Poems About Venice, Louisiana

Venice, Louisiana: Where Highway 23 Ends and the River Lets Go

Highway 23 runs south from New Orleans through the whole long corridor of Plaquemines Parish, past the refineries and the citrus groves and the levee road communities strung along the east bank of the Mississippi, past Braithwaite and Boothville and Buras, until it arrives at Venice. And then it stops. There is no more road. Venice is the southernmost road-accessible community in the continental United States, and the sign at the end of Highway 23 says what the land has been saying for the last twenty miles: you have arrived at la fin du monde, the end of the world.

What the sign does not say is what you find when you get there. The Venice Marina is one of the most active sport fishing marinas on the Gulf Coast, the launching point for a charter fleet that targets marlin and yellowfin tuna and amberjack offshore and speckled trout and redfish in the inshore marshes. The docks hold the charter boats alongside the supply vessels and crew boats that service the offshore oil platforms. Helicopter pads service the rigs. The Mississippi River runs just east of town, carrying the runoff of half a continent before it splits below Venice into the passes of the Bird's Foot Delta and gives it all to the Gulf.

To be at Venice is to be at a particular kind of edge: not the emptiness of an ending, but the density of a place where everything converges. The river, the Gulf, the fishing economy, the oil industry, the people who chose the last stop on the map and stayed.

Life in Venice: Charter Boats, Oil Fields, the Bird's Foot Delta, and the People Who Came Back

The charter fishing culture of Venice is world-class in the most literal sense of that phrase. The offshore waters below the Bird's Foot Delta hold blue marlin and yellowfin tuna and amberjack in numbers that draw anglers from across the country and from abroad. The inshore marshes and shallow bays around the lower delta produce speckled trout and redfish of the kind that made Louisiana legendary among freshwater and saltwater anglers generations ago. The Venice Marina is the staging point for all of it: the offshore boats rigged for deepwater game fish running south at first light, the inshore guides working the grass flats and broken marsh before the heat settles in.

The oil and gas industry has always shared this ground. The same docks that hold the charter fleet also service the supply boats and crew vessels that run materials and workers to the offshore platforms visible on the southern horizon. Helicopter pads at Venice handle the rotary traffic that keeps the offshore operations running, the workers cycling out to the rigs and back on schedules that the fishing captains understand from their own early-morning departures. The two economies have coexisted here for decades, bound together by the same geography: the southernmost staging ground accessible by road.

Below Venice, the Mississippi River divides. Les passes, the river passes of the Bird's Foot Delta, split the main channel into multiple distributaries before it reaches the Gulf: Southwest Pass, South Pass, Pass a Loutre. Each pass carries a portion of the river's flow into the open water, and the delta continues to extend itself southward as the river deposits its load of continental sediment at the mouth. Les passes are navigational corridors and ecological zones and the final geography of the river, all at once.

Katrina nearly destroyed Venice entirely. The storm surge from the Gulf and the winds of a Category 3 hurricane at landfall hit the lower delta with a force that left most structures uninhabitable. Families who had worked this ground for generations watched their houses flood and their docks scatter. Many left for higher ground and did not return. The ones who came back rebuilt in a community that was smaller than before but held the same essential character: the charter fleet at the Marina, the oil industry logistics, the knowledge of the passes and the offshore grounds that only comes from being here for years.

Featured Poem: Venice, Louisiana

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the charter boats departing before dawn at the southernmost stop on the map, the river splitting itself into its final passes below, the oil platforms burning on the horizon, the community that rebuilt at la fin du monde because this is the only place where their particular knowledge of water and fish and wind is entirely true. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same logic holds: you stay because the place cannot be replicated anywhere further up the road.

The poem closes on three lines that hold the whole truth of Venice: This is where the river lets go. / This is where the land runs out. / The boats keep going anyway. The river does not stop at Venice. The boats do not stop at the end of the Marina. The people who rebuilt here did not stop after Katrina. The southernmost point on the map is not an ending but a launching place, the last solid ground before the open Gulf takes over.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Voice at the Edge of the Map

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water is the center of everything and the question of what endures is never abstract. His collection Dulac Poetry ranges across the small communities of coastal Louisiana, from the bayou parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche to the lower Plaquemines Parish corridor that terminates at Venice. Parfait writes from inside this geography, not as a visitor documenting the picturesque but as a poet who understands what it costs to live where the land meets the water at the very edge.

Venice fits into that work because it is the limit case: the southernmost point, the place where all the roads run out, where the river finally gives up its volume to the Gulf. The charter fishing captains who leave the Marina before dawn carry the same accumulated knowledge as the shrimping families of Dulac: where the fish hold, what the weather will do, how to read the water in the dark. That knowledge is specific to this ground and cannot be reproduced elsewhere. Dulac Poetry is where it finds its voice.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon collects this Gulf Coast work: the poems of endurance and staying, written from inside the communities that most American poetry has never thought to name, by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana who knows what it means to live at the difficult edge and call it home.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Discover Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If Venice holds you: the end of Highway 23, the charter boats leaving the Marina before the sky turns, the river dissolving into its passes below the Bird's Foot Delta, the oil platforms burning on the southern horizon, the community that rebuilt at the literal end of the map because this is the only place where their knowledge of the water is entirely true. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside. Written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the Gulf Coast knowledge of staying at the difficult edge has been lived for generations.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the end of the road, the Bird's Foot Delta, and the Gulf South communities that live where the land lets go.

Find more poems about lower Plaquemines Parish at Boothville, Ironton, Happy Jack, Naomi, and Phoenix. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Venice, Louisiana, the southernmost road-accessible community in the continental United States, at the end of Highway 23 in Plaquemines Parish, where the charter boats leave the Marina before dawn, the Mississippi River splits into its final passes below the Bird's Foot Delta, and the people who stayed after Katrina hold the last place on the map. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.