A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO COWBOY POETRY, OR, WHOS THE GUY IN THE BIG HAT AND WHAT IS HE TALKING

ABOUT?
Long, long ago in a land called Texas, unemployed soldiers from the recent War Between the States rounded up herds of wild cattle and
trailed them north to feed a hungry nation. Evenings along the way, as the sun set romantically in the west, the boys gathered and,
accompanied by a crackling fire and the howl of coyotes, recited for one another rhymes composed during long hours in the saddle, set to the
rhythms of creaking leather, rattling dewclaws, and drumming hoofbeats. Being illiterate, these poets of the prairies passed their recitations
from mouth to ear, ear to mouth, mouth to ear, all down the generations in an unbroken oral chain. Still today, these roughshod rhymes are
recited wherever folks in wide-brim hats and high-top boots gather. And so goes the story called Cowboy Poetry.

Its a touching story, the stuff of legends. Which it is, mostly. While seasoned with truth, as legends often are, the real story of our folk art is
more complex and less romantic, but equally intriguing.
No doubt poetry played a part in the leisure time activities of trail drivers way back when and, later, in roundup camps and ranch
bunkhouses. As Will James wrote in Cow Country (in an observation made some 50 years after the end of the trail drive era), Then in the
evenings thered be songs, old trailherd songs that some used to sing. There was even poetry at times, made right there at the cow camp.
(James, 228)
Poetry, on such occasions, to hear James tell it, played second fiddle to singing. Jack Thorp and John Lomax, often credited as the earliest
collectors of cowboy verse, first and most often gathered songs. It can be argued, of course, that poems were often set to music as songs and
song lyrics recited as poetry. Likely so. As David Stanley writes in Cowboy Poetry Then and Now in the book he edited with Elaine
Clark, Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry, The distinction between poem and songhas never been of much moment to working
cowboys. (Stanley, 3)
ILLITERATE, OR LITERATI?
Stanley makes another important point that the widespread Victorian affection for parlor and publicoften schoolhouserecitations was
equally loved around cowboy campfires and chuckwagons, and included a mass of popular poetry from Shakespeare to Stephen Vincent
BentRudyard Kipling and Robert W. Service. (Stanley, 3)

The use of these poetsand, likely, others popular at the time such as Poe and Longfellow, Emerson and Burnsgives lie to the popular
notion of the illiterate cowboy. Stanley, again, tells us that Many cowboys of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been well
read, sometimes astonishingly so, and that Cowboy poetry has been primarily the province of literate people since the first publication of
poems in western newspapers in the 1870s. (Stanley, 4)

So, while always something of an oral tradition, born in an era when memorization and recitation were valued, cowboy poetry is, and always
was, a literary or written tradition as wellprobably more so.

And its a good thing. The few cowboy poems that survive from the nineteenth century, particularly those, as Will James described it, made
right there at the cow camp, would have disappeared (especially those composed by the great poet Anonymous) without collectors like the
aforementioned Jack Thorp and John Lomax who put them in print.

Thorp, in 1908, published a 50-page collection of verses embracing, he said, most of the songs as sung by the old-time cowpunchers,
gathered from the cow camps of the different states and territories. He wrote, I plead ignorant of the authorship of them. (Thorp, i)
Lomax published two similar but more ambitious works: Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910 and Songs of the Cattle
Trail and Cow Camp in 1919. A Texas native and Harvard-educated folklorist, he spent several months horseback riding hundreds of miles
gathering material for his anthologies. Some entries are not attributed, but Lomax credits authorssometimes erroneouslyof most of the
verses in his anthologies.
Important and enduring though they are, these books are actually latecomers to the publication of cowboy poetry. Guy Logsdon, writing
in Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry, lists a number of newspapers published in trail towns in the 1880s and says all of them printed
cowboy poems and songs. According to Logsdon, Western Travels and Other Rhymes, written by Texas cowboy Lysius Gough and
published in Dallas in 1886, is the earliest known book of cowboy poetry. The first major collection of cowboy poetry, Logsdon says, is
William Lawrence Larry Chittendens 1893 publication Ranch Verses. (Logsdon, 54-6)
Some of Chittendens work, and poems from the Thorp and Lomax anthologies are still recited today, as are a few other nineteenth century
poets, including D. J. OMalley. But much, probably most, of the old-time cowboy poetry recited at todays gatherings and collected in recent
anthologies is from a later era, long after the legendary trail drive days. And, again giving lie to the legend, much of this favored verse was
written by men with tenuous connections to the workaday cowboy world.

COWBOY POETRYS CLASSIC ERA

The Golden Age or Classic Era of cowboy poetry occupied, roughly, the first half of the twentieth century, with many of its most popular
practitioners surviving well past that. Heres a partial roll call of names familiar in cowboy poetry circles, accompanied by a brief description
of their cowboy credentials. (By no means definitive, the list does include enough names to allow those who memorize it to fake their way
through an otherwise intelligent conversation on cowboy poetry.)

E. A. Brininstool wrote thousands of cowboy poems, some collected in a 1914 book, Trail Dust of a Maverick. Born in New York in 1870, he
spent most of his life in Los Angeles as journalist, freelance writer, and Western historian.
Another transplant, Arthur Chapman, wrote the renowned Out Where the West Begins:

Out where the handclasps a little stronger,

Out where the smile dwells a little longer,
Thats where the West begins;
Out where the sun is a little brighter,
Where the snows that fall are trifle whiter,
Where the bonds of home are a wee bit tighter,
Thats where the West begins.

Out where the skies are a trifle bluer,

Out where friendships a little truer,
Thats where the West begins;
Out where a fresher breeze is blowing,
Where theres laughter in every streamlet flowing,
Where theres more of reaping and less of sowing,
Thats where the West begins.

Out where the world is in the making,

Where fewer hearts in despair are aching,
Thats where the West begins;
Where theres more of singing and less of sighing,
Where theres more of giving and less of buying,
And a man makes friends without half trying
Thats where the West begins.

Chapmans observations were not made from horsebackborn in Illinois in 1873, he learned the Western ways he loved and praised during
his many years working as a newspaperman in Denver.

Henry Herbert Knibbs, born in 1874, might have witnessed the trail herds had he grown up somewhere other than Ontario, Canada.
Nonetheless, he is author of numerous acclaimed cowboy poems including the reverential Where the Ponies Come to Drink as well as
Boomer Johnson, which takes a decidedly irreverent tone as demonstrated in this stanza:

Now Mr. Boomer Johnson was a gettin old in spots,

But you dont expect a bad man to go wrastlin pans and pots;
But hed done his share of killin and his draw was gettin slow,
So he quits a-punchin cattle and he takes to punchin dough.

Knibbs eventually made it to the West in 1910, lived in California, and spent a good deal of time wandering the Southwest soaking up, as a
talented observer, the cowboy life. By the time he died in 1945, Knibbs had written widely about the West, including poetry, and has enjoyed
respect and admiration in cowboy poetry circles despite being an outsider.

Robert V. Carr is another cowboy poet of the Golden Age who came by his knowledge of cowboy life through observation. Born in South
Dakota in 1877, he lived for a time among the Sioux Indians and worked as a prospector, soldier, and reporter.

Born in 1878 in Pennsylvania, Bruce Kiskaddon moved west and by 1898 was a working cowboy. He rode for various ranches throughout the
Southwest and, for a time, in Australia. Most of his poetry was penned after Kiskaddon moved to California seeking riches in the movie
business. Instead, he spent most of his time working as a hotel elevator operator and writing poems, which, for years, appeared monthly
in Western Livestock Journal. An always popular, and always emotional, recitation is Kiskaddons When Theyve Finished Shipping Cattle
in the Fall. Heres an excerpt:
Then you watch the stars a shinin
Up there in the soft blue linin
And you sniff the frosty night air clear and cool.
You can hear the night hoss shiftin
And your memory starts a driftin
To the little village where you went to school.
With its narrow gravel streets
And the kids you used to meet,
And the common where you used to play baseball.
Now youre far away and draggin
To the home ranch with the wagon
For theyve finished shippin cattle in the fall.

Nearly as popular with Western audiences is the knowing open-range poem, The Little Blue Roan. The climactic stanzas are:

The hoss he was usin his eyes and his ears

And I figgered right now there was somebody near.
He seemed to be watchin a bunch of pinon,
And I shore took a hint from that little blue roan.

Instead of my brand, well, I run on another.

I used the same brand that was on the calf s mother.
I branded her right pulled her up by the tail
With a kick in the rump for to make the brute sail.
I had branded her proper and marked both her ears,
When out of the pinons two cow men appears.

Other oft-recited Kiskaddon favorites include Alone, It Might Have Been Me or It Might Have Been You, and The Old Night Hawk;
space forbids listing more of this popular poets works.

Second only, perhaps, to Bruce Kiskaddon in the hearts of cowboy poets is Charles Badger Clark, born in Iowa in 1883. His preacher father
moved the family to South Dakota during Badgers first year, and there he lived most of his life. He lived for a time as caretaker on an Arizona
ranch while seeking relief from tuberculosis, but was not a cowboy although he admired the cowboy life and loved the men who lived it. He
wrote numerous popular poems including Ridin, From Town, A Border Affair, The Glory Trail, The Legend of Boastful Bill and
many others. Clark earned much of his living as an adult as a lecturer and speaker, and often included poetry in his presentations.

Carmen William Curley Fletcher, author of the timeless poem-turned-song The Strawberry Roan, was born in San Francisco in 1892. He
was an authentic cowboy, with experience on both ranches and in the rodeo arena, and worked, as well, as a miner and musician.

Especially prolific was S. Omar Barker, who authored some 1,200 articles, 1,500 short stories, and 2,000 poems. Although of limited, if any,
working cowboy experience, the school teacher, college professor, then full-time freelance writer said he was raised among the cowfolks of
New Mexico, where he was born in 1894. Many of his poems are still popular, including A Cowboys Christmas Prayer and the hilarious
Jack Potters Courtin which includes this stanza:

Im just a humble cowhand,

Miss Cordie if you please,
That hereby asks your heart and hand,
upon my bended knees!
It sounded mighty simple
thus rehearsed upon the trail,
But when he come to Cordies house,
his words all seemed to fail.

Two other names bear mention, although not cowboy poets in the strictest sense of the word. Residents of Australia and practitioners of a
similar tradition called Bush Poetry, A. B. Banjo Paterson and Will Ogilvie wrote poems that speak to cowboys still today. Paterson, born
in 1864, wrote the classic poem The Man From Snowy River as well as American favorite Clancy of the Overflow and others. In his native
land the lawyer, journalist, and farmer is best remembered for writing Waltzing Matilda. Ogilivie, a Scotsman born in 1869, spent a decade
working in Australia breaking horses and as station hand and droverthe Australian equivalents of a ranch cowboy. The Hoofs of the
Horses and The Pearl of Them All are often recited at cowboy poetry gatherings.

The so-called Golden Age of cowboy poetry to which those gentlemen, and others, lent their talents kept its glitterevidenced by the
appearance of cowboy and western poems in numerous magazines and newspapers, along with the publication of several popular collections
in book formuntil World War II or thereabouts. The art never disappeared, but it may as well have. During the ensuing drought, cowboys
who wrote poems worked largely in isolation, many of them claiming they never realized there were others doing what they did. Public
performance was rare, publication infrequent.

THE REDISCOVERY OF A FORGOTTEN ART

Until 1985, when everything changed.

Thats the year a few folklorists, led by Hal Cannon and Jim Griffith, put together the first cowboy poetry gathering in Elko, Nevada.
Folklorists throughout the West scoured cattle ranches and rodeo arenas, bunkhouses and bars in search of cowboys who recited and wrote
poems about the life they lived. A handful were invited to the high-desert cowtown to recite their own compositions and classic poems for a
few hundred onlookers.

The idea took hold like a lariat dallied hard around a saddle horn. The eventofficially designated by Congress as the National Cowboy
Poetry Gathering but known in cowboy poetry circles simply as Elkocelebrates its 25th anniversary in January, 2009. Nowadays, the
audiences number in the thousands. Concurrent sessions on several stages go on for days, with cowboy lingo rolling over enthusiastic crowds
like a tumbleweed stampede. Poets by the hundreds apply for the privilege of performing in Elko, with aspiring poets lining up to appear in
open-mic sessions where supply far outpaces demand.

But poets not given the opportunity to stand on cowboy poetrys biggest stage in Elko dont have to look far for an alternative. Hundreds of
gatherings and similar events are scattered across the West like so many cattle. Some are small-town Grange Hall affairs, others occupy bigcity auditoriums. Audiences range from a few friends and family members to crowds that rival those in Elko. From Pincher Creek to Pigeon

Forge, Santa Clarita to San Angelo, Medora to Moab, aficionados of the art can feed the habit practically any weekend of the year at any one
of a number of cowboy poetry troughs.

PERFORMANCE, PUBLISHING, AND PATTERNS

But enough, already, about where it came from and where it is. What, exactly, is this cowboy poetry?

The simplest answer is probably to say its poetry that springs from the workaday world of the cowboy. (More on that later.) But thats too
simplistic an answer to encompass what cowboy poetry was, let alone what it is, never mind where its going.

Today, its best known and most appreciated in oral recitation, even as performance art. And while recitation has always been part of the
tradition, in modern times it has overwhelmed the printed word. Where Curley Fletcher and Badger Clark produced books, todays poets are
more likely to cut a CD. Where Bruce Kiskaddon had Western Livestock Journal to disseminate his verses to a mass audience, we now have
Clear Out West (COW) Radio and Red Steagalls Cowboy Corner spewing poetry over the airwaves.
Not that the written word doesnt play a role. Slick magazines edited for Western-enthusiast audiencessuch as American Cowboy,
Western Horseman, and Rangetreat readers to cowboy poetry on occasion. Many poets still publish books, often to hawk during public
performances. And CowboyPoetry.com caters to millions of online readers with an ever-growing offering of thousands of poems accompanied
by numerous related features of interest.
But back to the poetry itself. Given the preferences of the day, virtually all cowboy poetry from the early days and the classic period
conformed to conventional patterns of rhyme and meter. Owing, perhaps, to its association with song and to facilitate memorization, most
poems use the ballad form or variations thereof. Four-line stanzas with an a-b-c-b, a-a-b-b, or a-b-a-b rhyme scheme are common, and end
stops are the norm.

The list of cowboy poets who write and rhyme beautifully in the traditional style is too extensive to include here. Standoutsat least in my
mind include Baxter Black, Red Steagall, Doris Daley, Wallace McRae, Virginia Bennett, Pat Richardson, and Joel Nelson. A particular
favorite rhymer of mine is Bob Schild, who demonstrates his chops in these stanzas from The Maverick Bull:

The old bulls speed defied his age.

I tracked him on, through rocks and sage.
But when I thought him ripe to cage,
Hed up and write another page.

Who wins success, failure defies.

The sprint through life, one lives or dies.
Enduring all this tale implies,
I roped him deep below the eyes.

Afraid to miss. . .jerked in the slack,

Then laid it neatly oer his back,
Spun safe three dallies on my kack,
An dropped him like a rifles crack.

While the typical form can, and often does, produce beautiful results, in hands of lesser skill the outcome is often sing-songy and
monotonous, with syntax twisted and rhymes shoehorned uncomfortably into the pattern. And while skilled writers pay careful attention to
meter, many cowboy poetstoo manywouldnt know a trochee if it was crawling around inside their bedroll. Which means that meter is
often inconsistent and sometimes mangled beyond recognition.

Careful writing is, I believe, a casualty of the emphasis on recitation. Mistakes in rhyme and meter are detectable to the listening ear, but they
pass by at the speed of sound, soon forgotten in the stream of words. Lapses on the printed page, however, will stare back at both writer and
reader in unforgiving permanence, thereby encouraging greater care in composition.

More adventurous, more talented poets soon tire of the limitations of the traditional form and venture into more complexity. Badger Clark
is, for my money, the best writer among poets of the Golden Age. Many of his poems depart from the ballad style to encompass more
inventive patterns of rhyme, more intricate metrical designs, often employing a different rhyme and meter scheme in alternating stanzas to
emphasize changes in thought, voice, setting, or other abrupt shifts. Demonstrative of his artful ways is Ridin:

There is some that like the city

Grass thats curried smooth and green,
Theaytres and stranglin collars,
Wagons run by gasoline
But for me its hawse and saddle
Every day without a change,
And a desert sun a-blazin
On a hundred miles of range.

Just a-ridin, a-ridin

Desert ripplin in the sun,
Mountains blue along the skyline
I dont envy anyone
When Im ridin.
When my feet is in the stirrups
And my hawse is on the bust,
With his hoofs a-flashin lightnin
From a cloud of golden dust,
And the bawlin of the cattle
Is a-comin down the wind
Then a finer life than ridin
Would be mighty hard to find.

Just a-ridin, a-ridin

Splittin long cracks through the air,
Stirrin up a baby cyclone,
Rippin up the prickly pear
As Im ridin.
I dont need no art exhibits
When the sunset does her best,
Paintin everlastin glory
On the mountains to the west
And your opery looks foolish
When the night bird starts his tune
And the deserts sliver-mounted
By the touches of the moon.

Just a-ridin, a-ridin,

Who kin envy kings and czars
When the coyotes down the valley
Are a-singin to the stars,
If hes ridin?
When my earthly trail is ended
And my final bacon curled
And the last great roundups finished
At the Home Ranch of the world
I dont want no harps or haloes,
Robes nor other dressed up things
Let me ride the starry ranges
On a pinto hawse with wings!

Just a-ridin, a-ridin

Nothin Id like half so well
As a-roundin up the sinners
That have wandered out of Hell,
And a-ridin.

A modern classic, perhaps the finest cowboy poem ever, is the late Buck Ramseys epic Grass or And As I Rode Out on the Morning. The
book-length poem not only retells familiar cowboy stories with a fresh voice and intensity, it does so in a form unique in cowboy poetrya
stanza scheme, Ramsey says in the books original edition, from Pushkin. (Ramsey, 64) This is a stanza from the segment of the poem
called Anthem:

It was the old ones with me riding

Out through the fog fall of the dawn,
And they would press me to deciding
If we were right or we were wrong.
For time came we were punching cattle
For men who knew not spur nor saddle,
Who came with locusts in their purse
To scatter loose upon the earth.
The savage had not found this prairie
Till some who hired us came this way
To make the grasses pay and pay
For some raw greed no wise or wary
Regard for grass could satisfy.
The old ones wept, and so did I.

Many, many other poets today experiment with meter, often importing forms from outside the genre and emulating or imitating them in
composing a cowboy poem. I have heard and seen limericks (who hasnt?), rap-style, sonnets, haiku, and other forms attempted by buckaroo
bards.

Cowboy poets and cowboy poetry audiences, it seems, tend to accept metrical patterns that depart from the norm (if for no other reason than
they havent the inclination or lack the ability to scan for meter) so long as they can sense the rhythm and hear the rhyme.

THE RIGHTS AND WRONGS OF RHYMES

Rhyme, you see, is a sticky issue in cowboy poetry circles.

Many writers insist that every rhyme mustmustbe a strict rhyme, with exactly corresponding vowel and consonant sounds in the final
syllable of the rhyming words. No exceptions. Slant rhyme, they say, is a sign of laziness or sloppy writing. Never mind the fact that it is easily
demonstrated that the best poets of the classic era of cowboy poetry used slant rhyme effectively, even in poems these strict-rhyme
exclusivists revere, even recite.

Which brings us to the related, if larger, problem of free verse.

(Let me pause here for a moment to mention that I am fully aware that free verse is defined by lack of meter, and that rhyme is sometimes
employed in free verse. But, Im sure you will agree, most free verse does not use rhyme, and that most anyone you askpoet or otherwise
will say that free verse is poetry that doesnt rhyme.)

There is considerable controversy concerning free verse cowboy poetry. A goodly number of folks will not even admit such a thing exists.
Plain and simple, poetry that doesnt rhyme isnt poetry. Some events wont allow free verse poets to recite on their stages and exclude them
without apology, even with braggadocio.

Yet free verse plays an important roles in todays cowboy poetry, like it or not. And its not likely to go away anytime soon, nor are the poets
who produce it. Rancher, poet, editor, and publisher John Dofflemyer was an early proponent, promoter, and practitioner. Red Shuttleworth
has enjoyed critical success and literary acclaim with free verse poetry, as has Laurie Wagner Buyer, as have others, and their work has
inspired more cowboy poets to attempt free verse.

But, in a larger sense, Elko may be the biggest reason for the continuing, if not universal, acceptance of free verse cowboy poetry. Unlike most
gatherings, the National Cowboy Gathering staff at the Western Folklife Center makes an effort to ensure that performers come with at least a
semblance of legitimate cowboy credentials. Each must demonstrate some experience at ranch work, rodeo, horse training, or other cowboyrelated occupations to satisfy an expectation that it lends authenticity to the reciters and the event. (Interestingly, some of the classic cowboy
poets whose work is regularly recited at Elko would not qualify!)

So, when a Great Basin buckaroo like Rod McQueary, an experienced rodeo hand like Paul Zarzyski, a ranch woman like Linda Hasselstrom,
or a ranch hand like D.W. Groethe chooses to describe the cowboy life in words that dont rhyme (or meter) its difficult to argue convincingly
that what theyre doing isnt cowboy poetry. And yet some try. In an essay in the book Cowboy Poetry Matters, Zarzyski describes his
skittishness when first presenting free verse poetry at an early Elko gathering: I understood then, and still understand, how hard-core
cowboy poetry audiences pay staunch allegiance to, and take great pride in, the tradition. Which means rhyme and meter. He goes on to
describe squint-through-rawhide John Wayne clones who warn, It dont rhyme, it aint po-tree. But he was surprised at the warm, if not
sometimes wild, western welcome his free verse recitations received. (Zarzyski, 245)
WHAT ITS ABOUT, AND WHY WE CARE
Zarzyskis tale, and his work, leads us to another aspect of cowboy poetry that deserves attention here: subject matter. Earlier, our simplistic
definition of the genre described it as poetry about the workaday world of the cowboy. And, for the most part, that shoe (or boot) fits. Poems
about horses and cattle, roping and riding, buckoffs and wrecks, are common. The Western landscape, ranch life, bunkhouse lies, tall tales,
cowdogs, denigrating stories about sheep and sheepherders canand willbe heard at any and every gathering. Laments and eulogies about
the vanishing way of life in the West have been penned from cowboy poetrys earliest days and still are. Sappy sentiment is widespread, as is
deep and true emotion. Hilarious tales are told as often as the latest lame jokes set to rhyme. Cowboy life is rich with possibilities, and while
some subjects get tiresome at times, theres always the chance that someone will sound off with a fresh way of looking at a familiar subject.

But cowboy poetry doesnt end with cowboy poems. Theres a famous sayingthe origin of which, if I ever knew, I dont recallthat any
poem a cowboy likes is a cowboy poem. Which explains the popularity of poems and poets that dont always conform to the norm. Which
brings us back to Zarzyski, who has written about racism and the Holocaust. Wallace McRae has made poems about environmentalism and
strip mining, Rod McQueary about war, D.W. Groethe about romantic spiritual connections, Doris Daley about answering machines and
acronyms, Pat Richardson about ducks, Red Shuttleworth about outlaw ghosts and running naked through the front yard, and on and on. The
non cowboy world is often as interesting to cowboys as their own, and they like poems about it.

In summary, while sometimes denigrated as doggerel, dismissed as mere folk art, and decried for sins as varied as using rhyme and meter (or
not) and vernacular vocabulary, if you listen closely cowboy poetry can be heard to say, tell somebody who cares. Cowboys like to write it.
Cowboys like to read it. Cowboys like to recite it. Cowboys like to listen to it. And everyone everyonewho reads this issue of Rattle wanted
to be a cowboy at one time or another. And most likely, deep down, still wants to. So enjoy some cowboy poetry. It may be as close as youll
get.