Poems About Eunice, Louisiana

Eunice and the Prairie

You know you're getting close when the land flattens completely and the horizon goes from here to nowhere. The bayou country has been dropping behind you since you left Opelousas — the cypress giving way to open prairie, the soil turning black, the rice fields stretching out in every direction like a mirror before the water comes in. Eunice sits in the middle of all that flatness, about 25 miles west of Opelousas on U.S. 190, and on a Saturday morning you can hear the accordion before you've even found parking. It's coming from Savoy Music Center on the edge of town, where someone is already playing and someone else is already pulling up a chair and the circle is forming the way it forms every Saturday, the way it has been forming since Marc Savoy opened the shop. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY comes from the coast, from the water's edge sixty miles south — but the music carries across that distance and does something you didn't plan for.

Saturday night the Liberty Theater marquee glows on Second Street. The 1924 building is still hosting Rendéz-Vous des Cajuns — a live radio and TV broadcast of Cajun and zydeco music that has been running every Saturday night since 1987. The announcer introduces everything in French first. The balcony fills. The songs are in French. Between the jam in the morning and the broadcast at night, the whole town is organized around music the way other towns are organized around a mill or a port. On the way in from Opelousas, the gas station has cracklins in the fryer by nine in the morning. The smell of boudin from Billy's or Eunice Superette is in the air before you cross the parish line. The black soil after last night's rain has a smell that belongs only here — not the salt of the Gulf, not the tannin of the bayou, but the dark earth of the Cajun prairie giving itself up to the day.

Life in Eunice

The week in Eunice runs on two fixed points: Saturday morning at Savoy Music Center and Saturday night at the Liberty Theater. The Savoy jam starts early and runs without a schedule — a dozen or twenty people show up, pull chairs into a circle in the middle of the shop, and somebody starts playing. There is no stage, no announcer, no set list. Marc Savoy has been making diatonic button accordions here since the 1960s, the instruments built by hand in the back of the same building where the jam happens out front. His wife Ann Savoy — musician, scholar, author of Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People — is as likely to be in the room as not. The music moves from one person to another without stopping. Nobody is in charge. That's the whole point. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY understands that kind of gathering.

In February, the Courir de Mardi Gras — the running of Mardi Gras — goes out across the flat fields. This is not the New Orleans parade. Masked riders on horseback leave town before dawn and ride from farm to farm through the prairie, begging for the ingredients of a community gumbo. At each farm they ask for a chicken, a handful of rice, some filé. The farmer throws the live chicken in the air and the riders scramble for it in their masks and costumes. They carry it back. At the end of the day, the gumbo is made in an enormous pot and the whole community eats together. It is one of the oldest surviving Mardi Gras traditions in Louisiana, older than the parade floats, older than the beads. Eunice hosts one of the major ones.

The Eunice Folklife Museum — housed in the old Southern Pacific depot on the east side of downtown — holds the region's history in photographs and instruments and Mardi Gras costumes: the wire-screen masks, the pointed capuchons, the quilted suits the courir riders wear. Bee Dees Records on the strip carries Cajun and zydeco on vinyl the way it has for decades. The Cajun French radio drifts through the truck window on the way to the rice fields — slower here and more formal than the bayou Cajun, the old prairie variety that has been spoken on this land since the first Acadian families came west from the Teche corridor and found the prairie opening up in front of them. Rice and soybeans in the black fields. Crawfish ponds in the flooded paddies in spring. The horizon enormous in every direction. Laissez les bons temps rouler — let the good times roll — but said here with an awareness that the good times are made, not found.

Featured Poem: The Saturday Morning Jam

In Mitchell Parfait's voice — a man from Dulac, the coast, the Gulf-facing bayou country sixty miles south, inside the Saturday morning circle at Savoy Music Center. He doesn't know anyone. He can't follow the words. But the accordion is doing something to him.

I drove up from the coast on a Saturday morning
with no particular reason
except I'd heard there was music
and I had nothing pulling me back before noon.

The shop sits at the edge of town
on flat prairie land,
the fields running out past it
in every direction.
Inside: chairs pulled into a circle.
A dozen people who knew each other,
and me.

Nobody introduced themselves.
Nobody needed to.
Someone started playing
and that was the introduction.

The words were in French —
the slow prairie French,
not the bayou kind I half-know
from my mother's mother's kitchen.
I couldn't follow it.
But l'accordéon doesn't need you to follow.
The chord pattern was simple and ancient,
three chords the way the oldest songs
have always been three chords —
the same geometry that holds
a pirogue in the current,
the same geometry that holds
a man in a hard year.

Across the circle an older man
looked up from his strings
and nodded at me.
Not an invitation.
Not a welcome exactly.
Just: you're here.
Just: I see you.

I didn't play.
I have no instrument, no right to one
in this circle.
I just sat
and let the music work on me
the way the tide works on the marsh —
without asking permission,
without needing it.

At the end of a reel,
the older man at the far side of the circle
set his accordion across his knees
and said something to the room in French.

I didn't understand a word of it.

But everybody laughed.

And I laughed too —
not because I knew what he said.
Because I was in it now.
That's all.
That's the whole thing.

The poem holds the grammar of the Saturday morning circle at Savoy Music Center — the coastal man in a room full of people who know each other and know the music, the French words running past him without stopping, the accordion doing its work on him anyway. L'accordéon arrives once, in the middle, earned: the instrument named in the language of the music it carries. The older man's nod across the circle is not an invitation — just an acknowledgment: you're here. And the close is the whole thing: he laughs not because he understood what was said, but because he's in it now. That's the only way in. DULAC POETRY is built on moments like this: the specific detail that carries more than it explains.

Eunice in Louisiana's Literary and Musical Landscape

Eunice sits at the center of one of the richest traditional music cultures in the United States — not as a tourist destination but as a living tradition that has never stopped. The Savoy Music Center jam is not a performance; it is a practice, the way the church choir is a practice, the way the net-mending circle is a practice. Ann Savoy's Cajun Music: A Reflection of a People — the definitive oral history of the tradition — was built out of this same world: the interviews, the field recordings, the songs collected from older players who learned them from players older still. Barry Jean Ancelet's work at University of Louisiana Lafayette has documented the prairie Cajun tradition as a distinct literature — a body of French-language song and story that is different in cadence and vocabulary from the bayou variety, slower and more formal, carrying the marks of isolation and persistence.

This is the Louisiana that Mitchell Parfait writes into from the south. He comes from the coast — from the water's edge, the Gulf-facing bayou country of Dulac and Terrebonne Parish — but the same South Louisiana Catholic Creole inheritance runs through Eunice and Dulac both: the French language beneath the English, the Catholic calendar governing the year, the working life that asks everything and gives back something in the specific details. D.L. Menard's “La Porte d'en Arrière” came out of this same parish. Bee Dees Records has been carrying the local music on vinyl for decades. DULAC POETRY is coastal in its subject and in its particular attention, but the prairie and the bayou share a root: the music that comes from hard country and the people who kept making it beautiful anyway.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Read DULAC POETRY — The Working-Water World in Forty-Five Pages

Mitchell Parfait was raised on Dulac, Louisiana — down Bayou Grand Caillou, south of Houma, where the road runs out at the water and the Gulf is the fact everything else organizes around. His poetry comes from the coast, from the bayou country, from the same South Louisiana Catholic working-class Creole inheritance that runs through Eunice and St. Landry Parish — but from the water's edge, sixty miles south of the black prairie fields, where the land and the Gulf meet and the tide is the clock and the shrimp boat is the instrument and the net is the text. The Saturday morning circle at Savoy Music Center is not his world. But the music crosses the distance. The chord pattern is simple and ancient and it works on a man from the coast the same way it works on everybody else: without asking permission. If you have stood somewhere you didn't belong and found yourself laughing anyway — found yourself in it before you decided to be — then DULAC POETRY was written for you. Available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99). The book is on Amazon now.

If you are looking for poems about Eunice Louisiana — or for Gulf South poetry about the Savoy Music Center, the Liberty Theater, the Courir de Mardi Gras, Marc Savoy's accordion workshop, the Rendez-Vous des Cajuns, and the flat Cajun prairie where one of the most concentrated traditional music cultures in the world has been meeting on Saturday mornings in a circle of chairs since before anyone thought to call it anything — this is where that work lives. DULAC POETRY is available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B0FXVZDLZG. Written from inside the working-water world, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana who carries it wherever he goes.

Read alongside poems about Opelousas, Louisiana and poems about Breaux Bridge, Louisiana to follow the prairie Cajun cluster. Then read about DULAC POETRY on the book page, or learn about Mitchell Parfait on the author page.

DULAC POETRY — Eunice Louisiana poetry on Amazon. Get Your Copy on Amazon | Buy the Book | Read Dulac Poetry