalize it. They record it, from the inside, the way it actually is.

What it means to write a poem about this world — to put it on the record before it vanishes — is something Mitchell Parfait understood from the beginning. The fleet is contracting. The regulations accumulate. The sons move away. The cost of diesel rises faster than the price of shrimp. The boats that have worked these waters for three generations are being sold for scrap or left to rot at the dock, their names still painted in faded white on the hull, still legible for a few more years. If nobody writes it down — if nobody who actually lived on those boats puts the life into language before it is gone — then it will be gone in the fullest sense: not just ended, but unrecorded, as if the work and the men and the knowledge and the smell of diesel at 4am never happened at all. Order the book and read the record before it closes.

The boats are still going out. The poems are here.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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