Poems About Solitude — From a Town That Is Mostly Water and Sky

Solitude Isn't Loneliness — And the Two Get Confused All the Time

Solitude gets a bad name. People hear the word and think of empty rooms, missed calls, the soft ache of being forgotten. But that's not what solitude is. That's loneliness — and the two get confused all the time.

Solitude is a creative condition. It's the quiet a poem needs in order to find you. It's the reason men in monasteries take vows of silence and the reason the best writers in the world have always lived a little outside the noise. You can't hear yourself think over a crowd. And you sure can't hear a poem.

In Dulac, Louisiana, solitude isn't a choice — it's the geography. It's a town that is mostly water and sky and quiet, where the population is small and the marsh stretches further than the road. The bayou makes poets because it forces stillness. The boat motor cuts off, the gulls settle, and what's left is your own mind.

DULAC POETRY is what came out of that quiet.

What Solitude Really Feels Like

Most poetry about solitude was written by people who had never really been alone. A weekend at a cabin. A train ride. A quiet afternoon. Then back to the city.

Real solitude has a different shape.

It's the bayou at five in the morning, before the sun comes up, when the air is so still you can hear the marsh breathe. It's the fog that rolls in off the water and erases everything past twenty feet. It's a heron standing in the shallows that doesn't move for an hour because there's no reason to. The world is paused, and you're the only person in it.

That's the landscape DULAC POETRY comes from — the place where Mitchell Parfait grew up and still works the water, where the silence isn't empty but full. Full of weather and birdsong and the particular sound water makes against an aluminum hull at dawn.

The sea has its own version of this, and so does the night sky out over the Gulf — but the bayou's solitude is different. The marsh holds you. It doesn't ask anything of you. It just lets you sit with whatever you brought with you, until the lines start coming together in your head.

Most people would call that loneliness. The truth is the opposite. It's the most company a man's thoughts ever get.

The Poems That Come Out of Quiet Places

Poems born from silence are different from poems written in noise. They carry more weight per word. They don't waste lines. They sound like they had time to settle.

Two poems in DULAC POETRY could only have been written by someone who'd had hours alone with his thoughts. “Pray” is one of them. It's not a Sunday-morning poem. It's the kind of prayer a man says to himself out on the water, when there's nobody to perform for and no preacher in the room — just him and whatever he believes in. You can read an excerpt of “Pray” here. It only sounds the way it sounds because it was written in real quiet.

The other is “Love Hurts.” It's short. It's plain. It doesn't dress up what it's saying. That kind of honesty is hard to fake — you only get to it after you've sat with the feeling long enough to stop running from it. Solitude is what makes that possible. A noisy life will let you avoid your own heart for years. A quiet one will not.

That's the whole thesis behind this book. The best poems about solitude aren't written in libraries or coffee shops. They're written by men who spend twelve-hour days on the water with nothing but their own minds for company.

Solitude and the Southern Character

There's a reason poetry hits different from a Southern man.

Down here, especially in the small Gulf Coast towns, men are taught early not to talk about what they feel. You don't tell your father you love him — you fix his truck. You don't tell your wife you're scared — you go pull a double on the boat. The whole culture runs on what isn't said.

So where does all of that go?

For some, it never goes anywhere — it just sits there until the body gives out. But for the ones lucky enough to find a pen, poetry becomes the only place that's allowed. It's the one room where a working man from the South can put down what he's been carrying without anybody calling him soft for it.

DULAC POETRY is that kind of book. It's quiet on purpose. It's solitary on purpose. Because the poems in it weren't written for an audience — they were written because the alternative was carrying it forever.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

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