I first ‘met’ Louis Jenkins in 2016 when the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge staged ‘Nice Fish’ an adaptation of his prose poems written by and starring Mark Reylance and with Jenkins playing a small role.  “Nice Fish” was the title of his 1995 collection of prose poems, one of 19 volumes produced by this Minnesotan.  Reylance, a perennial Tony and Oscar nominee and winner, encountered Jenkins’ poems after being introduced to ice fishing during a run when he played Peer Gynt at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.  The play had successful runs at the Guthrie, the ART, and the Harold Pinter Theater in London being nominated for an Olivier at the latter.  Reylance clearly was taken with Jenkins quoting several of his poems instead of offering the usual thank you’s when he took to the stage to accept his Tony and Drama Desk Awards in 2008 and 2011.  I wish I’d seen those!

Jenkins is a fascinating guy because of his ordinariness that he turned into remarkably funny and thought-provoking prose poems.  Living near Lake Superior, married for nearly 50 years, and never a faculty member at any university, and never the winner of any of poetry’s major awards, Jenkins achieved minor fame through his frequent appearances on Prairie Home Companion and The Writer’s Almanac. He died in 2019 at 77.

This volume is full of gems, described in his brief bio in the Poetry Foundation’s web site as “… brief, accessible prose poems (that) use humor, wry observation, and hypothesis to tease out the absurdity of everyday situations. In his poems, Jenkins maintained a tight focus on the mundane particularities of ordinary existence, using deliberately flat language to comic and often heartbreaking effect.”

I can’t improve on that description but would observe that this collection of poems written over 35 years demonstrates how a poet can refine and sharpen his skill over time.  The later poems are far superior to the earlier ones as Jenkins faced aging, the loss of friends, and his own declining health and mental capacity.

I read these poems with my usual sharp Blackwing pencil which gradually lost its point as I constantly circled, underlined, and made one to four check marks in the margins as is my practice.  So many poems made me smile, laugh, or re-read a particularly clever or insightful line.

“Regret” is  one brief example that demonstrates his sense of humor used to highlight the impermanence of life and the fleeting presence and unimportance of any single one of us:

Regret