Poems About the Trawl Net — Written From a Place Where the Net Comes Up Full and Empty Both

When people search for poems about the trawl net, they find the harvest image — the catch spilling onto the deck, abundance as metaphor, the Gulf as provider. That tradition is real. It's just not from the mending table. Mitchell Parfait writes from the other version — the mend, the drag, the net that came up on a snag at two in the morning. That is what DULAC POETRY carries.

What Most Trawl Net Poetry Gets Wrong

Most poetry that mentions a trawl net reaches for the obvious image: the net spread wide on the water, the catch spilling onto the deck, abundance as metaphor. The poem is usually about harvest — the Gulf as provider, the fisherman as receiver of gifts.

What that version misses is the other half of the job. The mending. The net that came up on a snag and tore twenty feet of mesh. The hour before first light when you're checking the rigging because last time one of the doors was running wrong and you lost a set. The trawl net is not just a catching tool. It's a maintenance obligation. A debt to the equipment that has to be paid before every trip.

Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac, Louisiana — last town before the marsh — in a community where the trawl net was the difference between a working boat and a boat tied to the dock. He didn't learn about the net from the outside. He learned about it from the mending table. Most trawl net poetry reaches for the harvest and misses the mend. Order Dulac Poetry on Amazon and read one that doesn't.

The Trawl Net in Dulac

In Terrebonne Parish, the trawl net is infrastructure. It's what makes the shrimp boat a shrimp boat. You don't buy one trawl net — you maintain a set of them, rotate them, know which one is fresh and which one is close to needing work.

The Isle de Jean Charles Choctaw community, the Cajun families, the Vietnamese immigrant shrimpers who moved into the parish in the 1970s — all of them ran trawl nets. The technique varies slightly between families. The mending method is passed down. You learn your grandfather's splice and you keep it.

Dulac sits at the end of LA-24, a few miles above where the road stops and the marsh takes over. The shrimp boats leave before dawn because the tides and the shrimp don't wait. The trawl net goes in and comes back. What it brings up is the question every trip is built around. That knowledge — the kind that comes from living inside that economy — is what Mitchell Parfait writes from. That is what makes Dulac Poetry on Amazon unlike anything else in the poetry canon.

Why Gulf South Trawl Net Poetry Is Different

There's a nature-writing tradition that treats the trawl net as a symbol of human impact on the ocean — the bycatch problem, the seafloor disturbance. That's a real conversation. It's just not the only one.

The Gulf South working coast has a different tradition. The trawl net is not an abstraction. It's the tool your grandfather built his livelihood around, and his grandfather before him. When the imported shrimp price dropped in the 2000s and dock prices compressed, the trawl net was what people kept anyway because the water was still there and the shrimp were still running and you don't stop doing the thing that's kept your family fed for three generations just because the economics got harder.

Mitchell Parfait writes the second version. The net that paid. The net that came up empty. The net that tore on the same snag two trips in a row and cost three hours of mending on a Tuesday night. Most Louisiana shrimping poetry writes from outside the boat. This one writes from the mending table. Read Mitchell Parfait's poetry and hear what the inside sounds like.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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The Trawl Net Poems You Haven't Read

Most poetry collections don't include these. The trawl net poems that come from inside this place don't live in the harvest image or the abundance metaphor — they live in the knowledge of people who maintained the net before they set it, who knew which snag had torn the mesh twice already and planned their set around it. These are the poems Mitchell Parfait writes — not the trawl net as symbol, but as tool, as obligation, as the thing that holds the livelihood together:

• The set at dusk when the tide turned and you ran the net two miles east of where you planned and it came up full
• The mending table on the back dock in October, needle and twine, the method your grandfather showed you, the splice that holds when nothing else will
• The trip after the season opener when every boat on the parish was running and the dock was backed up three hours and you sat on the hold with the shrimp iced down waiting
• The net that came up on a cypress stump you'd been missing for seven years and tore from the headline to the cod end — the afternoon it cost
• The last trip before the storm, the net stowed below, the boat tied up on the high side of the canal, waiting

These aren't poems about the industry. They're poems about the place — the kind that only comes from staying, from working the same grounds long enough that the snags are geography before they're a hazard. They exist because someone was there, mending, long enough to know the difference between a net that was sound and one that was close to needing work. That someone is Mitchell Parfait, writing from Dulac, Louisiana, where the trawl net was the infrastructure and the mending table was where the work really happened.

That's the trawl net in Dulac Poetry. Not the harvest image. Not the net spread wide on the water for the photograph. The mending table in October, the splice your grandfather taught you, the net that came up on a cypress stump after seven years. Most readers looking for Gulf Coast trawl net poems will find that these work differently than what they've read before — truer, more specific, harder to put down. Get the paperback or Kindle edition — $3.99 on Amazon.

What It Means to Write About the Trawl Net From Here

The trawl net is disappearing from Terrebonne Parish the same way the marsh is disappearing — slowly enough that you can pretend it isn't happening until you count the boats still running and compare it to fifteen years ago.

Isle de Jean Charles is largely gone. The families that worked those waters for generations are dispersed. The mending traditions go with them unless someone writes them down.

Mitchell Parfait grew up in Dulac with Choctaw heritage, writing from inside a community that understood the trawl net as livelihood, not symbol. The poems in Dulac Poetry are not about the Gulf South from the outside. They're from the mending table, the back deck, the hour before the net goes in when everything depends on whether you checked it right. Writing it down is how you prove the place was real. Available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.

Dulac Poetry is that record. The mending table on the back dock. The splice your grandfather showed you. The net that came up on a cypress stump after seven years and the afternoon it cost. The book is available on Amazon in paperback ($12.99) and Kindle edition for $3.99. Read alongside poems about the oyster and poems about shrimping to understand the full world Mitchell writes from. Then order the book and read the poems themselves.

DULAC POETRY — available in paperback and Kindle. Read the poems | Get Kindle edition — $3.99