A short history of the poetry of the American West
By B.S. | SAN FRANCISCO
APRIL is National Poetry Month in the United States. Alongside all the readings, festivals and workshops, one much-loved offshoot is Cowboy Poetry Week, now in its 13th year, which takes place from the 20th to the 26th. (Lots of events are listed here.)
Cowboy poetry is just what you might expect: metered verses and songs written and performed by cowboys and Native Americans, most of whom live in the western United States. Writers do not actually have to be farmhands or ranchers to qualify as cowboy poets; it is enough just to share a fondness for the ways of the West. However, experience with the workaday Western lifestyle does bestow a certain authority on solitary, plainspoken artists who focus on describing the beauty of the mountains and open plains, and the frustrations of modern-day cattle ranching. Some of the most famous cowboy poets, including Baxter Black (pictured on the left) and Waddie Mitchell (on the right), are ranchers, veterinarians and tradespeople specialising in silversmithing, rawhide braiding, beadwork and leather tooling.
Rod Miller writes in Rattle, a poetry journal, that the first half of the 20th century was a "golden age" of cowboy poetry. But the tradition dates back to the early days on the Western frontier when folk stories were usually preserved orally. By the 20th century, chroniclers were hard at work collecting snippets from frontier newspapers. After compiling poems and songs for several decades, Jack Thorp, a cattleman and poet, published his seminal anthology, "Songs of the Cowboy", in 1908. John Lomax, a Harvard-educated folklorist, is also credited with preserving many 19th-century cowboy poems and range songs in his anthology from 1910, "Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads", and in "Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp", published nine years later.
Today, cowboy poetry gatherings provide a focal point for practitioners and supporters of the art. Regional meetings take place throughout the year in states including Colorado, Texas and Montana. Annual events such as the Saddle Up Celebration in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and the Cochise Cowboy Poetry and Music Gathering in south-west Arizona rely on a loyal fan base. The best known of these is the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, held in Elko, a small mining and ranching town in Nevada. This festival celebrated its 30th anniversary this year, in February, with performers ranging in age and experience from teenage slam poets to wizened cattlemen croaking out a few choruses. (There are other examples of solitary tradespeople who write verse and convene to share their work, including fisher poets.)
Cowboy poetry overlaps with a variety of folk and Western genres of music and literature. The cowboy poets who make their primary living as performers also take the stage at country-music venues such as the Grand Ole Opry, on radio programmes including "A Prairie Home Companion" and on mainstream American talk shows. For years, Mr Black worked as a commentator on National Public Radio, weighing in on topics such as the connotation—negative or positive—of references to George W. Bush as the "cowboy president". Considering that stereotype holds cowboys to be plainspoken, hardworking and quick on the draw, Mr Black concluded that it all depends on what virtues the public values most in a leader. Last year farmers and cowboy performers including Wylie Gustafson leapt into the limelight when they appeared in an advertisement for Dodge during the Superbowl. Kurt Markus, whose cowboy portraits and photos of American farm life have been included in several monographs, shot many of the photographs used in the advertisement.
Speaking slowly and in rhyming verse may seem like a difficult way for a tough, no-nonsense contemporary poet of the plains to be taken seriously—especially if he speaks from underneath a Stetson and behind an imposing moustache. Indeed some cowboy poetry does feel like a throwback to another era. But that’s also what’s so refreshing about the genre and its passionate performers: the sheer lack of pretence. Hats off to that.
Correction: Cowboy Poetry Week is now in its 13th year, not its 30th as we originally wrote. This was corrected on April 20th 2014.
