Nice Fish: A Play

Mark Rylance & Louis Jenkins

NICE FISH

Copyright © 2017 by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins

Cover collage by Becca Fox Design

Cover photographs: landscape © Fotosearch/Getty;

men ice fishing © Dmitry Maslov/Bigstock

Introduction copyright © 2017 Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: October 2017

ISBN 978-0-8021-2685-6

eISBN 978-0-8021-8947-9

Grove Press

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POETRY, PROSE AND PLAY

Louis Jenkins is a prose poet and here is his description of a prose poem.

The Prose Poem

The prose poem is not a real poem, of course. One of the major differences is that the prose poet is incapable, either too lazy or too stupid, of breaking the poem into lines. But all writing, even the prose poem, involves a certain amount of skill, just the way throwing a wad of paper, say, into a wastebasket at a distance of twenty feet, requires a certain skill, a skill that, though it may improve hand-eye coordination, does not lead necessarily to an ability to play basketball. Still, it takes practice and thus gives one a way to pass the time, chucking one paper after another at the basket, while the teacher drones on about the poetry of Tennyson.

I suppose every play involves collaboration between imagination and life, poetry and prose. When I was working on this play, I used to sit on the bed of my friend James Hillman, who was dying of cancer. James had studied the psyche all of his life and we would chat about the emerging characters in this play. One day, he said to me, You know imagination exists. It is not in us. We are in it.

Autumn Leaves

‘And you call yourself a poet!’ she said, laughing, walking toward me. It was a woman I recognized, though I couldn’t remember her name. ‘Here you are on the most beautiful day of autumn … You should be writing a poem.’ ‘It’s a difficult subject to write about, the fall,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘I saw you drinking in the day, the pristine blue sky, the warm sunshine, the brilliant leaves of the maples and birches rustled slightly by the cool west wind which is the harbinger of winter. I saw how you watched that maple leaf fall. I saw how you picked it up and noted the flame color, touched here and there with bits of gold and green and tiny black spots. I’m sure that you saw in that leaf all the glory and pathos, the joy and heartache of life on earth and yet you never touched pen to paper.’ ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘most of what I write is simply made up, not real at all.’ ‘So …?’ she said.

What is this play about? I don’t know. I will be making sense of it, word by word, as you are. We have read and re-read the hundreds of poems Louis has written and selected poems and passages to stitch together like an