Poems About Gonzales, Louisiana

Gonzales, Louisiana: The Jambalaya Capital of the World

Gonzales sits on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Ascension Parish, about halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans on Interstate 10, and it has claimed one of Louisiana's most specific identities: the Jambalaya Capital of the World. Rice and sausage and chicken go into the cast iron pot outdoors at the festival grounds every spring, and the Gonzales Jambalaya Festival draws tens of thousands of people to watch competitive cooks work through the morning over open fires on the fairgrounds. The highway runs through the middle of Ascension Parish between the petrochemical corridor on the river and the crawfish ponds in the low wet fields east of town, and the river itself is wide and brown past the landing, carrying the current of everything north of here toward the Gulf.

The water that passes Gonzales will eventually reach les passes: the distributary channels far to the south where the Mississippi divides and finds new routes to the Gulf through Southwest Pass and South Pass and Pass a Loutre. But here in Ascension Parish the river is still whole, still gathered, still moving through the bend above Donaldsonville where Bayou Lafourche begins its separate journey south through the bayou country.

Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana, at the other end of that bayou corridor, where the water meets the Gulf and the land runs out into the marsh. The food culture he knows from Terrebonne Parish is the bayou's food culture: shrimp from the trawl, crabs from the trap line, the catch brought home and cooked the way people have cooked it along this coast for generations. The jambalaya tradition in Ascension Parish is kin to that culture: different ingredients, the same impulse to feed a crowd from what the land and the water and the parish provide.

Life in Gonzales: The Festival Grounds, the Refineries, and the Crawfish Fields

The Gonzales Jambalaya Festival is the event that defines the town nationally, but it is also the event that makes sense of Gonzales locally. Cast iron pots, competitive cooking, tens of thousands of people on the festival grounds every spring: the competition is taken seriously here. Cooks train and refine their recipes across years. The judging is formal. The crowd watches the rows of smoking pots the way people in other places watch athletic competitions, with real attention to craft and outcome. Andouille and onions and the smell of oak smoke in the morning air, the children watching from the fence line, the judges walking the rows with their spoons and their notebooks. This is what Gonzales does every spring, and it has been doing it long enough that the festival has become the town's primary identity in the wider world.

From the I-10 overpass on the east side of town, you can see the petrochemical plants on the river bend: the towers and stacks of the refinery corridor that runs along the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and the Atchafalaya basin. The smoke and steam from the plants is visible from the festival grounds on a clear morning, a kind of industrial companion to the cooking smoke from the jambalaya pots. Ascension Parish holds both things at once: the festival culture of the bayou country and the industrial economy of the river corridor.

East of town, in the low wet fields, crawfish farmers work the ponds that spread across the flat alluvial plain. The crawfish farming tradition in Ascension Parish is part of the same Gulf Coast food economy that connects Terrebonne Parish to the north shore to the river parishes: crawfish raised in flooded rice fields and harvested by boat through the late winter and spring, sold fresh or boiled at the roadside stands that appear along every Louisiana highway in season. In fall, the sugar cane harvest runs through the parish, the same cane culture that defines the river corridor from Gonzales south to Donaldsonville and beyond. The Catholic parishes anchor the community's calendar: the festivals, the fish fries, the seasons of the liturgical year that align with the seasons of the land. Ascension Parish is caught between Baton Rouge's expanding sprawl to the north and the bayou country's quieter rhythms to the south, between the industrial economy of the river and the agricultural economy of the flat parish, between two worlds that have always defined Louisiana's middle ground.

Featured Poem: Gonzales

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the cast iron pot on the festival grounds before the sun gets high, the judges walking the rows, the children at the fence, the andouille smoke mixing with the refinery steam on the horizon, the crawfish fields east of town, the river wide and slow past the landing. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou that runs south from Donaldsonville finally reaches the Gulf.

The poem opens at the festival grounds before the sun is high, the cast iron pot already over the oak fire, the andouille giving off its smell into the morning air. It builds through the competition: the judges walking the rows, the children at the fence watching with real attention, the cooks who have been doing this long enough to know the moment. The refinery stacks on the river bend visible from the grounds, the steam rising into the same sky as the cooking smoke, the parish holding both without apology. The crawfish boats in the wet fields east of town. The river wide and slow past the landing, carrying its current toward the passes and the Gulf. And the close that names the whole corridor in three lines: the jambalaya feeds Gonzales, the bayou feeds Dulac, the same hunger answered by different water.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Northern Edge of the Bayou Country

Gonzales sits at the northern edge of the bayou country's food and faith traditions: the Cajun and Creole foodways, the Catholic calendar, the festival culture that turns the act of feeding a crowd into a competitive art form. South of Gonzales, down through Donaldsonville and into the bayou corridor, those traditions continue in a quieter register: the shrimp boats, the trap lines, the fish camps, the communities that have lived alongside the water for generations without the Interstate running through the middle of town.

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana: the other end of the corridor, where the bayou that begins near Donaldsonville finally meets the Gulf. His book Dulac Poetry is the voice of the working Gulf Coast: the fishermen and the crawfishers and the people of faith who live at the water's edge and know the bayou not as scenery but as the road, the supply line, the source of everything that matters. The jambalaya culture of Ascension Parish and the shrimping culture of Terrebonne Parish are two expressions of the same deep thing: a Gulf Coast people who have always known how to feed themselves and their neighbors from what the water and the land provide. Dulac Poetry is the literary record of that knowledge, written from the southern end of the bayou corridor where the land finally gives way to the Gulf.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

Order the Paperback →Get the Kindle ($3.99) →

Order Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Gonzales holds you: the cast iron pot before the sun is high, the oak smoke and the andouille in the morning air, the judges walking the rows at the Jambalaya Festival, the refinery stacks visible from the festival grounds, the crawfish ponds in the flat wet fields east of town, the river wide and brown past the landing. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY answers that pull from the other end of the corridor, from Dulac, Louisiana, where the bayou meets the Gulf and the same hunger for community and food and water finds its expression in the shrimp boat and the trap line and the voices of the people who have always lived here.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Poetry from the working Gulf Coast, from the festival grounds of Ascension Parish to the bayou towns of Terrebonne Parish, from the jambalaya pot to the shrimp trawl, from the Jambalaya Capital of the World to the edge of the Gulf.

Find more poems about Louisiana's waterways and towns at Donaldsonville, Southwest Pass, South Pass, Head of Passes, and Pass a Loutre. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Gonzales, Louisiana: the Jambalaya Capital of the World, Ascension Parish on the east bank of the Mississippi. The Gonzales Jambalaya Festival, the crawfish fields, the petrochemical corridor on the river bend. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana, the other end of the bayou corridor where the water meets the Gulf.