Poems About Small Towns — From a Bayou Town That Made a Poet

What a Small Town Actually Is (When You Live in One)

People who didn't grow up in a small town tend to romanticize them. They think of front porches and Friday night football and a little white church on a hill. Some of that's real. Most of it isn't the part that matters.

What matters is the hardware store where your grandfather's name is still on the account, even though he's been gone for years and the new owner just hasn't had the heart to take it down. What matters is the diner where the waitress pours your coffee before you sit down because she's poured it the same way for fifteen years. What matters is the gravel road that means you're almost home — the one that turns from blacktop to crushed shell, and the moment your tires hit it, your shoulders drop an inch.

Small towns aren't charming to the people who live in them. They're everything. They're the whole map. They're where you learned what work looks like, what loss looks like, what a neighbor is, and how long a Sunday can be in August. They're not somewhere you visit. They're somewhere that gets inside you and never leaves.

That's what these poems about small towns are written from. Not the postcard. The inside. Read DULAC POETRY on Amazon and you'll feel the difference on the first page.

Dulac, Louisiana: The Most Specific Small Town on the Gulf

If you've never heard of Dulac, that's the point.

Dulac, Louisiana is a small bayou town on the Gulf Coast — a stretch of fishing camps, shrimp boats, oak trees full of moss, and people who have been there long enough that the cemetery is mostly cousins. It's not on the way to anywhere. The road in is the road out. You can drive the whole town in fifteen minutes, and you can spend a lifetime in it without ever running out of things to know.

It's the kind of place that doesn't make the news and doesn't need to. It makes people instead.

Mitchell Parfait grew up there. Not “south of somewhere.” Not “near the coast.” Dulac, Louisiana. A water town in a state that's slowly losing its land to the Gulf, where every family has at least one boat, at least one shrimp pot in the yard, and at least one story about a hurricane that took the porch and left the kitchen. A town where the church and the dock and the diner are within walking distance of each other because there isn't anywhere else for them to be.

Most small town America poems are written by people who left small towns and looked back from a city. Mitchell's poems are written from inside one. From the kitchen table. From the bow of a boat at four in the morning. From a pew on a Sunday when half the families in attendance share a last name. That's why they read different. They aren't observing the town. They're remembering it the way you remember your own breath.

If you want to read more about how this specific place becomes the language of the work, see Cajun Poetry & Sense of Place and Poems About the South. Order the paperback here — it ships in two days.

What Mitchell's Poetry Captures About Small Town Life

Anyone can write poems about growing up in a small town. The hard part is writing them without flattening them. Without turning real people into postcards. Without making your hometown sound like a country song someone wrote in a Nashville office building.

Mitchell's poems work because they don't reach for the sentimental beat. They reach for the specific one.

They capture the textures of place — the particular smell of a rain that's been working up over the marsh all afternoon, the sound a screen door makes that's been on the same hinges for fifty years, the way the light hits the bayou at five in the morning when the boats are warming up. The details a tourist would never notice and a local would never forget. (More on the work itself in working-man poetry.)

They capture the community — the unspoken rules of how a small town actually operates. Who you wave at and who you stop for. Whose name you don't say at the grocery store. Which family fixes which kind of motor. Which aunts you visit at Easter and which you don't. Small-town life isn't simple. It's just close. Every relationship is layered with thirty years of knowing.

They capture the memory — what it means to live somewhere your grandparents lived, and their grandparents before them. The weight of a place that's been holding your family for a hundred and fifty years. Poetry about community in a town like Dulac isn't a literary move. It's literal. The community is the subject. The community is the line.

And they capture the leaving and the staying — the truth that every small town has two kinds of people, the ones who left and the ones who didn't, and both of them are still arguing with the place inside their heads. (See also Poems About Home for more on the pull of where you come from.)

You can read a sample of the work on the excerpt page and hear the voice for yourself.

Why You'll Recognize This Book Even If You've Never Heard of Dulac

If you grew up in a town that nobody else has heard of, you already know what these poems are about.

You already know the gravel road. You already know what your last name means in the only place it's ever really meant anything. You already know what it feels like to sit at a kitchen table that's seen four generations of supper. Poetry about rural America doesn't need to explain itself to a reader who lived it — it just needs to ring true, and that's what Mitchell's poems do.

And if you didn't grow up in a town like that — if you grew up in a city, in a suburb, in a place where neighbors don't know each other's last names — these are the poems about where you grew up that you wish you had. Read them anyway. They'll show you what you were missing.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait is available now on Amazon. A small bayou town. A poet who never had to leave to know what he had. Some of the truest small town poetry being written in America right now.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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