Poems About Shrimping — From the Nets and the Water in Dulac, Louisiana

People searching for poems about shrimping almost never find what they are looking for. The literary internet has no shortage of ocean poetry — waves, metaphor, abstraction, the sea as a symbol of something larger — but almost nothing written about the commercial shrimping life from inside it. Not from the deck of a trawler at 3am. Not from the culling board where you sort the catch by hand under flood lights while the boat rocks. Not from Dulac, Louisiana, where the shrimp boats have been going out for generations and where the knowledge of those waters belongs to families that have never left. DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is that missing collection.

The Work Nobody Writes Poems About

Shrimping is one of the hardest jobs in America. The alarm goes off at 2:30am. You are on the water before first light, engine running, ice in the hold, trying net rigged. The diesel smell hits you the moment you step on the dock and never really leaves — it mixes with the brine of the water and the sour-sweet of fresh shrimp and becomes the smell of the whole season, inseparable from every other part of the work. Most people who search for shrimping poetry find nothing that knows this smell.

The Dulac shrimping fleet works brown shrimp in the early season and white shrimp in the fall — the white shrimp are bigger and sweeter and worth more, and the whole parish waits for them. Trawling the Gulf means setting the net and dragging it across the bottom and feeling, through the hull of the boat, whether the drag is right. Too much resistance and you have hung up on something. Too little and the net is not fishing deep enough. You learn that knowledge from the men who came before you, and it lives in your body before it lives anywhere else. This is the world Mitchell Parfait grew up in — not as a visitor, not as a researcher, but as a person who belongs to it and always has. His poems carry that world into every line.

The ice holds, the 3am cull, the winch noise when the trawl doors come up, the codend hitting the culling board with everything the Gulf gave you that drag — stingrays, trash fish, crabs, and shrimp all mixed together — none of this is in the literary record. The Gulf Coast shrimping poems that tell the truth about this work are rare because most poets have never done it. Mitchell Parfait has done it his whole life. Read DULAC POETRY →

In Dulac, Shrimping Is Everything

Dulac, Louisiana sits at the end of Highway 24, deep in Terrebonne Parish, where the land gets lower and narrower until it is almost all water and marsh grass and sky. The Gulf of Mexico is a few miles out. You drive south from Houma and the road slowly narrows and the houses go up on pilings and the processing plants and boat docks appear and then you are in Dulac, where the shrimping industry built everything and still defines the rhythm of the year.

Three generations of shrimpers in many families — the Parfait family among them. Grandparents and great-grandparents who worked these bays before memory, passed the knowledge down through the hands of fathers and sons and uncles standing on docks and boat decks. The language of shrimping is specific and dense: the try net you send down first to test the bottom, the trawl doors that spread the net wide, the chute that routes the catch to the culling board, the ice hold where the good shrimp go, the offload at the dock when the run is done. None of that vocabulary exists in the literary canon. None of the poems about shrimpers that have been published by major presses use the word “try net.” They do not know the word.

What the boats teach about patience, weather, and hard work is not philosophy — it is practical. You cannot hurry the shrimp. You cannot hurry the tide. You read the weather the way other people read a book: the color of the sky at dawn, the way the wind shifts in the afternoon, the particular humidity that means a front is coming in. These are the lessons the water teaches men who have worked it their whole lives, and they show up in Mitchell Parfait's Louisiana shrimping poems not as metaphor but as lived knowledge. Order DULAC POETRY →

What Shrimping Teaches a Poet

The Gulf at 4am teaches a different kind of beauty than anything in a classroom. There is nothing abstract about it — the deck is wet, the lights are on, your hands are already cold, and the water is dark in every direction. The sky is enormous and completely indifferent. There is no metaphor available to you that covers what that actually feels like, standing on a shrimp boat in the dark off the Louisiana coast. You either know that feeling or you do not. Mitchell Parfait has known it since he was old enough to go out on the water, and his shrimping poetry does not try to make it poetic in the way that people who have not done the work would make it poetic. It renders it accurately and lets the accuracy be enough.

Shrimping is repetitive, physical, dangerous — and rich with meaning if you are paying attention. The repetition is the point. You do the same motions drag after drag, hour after hour, and somewhere in that repetition you start to notice things: the particular color of the Gulf at the moment before sunrise, the way the water sits flat and heavy when the air pressure is dropping, the sound the winch makes when the net is full versus the sound it makes when the net is not. A poet trained in that kind of attention — not the attention of a workshop, but the attention of a man whose livelihood depends on reading the water correctly — produces Gulf Coast shrimping poems that no MFA program can teach.

The camaraderie of the fleet, the solitude of the water, the pride of bringing in a good haul — these are not generic virtues. In Dulac they are specific: the fleet that goes out together in the morning, the radios that carry voice across the water between boats, the dock conversations when the boats come back in, the good-natured argument about who found the shrimp and who didn't. Mitchell Parfait carried that world into every line he wrote. It is not background detail. It is the subject. Read Mitchell's Poetry →

DULAC POETRY — Written From the Shrimp Boats

There is no other poetry collection written from inside the Dulac shrimping world. There are books about the Gulf Coast, documentaries about the fishing industry, journalism about the economics of coastal Louisiana — none of it is poetry written by someone who grew up on these docks and still lives there. DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is 45 pages of verse rooted in the specific landscape, labor, and community of Terrebonne Parish. Available as a paperback and as a Kindle edition for $3.99.

If you have been searching for poems about shrimping that actually know the work — that know the difference between bay trawling and skimming, that know the white shrimp season from the brown shrimp season, that know the smell of the ice house at 5am during the run — this is the book. Written in Dulac, by Mitchell Parfait, a man who did not visit this world. He came from it. Order the Paperback →

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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What's Missing From American Poetry

Most poetry anthologies cover nature abstractly. Mary Oliver's woods. Whitman's open road. Seamus Heaney's bogs. These are beautiful poems. But they are also poems written from a particular cultural position — the educated observer, present in the landscape as a visitor or a witness, not as a worker whose livelihood depends on reading that landscape correctly. The working Gulf Coast is almost entirely absent from the literary record: the shrimpers, the trawlers, the commercial fishing life that built coastal Louisiana. When you search for Louisiana shrimping poems or poems about shrimpers, you find almost nothing that knows what it is talking about.

The literary tradition of work poetry is real — James Agee in the Alabama cotton fields, Carl Sandburg's Chicago, Philip Levine in the Detroit auto plants. These poets wrote from inside or close to the work and produced verse that carries the specific gravity of physical labor. But the Gulf South is still mostly blank. The shrimping culture of Terrebonne Parish and Lafourche Parish and the rest of coastal Louisiana — one of the most distinct working-class cultures in America, built on the water over generations — has almost no presence in American poetry. DULAC POETRY fills that gap. Raw, specific, rooted in a place that most Americans have never heard of, this collection belongs in the canon of American work poetry — not as a curiosity but as a necessary contribution. Get Your Copy →

The absence of Gulf Coast shrimping poems from the literary record is not because there is nothing to write about. It is because the people who could write about it from the inside — the shrimpers themselves, the men who grew up on the boats and know the bays and the seasons and the language of the work — have not historically been the people with access to the publishing world. Mitchell Parfait is the exception. And the poems he has written from inside that world are the poems that have been missing.

The Boats Are Still Going Out

The Dulac shrimp fleet still launches every season despite everything working against it: foreign competition driving the price per pound down, rising fuel costs eating the margin, a younger generation doing the math and deciding there are easier ways to live. The men who keep going out anyway are not doing it because it makes economic sense. They are doing it because it is who they are — because the knowledge of these waters is in their bodies and the work is inseparable from the life and you do not just walk away from that because the price of white shrimp dropped.

These men and their families are the living tradition Mitchell Parfait writes about. The docks at 4am during the white shrimp season. The ice house smell. The sound of the fleet going out when the conditions are right. The specific pride of a good haul and the specific weight of a bad run. When you read DULAC POETRY, you are reading that world — the ice holds, the nets, the Gulf — rendered by the one person who grew up inside it and found a way to write it down. Poems about shrimping this specific and this honest are rare because the conditions that produce them are rare: a man from a shrimping family, in a shrimping town, who sat down and wrote it all out.

The closing image is the one that belongs to anyone who has ever stood on the Dulac waterfront in the dark hours of the morning: the shrimp boats heading out at dawn, deck lights on, the engines audible across the whole waterfront, fading slowly into the dark water until you can only see the lights — small and scattered like a constellation that moves — and then the docks go quiet and the day begins. That image is in the book. Read DULAC POETRY →

Read it alongside poems about fishing and poems about the bayou for the full picture of what Mitchell Parfait has built in DULAC POETRY. A record of a world that is still out there on the water, still going out every season, still producing the kind of life that poetry has almost never touched.