Cowboy Poetry Research Articles

Cowboy poetry: finding and using safe venues for emotional expression.

Mental health problems still carry heavy stigma in rural communities. Sometimes a person suffering a mental, emotional, or behavioral health issue won't seek care for fear of others knowing about their personal issues. Historically, some rural communities created safe venues for emotional expression. One example is cowboy poetry, which allowed the cowboy poet to express sadness, disappointment and heartache in a safe environment. There is an opportunity for rural communities to imagine and reimagine safe venues for mental, emotional, and behavioral health; maybe cowboy poetry, maybe other ways to connect. Today, it is crucial for rural communities to do all they can to address mental health in the usual clinic settings, and by creating other safe venues for emotional expression.

James S. Griffith: Remembering “Big Jim” (1935–2021)

James S. Griffith: Remembering “Big Jim” (1935–2021)

Review Essay: Poet in the Public Arena

Review Essay: Poet in the Public Arena

Talking Machine West: A History and Catalogue of Tin Pan Alley’s Western Recordings, 1902–1918. American Popular Music Series. By Michael A. Amundson

Music historians generally agree that the first recording of a western or “cowboy” song was “Jesse James” by concert singer Bentley Ball in 1919, while Carl Sprague, who waxed “When the Work’s All Done this Fall” in 1925, was the first authentic cowboy to record. In this new book, Michael A. Amundson explores the phonograph industry’s earlier recordings of western-themed material. This material sprang from the pens of professional songwriters based in New York and the performances were by vaudeville performers such as Billy Murray, Ada Jones, and Len Spencer, none of whom had experience in the West beyond singing in regional theaters. Talking Machine West is divided into three sections. The first discusses the author’s engagement with popular music history, exploring early recording equipment and processes with a focus on cylinder recordings. Next, Amundson provides an overview of the early recording industry, the idea of the West in popular culture, and places western themed recordings within that context. Important factors in emergence of popular images of the West are Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, western tourism, and influence of Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Jackson Turner. Equally important in the writing of popular music was the rise of blackface minstrel and ethnic imagery. These factors merge into an examination of the songs and recordings themselves. Amundson is particularly adept at outlining the types of songs represented in the catalogue “including cowboy poetry, western skits, cowboy songs, love songs, Indian songs, Wild West show songs, cowgirl songs, and both cowboy and Indian ragtime dance songs” (p. 45). Racial and ethnic attitudes, common on the early twentieth-century American stage, find discussion and show that Western compositions were not immune to those trends.

Shaping a World Already Made: Landscape and Poetry of the Canadian Prairies by Carl J. Tracie

Reviewed by: Shaping a World Already Made: Landscape and Poetry of the Canadian Prairies by Carl J. Tracie Molly P. Rozum Shaping a World Already Made: Landscape and Poetry of the Canadian Prairies. By Carl J. Tracie. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015. ix + 212 pp. Maps, bibliography, index. $27.95 USD/CAD paper. The geographer Carl J. Tracie offers here a welcome poetic interpretation of region and a call to geographers to go beyond considering space as reduced to scientific systems, to space as felt and imagined. While the tradition of poising environmental and cultural determinisms dates to the 1970s' "imaginative turn" in geography, Tracie believes geographers have continued to favor the "natural landscape," or what he calls, citing a phrase of the poet Louis Dudek, a "world already made" (4). Poetry, he argues, yields "resonance" or "what makes space place" (9). Of the book, the strongest chapter focuses on enduring elements—land, sky, and space—in prairie poetry from nine modern Canadian [End Page 115] poets (although some twenty receive mention). Tracie has a good eye for classic poetic imagery. Lorna Crozier suggests the sky "gives you/all the room you need/to grow small" (34) and cites how a windblown aspen "'signs whole alphabets of light'" (36). Eli Mandel depicts wind's effects on fields "strewn with corpses of could" (56) and John Newlove tells of wind's toll "at best, blowing endurance/and stupidity into the people" (61). Tim Lilburn argues the prairie "will set up a small/homestead of thinking in you'" (52). Still, television (59), the "Harlem Globetrotters" (150), a coyote's howl as "weightless as Amway sales talk" (51), and land in "chemical sleep" (50), all suggest late twentieth-century renditions of enduring elements. Empathy expressed for both aboriginals and settlers appears in the poetry of Di Brandt and Andrew Suknaski. Settler society's poets transform not the "natural" patterns to which geographers reduce the world but an Indigenous-made world. Less compelling but still useful chapters discuss themes of gender, race, rural/urban location, mystery/spirituality, silence, and the presence of "interactive binaries" (125) oozing ambivalence. Tracie analyzes the texts of Indigenous poets such as Emma LaRocque, Marilyn Dumont, Armand Ruffo, and others, but these citations serve mainly to emphasize settler society commodification of land. The detail threading this settler regional poetry, what Lilburn calls "thick-looking" (141), Tracie insightfully notes, actually distances settlers from the land. Moreover, popular prairie poetry traditions (such as the lines of Edna Jaques and general cowboy poetry) grow out of rural impulses rather than those of region. Tracie sees the students of academic poets as the main hope for bringing transformative literary prairie poetry into popular consciousness. To raise, finally, the geographic tradition of scientific patterns that Tracie writes convincingly against, how do enduring poetic elements interact with scientific systems to create regions? Molly P. Rozum Department of History University of South Dakota Copyright © 2018 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Lucky Joe's Namesake: The Extraordinary Life and Observations of Joe Wilson ed. by Fred Bartenstein, and: Roots Music in America: Collected Writings of Joe Wilson ed. by Fred Bartenstein

Reviewed by: Lucky Joe's Namesake: The Extraordinary Life and Observations of Joe Wilson ed. by Fred Bartenstein, and: Roots Music in America: Collected Writings of Joe Wilson ed. by Fred Bartenstein Travis D. Stimeling Lucky Joe's Namesake: The Extraordinary Life and Observations of Joe Wilson. Edited by Fred Bartenstein. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. Pp. xxviii, 215.) Roots Music in America: Collected Writings of Joe Wilson. Edited by Fred Bartenstein. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2017. Pp. xxi, 290.) Like his colleague and occasional collaborator Archie Green, Joe Wilson (1938–2015) defied easy characterization. An East Tennessee native who devoted much of his professional life to documenting and presenting the folklore and history of southern Appalachia, Wilson eschewed the title "folklorist," a term that he associated with high-minded academics who "turn up their nose at amateurs" without proper academic training (Lucky Joe's Namesake, 29). Rather, Wilson was a self-described "do-gooder" who believed that he should do everything he could to provide support for "the originals of our world of art" (Lucky Joe's Namesake, 158). As executive director of the National Council for the Traditional Arts (NCTA), Wilson was a passionate advocate for musicians not only from his home region, but also from around the United States and even as far away as Cambodia. And, as the writings collected here by bluegrass historian Fred Bartenstein indicate, Wilson's passion and advocacy extended to nearly everything he was involved with, from the Civil Rights Movement to local history. [End Page 193] Given the breadth and volume of Wilson's writings, Bartenstein was able to produce two volumes that, while complementary, can be read as stand-alone books. The first book, Lucky Joe's Namesake, uses Wilson's writings—some of which were unpublished during his lifetime—to create a memoir that sheds light not only on his significant contributions to the world of US vernacular music, but also on his family's history in East Tennessee, his brief stint in the Nashville music scene of the early 1960s, his efforts to counter violence in Birmingham in the mid-1960s, and his retirement in the New River Valley. Bartenstein augments the narrative with extensive examples from Wilson's published and unpublished writings. Many of these pieces—especially his writings on his hometown of Trade, Tennessee—should be essential reading for anyone interested in Appalachian history and culture. Readers with an interest in the Civil Rights Movement will also be intrigued by "Hucksters of Hate—Nazi Style," a piece exposing the racist violence of the National States Rights Party that Wilson and Edward Harris wrote for The Progressive in 1964. The second volume, Roots Music in America, presents an array of Wilson's extensive writings on the many different varieties of US vernacular music that he found interesting. A substantial number of these pieces explore Appalachian musical traditions, with essays on important places ("The Blue Ridge: A Place Near the Heart in American Musical History," "Fries: Where the Music Began"), institutions ("Radio and the Blue Ridge," "Bristol's WCY: Early Bluegrass Turf"), musicians ("Grayson and Whitter," "Carroll Best: Too Tall to Sleep in a Car"), songs and tunes ("Rachel and the Eighth of January," "Durang's Dance and Hoffmaster's Tune"), and instruments ("Men and Kings: A Mini-History of the Guitar," "The Pedal Steel: A Folk Instrument of Our Time"). Additionally, Bartenstein has collected writings on the blues (most notably, "Cephas and Wiggins: Masters of the Piedmont Blues"), cowboy poetry, and Native American flutes, among others. Many of the pieces in this volume were published in programs for NCTA productions, while still others reached readers in Bluegrass Unlimited and other popular publications. Although an occasional factual error can be found from time to time, as in Wilson's assertion that the rebec—a bowed string instrument—is "a form of guitar," these pieces reveal both careful scholarship and a deep devotion to clarity and conciseness (86). Readers with an interest in US vernacular music will undoubtedly find these sources to be of great value. In reviewing the breadth of the writings collected in these volumes, Wilson's deep interest in reaching a wide and diverse...

Demystifying the Cowboy Through His Song: How Cowboy Poetry and Music Create a Common Language Between Multiple-Use Conservationists and Forever-Wild Preservationists to Meet the Goals of Sustainable Agriculture

Though multiple-use conservationists (use the land for multiple purposes) and forever-wild preservationists (solely set aside land for nonhuman species) seem to be at odds, this article argues that key figures such as Gifford Pinchot and John Muir discredit this perceived discordance. As well, it probes into the unexplored arena of cowboy music gatherings as productive places for cooperation between the two groups. First, mystique of the cowboy is examined and unraveled through true stories of cowboy-environmentalist collaboration. This article addresses how cowboy poetry festivals function as entertainment and meeting places to support sustainable behavior through community-based social marketing techniques.

My Taxes Paid for That?! or Why the Past Is Prologue for Public Arts Funding

AbstractRecent efforts to cut public funding for the arts and culture sectors in the United States are couched in the need for balanced budgets and fiscal discipline. Lawmakers who support cuts question whether artistic pursuits such as “cowboy poetry” or artistic endeavors that offend or shock some viewers are an appropriate use of public monies in a depressed economy. While the current debate is grounded in a need for balanced budgets and reduced deficits, long-standing unresolved legacies fragment arts and culture policy and leave arts and culture funding vulnerable to additional cuts. The normative implications for the role of the arts and culture sectors in a democratic society need to be considered.

Playing at Monarchy: Sport as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France by Corry Cropper (review)

Corry Cropper, Playing at Monarchy: Sport as Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century France. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 272 pp. If you grew up in France as a garcon de bonne famille on a regimen of tennis and fencing, your aversion for parvenus could reach its nadir in a quasi-Lacanian meconnaissance with the fanaticism of American college football, its celebration of big bucks and unabashed media frenzy. But the enigma of America, as evident from Corry Cropper's rigorous study, is that it is after all a former British colony that never had a chance to mature through the trials and tribulations of monarchy, empire, and republic. Yet the American experiment is also very much the product of French grandeur and intellectual prowess. From Lafayette's heroic warcraft to Crevecoeur's cowboy poetry, there would be no American exceptionalism without France. Corry Cropper is a remarkable observer of the unspoken subtext of this French heritage. By sifting through the works of Balzac, Merimee, Flaubert, Maupassant, Theophile Gautier and others, he reminds us that and games not just mindless activities. Rather, they are used for political ends and [...] their presentation is crucial in forming and maintaining a cultural and political power structure (xiii). Indeed, by sports Cropper refers to all leisurely activities--including playing skittles or even dominos. If the term is reminiscent of nineteenth-century comedies of manners, it is because Cropper predominantly writes about the period between the ancien regime and the modem era, its reactionary unease with the Revolution of 1789 and its unpalatable aftertaste from the 1870 defeat at the hands of the Prussians. Class lies at the centerpiece of this analysis. Aptly enough. Cropper draws our attention to the distinctions between noblesse d'epee, noblesse de robe, and the bourgeoisie. Nowhere is this more palpable than in his analysis of Eugene Chapus's ridiculous books about regal manners and pastimes destined for a nouveau riche readership. Titles like Manuel de I'homme et de la femme comme il faut (1855), Les chasses princieres en France de 1589-1841 (1853) or Le sport a Paris (1854), sometimes written under the pseudonym of Vicomte de Marennes emblematic of the era for Cropper. More specifically, he shows how le jeu de paume (the precursor to tennis) was for centuries the sole prerogative of the aristocracy. Abandoned during the French Revolution of 1789, it made a comeback under Napoleon III (1852-1870). Similarly, hunting was stringently restricted to the nobility, with severe penalty laws under Charles VI and Louis XIV should commoners endeavor to partake in the sport. Fencing was also very much a regal sport, though it became more mainstream in the twentieth century, like tennis. As for chess, Cropper tells us it represented the violence of the feudal system whereas trictrac, a slow-paced card game, fell out of style during the Revolution and became defunct by the 1850s. These gems of historical trivia sure to engage the reader. Similarly, Cropper suggests it would be a misconception to assume the Olympic Games were seen as a celebration of for all, as they now. …

Canadian Cowboy Poetry and the Oral Tradition

A cultural movement is sweeping the West like a prairie fire: cowboy poetry. In gatherings and festivals from Fort Qu’Appelle to Pincher Creek and Kamloops, from Maple Creek to Stony Plain (and beyond), equestrian versifiers are chanting the praises and woes of ranch culture as never before — in numbers unimaginable in the days before the gasoline engine brought the end of horsepower. In fact, cowboy poetry has become a truly popular phenomenon across Western North America.

Dana Gioia is Wrong about Cowboy Poetry

D a n a G io ia Is W r o n g a b o u t C o w b o y P o e t r y B a r n e y N e l s o n Dana Gioia, named head of the National Endowment for the Arts by George Bush in January 2003, calls cowboy poetry part of a “massive cultural revolution,” a “shift from print culture to electronic media,” and he’s predicting “the death of the text” (“Disappearing” 21, 23, 29). The public has yawned at academic poetry, he says, either as it is taught in literature courses or produced by creative writing classes, and so several “new bohemian” groups have broken away to revive poetry outside academia: cowboy poetry, rap, poetry slams, and performance poetry (see Gioia, “Note toward a New Bohemia”). Their popularity, he says, proves that the love of poetry is not dead, just the love of the poem on the page, and that poetry now “resembles entertainment more than art” (“Disappearing” 37). He says these new forms of poetry have wrestled the genre from the clutches of the academic elite back to the working classes. Gioia obviously has his thumb on the pulse of American art. He’s right about the boredom and rebellion, but he’s wrong about the rest. Cowboy poetry has always been written down. One of my personal treasures is a handwritten copy ofa poem an old cowboy had saved, folded in an envelope, for over sixty years. He gave it to me not long before he died because the poem described a good cowpony named “Barney.” I’ve never heard it recited. Before the first poetry gatherings, most people familiar with cowboy poems had read them rather than heard them. Bruce Kiskaddon’s poems had been read and clipped from The Western Livestock Journal or one of its calendars or memorized from his books. E. A. Brininstool, Bill Chittenden, Badger Clark, Curley Fletcher, Henry Herbert Knibbs, and even Charlie Russell had published their poetry. A t one of the early Elko gatherings, folklorists assembled a huge collection of old cowboy poetry books. Ranch bookcases usually contained several volumes, and many have now been reprinted. Many of the “anonymous” poems recited at the early gatherings have since been traced to published authors. Yet today cowboy poetry is consid­ ered “folklore,” captured from the “oral tradition,” and Gioia predicts “the death of the text.” This sounds like another version of the “dying W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e 40.4 ( W i n t e r 2006): 404- 22. B a r n e y N e l s o n 4 0 5 cowboy,” who has been dying for one hundred years, yet there are prob­ ably just as many cowboys today, probably more, than there were one hundred years ago. Someone horseback looks after all that “empty” space travelers pass through on their way from San Antonio to Los Ange­ les, Bozeman to St. Paul, and Cheyenne to El Paso. And if you count the number of “cowboys” who have magically appeared since the poetry gatherings began, the population is definitely on the increase, as are books featuring cowboy poetry. The popularity with readers is phenom­ enal. I’m not sure what the figure is today, but in 1991 one reviewer said Hal Cannon’s first anthology, Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering (1985), had already gone through seven printings and sold over forty thousand copies (Preston 11). A recent e-mail from Gibbs M. Smith’s publicity department said that their records go only as far back as July 1995, but Cannon’s first book has sold thirty thousand copies since then. So by adding an estimated three thousand copies for each of the missing four years, the book has probably sold at least eighty-two thousand copies. That text, for one, does not seem to be dying. Gioia’s assertion that cowboy poetry “emerged entirely outside estab­ lished literary life and [was] initially developed by individuals marginalized by intellectual and academic society” is another myth...

Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry

Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry. Edited by David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 392, preface, index. $49.95 cloth, $21.95 paper) Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry is the first book-length volume to examine this American tradition of occupational verse in all its historical and contemporary complexity and depth. Even better, it does so in mixed chorus of voices that includes the poets themselves, in addition to folklorists, historians, and creative writers. Naturally, this at times makes for jumpy reading, as literary analysis invoking iambs and catalexis is followed by folksy account of picking up cowboy songs in bars and behind the rodeo chutes, but that is the nature of essay collections as well as of cowboy poetry. The overall effect is of surprisingly unified voice describing the history of the tradition, the values it expresses, and the strong sense of community and commonality among the poets and the ranch people they speak for. After an introductory overview by David Stanley, the book proceeds with twenty-seven essays organized into six sections. Backgrounds provides historical and analytical introduction to the tradition of cowboy poetry; Process describes various aspects of how the poems come to be; Portraits includes two third-person and two first-person sketches of individual writers; Themes explores the poets' relations with community and nature, and the increasingly vocal role of women in the poetry movement; Connections includes essays on the related traditions of Mexican-American versos, Northwest logger poets, South American gaucho oral traditions, and Australian bush poetry; and Developments analyzes the impact of organized poetry gatherings, and looks at the future of the tradition. The introductory essay elucidates the key characteristics of cowboy poetry, its history and long-standing themes, and its most revered practitioners. Many of the points made here are repeated again and again in the essays that follow-the topic of the imminent demise of ranching and cowboying that was present even in the earliest known cowboy poems of the late 1800s, the universal literacy and the tradition of reading and reciting among cowboys and ranch people, the strong bonds of community even in culture so geographically scattered and isolated, and the sense of way of life under threat from industrialization, urbanization, environmentalism, tourism and land development. Poet and writer Kim Stafford's opening essay in the Backgrounds section adds the all-important information that this is culture that loves words and language. He draws continuous line from medieval poetry and oral recitation straight to the horseback reciters of today, explaining that a poem carries wisdom through time. In the next chapter, folklorist Jim Griffith points out that both cowboy gear and cowboy poetry are highly crafted and richly textured, and describes this as central aesthetic need in culture where man is judged by his work (an often-repeated tenet among cowboys). Other folklorist contributors to the volume examine the way poems change (both accidentally and deliberately) in oral recitation, how poets play with rhythm and meter in composing and reciting, how poems and songs have interacted over the years in the cowboy tradition, how changing attitudes toward nature have been expressed in verse from the early days of American cattle herding to the present, and how women in the ranching community are gaining new, more audible voice thanks to the cowboy poetry movement. …

Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry

Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry

Cowboy poets & cowboy poetry

This is the first sustained and serious look at the traditions, history, and contribution that cowboy poets and cowboy poetry have made to American life and culture.

It's the Impact, Stupid!

I'm sure that, in preparing their remarks, my predecessors reread many of previous ARIA presidential addresses. I was different in this regard. In identifying a potential topic, it was clear that I was far from ideal candidate to comment further on matters relating to diversity - a theme highlighted in Norma Nielson's remarks last year. The elimination of this as a possible topic was a no brainer. As a white, Anglo Saxon, Protestant male, married to same person for 29 years, with 2.5 (actually 3) children, I am a poor example of diversity. As a leading-edge baby boomer, one of my top choices for a topic was a Message from an Old Man. Of course, this title had already been chosen by Jerry Jorgensen for his 1992 ARIA presidential address. How could any of my thoughts on this topic be more inspiring and elicit more emotion than Jerry's reading of cowboy poetry? Plus, as Jerry pointed out, he was the oldest person ever to be elected president of ARIA. It was clear that I had to look elsewhere for a topic. On a more serious note, I had an interest in commenting on change and its implications for risk management and profession. However, after rereading Joan Schmit's 1994 presidential address, Cycles, Context, and Change, I knew that anything that I could say on this topic would certainly fall far short of eloquence of Joan's remarks. Another possible topic dealt with integration of and insurance. This was especially appealing to me, considering that 1995 ARIA program which I chaired had a finance and insurance theme. But in reviewing Harold Skipper's 1993 presidential address, Risk Management and Insurance Education: Will We Miss Boat? it was clear that I could add very little to Skip's important insights. Neither could I be as suave in my delivery as Skip - at least in Jerry Jorgensen's eyes, and I suspect in eyes of everyone else, too.(1) To make matters worse, since my statistical skills are too rusty, I shied away from idea of presenting a rigorous scholarly paper as did Scott Harrington - ARIA's most handsome member according to Jerry Jorgensen and I suspect according to most others as well.(2) Well, it's time to move beyond these light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek comments and on to more serious remarks. Many of preceding addresses, at least indirectly, had this in common: they asked us to think carefully about impact that we have on risk management and policy and practice. If what we do is not highly valued by others and does not have a substantial impact, our profession is threatened - as it should be! Indeed, how many of us have been presented with a mandate for impact assessment relative to our curricula and what we do as educators? For these reasons, I have altered slightly famous slogan associated with 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, It's Economy, Stupid! and entitled my remarks, It's Impact, Stupid! My underlying theme is that our greatest worth lies in impact that our teaching, service, and research has on our various constituencies: our students, consumers, policy-makers, and financial services industry, in general. In many ways, teaching, research, and professional service activities are intertwined. When we share our knowledge and research findings in certain ways, we are providing meaningful service to our constituencies. I will address three traditional areas of academic life separately, however. Teaching I will initially focus my remarks on teaching. When I think of teaching and impact, I immediately think of traditional classroom experience and impact that we have in shaping students' lives and their future careers. All of us strive to provide relevant, up-to-date information to our students through a variety of instructional methods. We bring into classroom useful academic perspectives that are often lacking in business world. …

A Sacred Heart by Ron Watson, and: “Twin Peaks” Cherry Pie: New Poems by Robert Peters, and: Canyonvue by Scott Preston, and: 301 by Ford Swetnam

Reviews 413 boy and his grandfather finally seek their tarpons, here where the battle loses all significance in light of the ultimate death of both predator and prey. The Death of Tarpons is a story of innocence moving through a brutal world, a story told with a narrative voice so sincere in its attempt to make sense of a mean and random world that we can’t help but share in the journey toward a life of love, compassion, and wonder. JANE BRADLEY University of Toledo A Sacred Heart. By Ron Watson. (Pocatello, Idaho: The Redneck Press, American Poetry at the Millennium Series Number 5, 1994. 12 pages, $6.00.) “Twin Peaks” Cherry Pie: New Poems. By Robert Peters. (Pocatello, Idaho: The Redneck Press, American Poetry at the Millennium Series Number 6, 1995. 12 pages, $6.00.) Canyonvue. By Scott Preston. (Pocatello, Idaho: The Redneck Press, American Poetry at the Millennium Series Number 7, 1995. 12 pages, $6.00.) 301. By Ford Swetnam. (Pocatello, Idaho: The Redneck Press, American Poetry at the Millennium Series Number 8, 1995. 12 pages, $6.00.) Four recent chapbooks from the Redneck Press vary consider­ ably in quality, but all testify to the vitality of a uniquely western American poetry at the end of our century. Ron Watson’s A Sacred Heart, a tame book, is a cycle of love poems with all the cliched ups and downs typical of poems in an exaggerated courtly love tradition—or maybe in a subdued Harlequin romance tradition. Watson’s forte is the intensely person­ al image, never shying short of sentimentality: “i . . . search the wall for words/ to give this moment birth—/ i want a phrase immortal enough/ to swim in forever.” Once past this obligatory eternizing 414 Western American Literature conceit, though, we get to the real essence of the love poem: “i hear you drawing water for a bath,/ your voice soft with janis/ as she coos a slow one, smooth/ as southern comfort.” If Watson would drop the tired freshman tactic of using all lower case personal pronouns, though, he might strengthen an otherwise delicate poetic voice. America’s favorite curmudgeon of poetry, Robert Peters—chief blue ribbon judge of the Great Poetry Bake-Off series, whose famous prose style captures the essence of the best poetic styles of our time, in this new chapbook shows us his poetry is almost as good as his prose. This volume is a fast-paced verbal video of contempo­ rary western life—Nevada, Indian cemeteries, skateboarding, and second-hand celebrity. Some poems are loud, raunchy, and frenetic with activity—with the excitement of Nevada casinos: “Silver dol­ lars clang/ Cherries, plums, and lemons/ whip past: clunk, and stop./ $240 is my limit.” A quiet poem, but no less the verbal video version of a PTV (Poetry Television) video is “Indian Burial Ground” where “Hares bound and skitter/ through creosote brush and lupine./ Bleached name-hieroglyphics, an old woman’s/ plastic flowers. Rodent bones. Massed clouds./ Spinning hawks. Rocks and boul­ ders.” Three thumbs up for these poems, new poems that are raucus, primitive, and raw as the new West itself. Scott Preston, one of the foremost scholars of cowboy poetry, in Canyonvue delves into the “intensely personal realms of madness” as he confronts Idaho’s “evil mental health codes” in a volume devoted to poetic experiences at Canyon View Hospital. In his end­ note Preston claims that “Idaho’s reputation as the most Neanderthal state in the union gets one wacky boost” with these poems. Well, while competent poetry in a most deeply personal way, Canyonvue is hardly “wacky”— thank goodness. Instead, here are poems of bit­ terness and mental anguish, poems of rage against an insane system: “The State arrives/ with a lamp &/ a pleasant expression/ perfectly primed/ to bleach another month/ of my life away.” Preston is at his best, by far, in character portraits such as that of “the little chi­ huahua woman” who has “a voice that could drive a cartoon insane” or the Director of Nursing who “was bitter/ as chewed aspirin/ and almost as attractive.” Here is terrific black humor—but it is hardly “wacky.” Reviews 415 Ford Swetnam is a prominent...

Cattle, Horses, Sky, and Grass: Cowboy Poetry of the Late Twentieth Century ed. by Warren Miller

Cattle, Horses, Sky, and Grass: Cowboy Poetry of the Late Twentieth Century ed. by Warren Miller

The Festival Life-Cycle and Tourism Strategies: The Case of the Cowboy Poetry Gathering

The Festival Life-Cycle and Tourism Strategies: The Case of the Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Cowboy Poetry in Pincher Creek: The Gathering of '91

Cowboy Poetry in Pincher Creek: The Gathering of '91

Ordinary Messengers by Michael Hannon, and: The Raven Wakes Me Up by Stephan Torre

Reviews 277 but in ways at once more personal and more historical. Wallis has a stronger bent for the rhyme traditional to cowboy poetry though she uses free verse more frequently. Her poetry of cattle culture tends toward narrative, and at times, as her book’s title suggests, it translates western experience into Nordic myth—see her “Invocation”of Odin on his “oct-shod bronc”or “War Horse,”where “In my dreams I ride war horses/Deep bay Belgians big with dignity” (that second line my favorite in the book).Though the speaker of “Invocation”may “much prefer a/Fighting God” to a “wimpy, singing Muse,”the poet can take much care with small details of song (like the alliteration of “Beneath the burden/O f carried coffins”in “Where Old Ones Die”).Wallis also attends to women’s private pains (“Mamie”) and social pleasures (“Girlfriends”) in land dominated by men, and in “A Thousand Pretty Ponies” she offers a classic Montana cowboy poem in rhymed quatrains. Dry Crik Press should be applauded for bringing more cowboy poetry into print, but these books could be improved with numbered pages and biographi­ cal notes on the poets—and, in the case of The Exalted, One, with its several scrambled pages, more diligence in assembly. MICHAEL L.JOHNSON University ofKansas Ordinary Messengers. By Michael Hannon. (Point Reyes Station, California: Float­ ing Island, 1991. 88 pages, $10.00.) The Raven Wakes Me Up. By Stephan Torre. (Point Reyes Station, California: Floating Island, 1992. 42 pages, $8.00.) Within the last year and a half, publisher Michael Sykes has brought out two of the most passionate poets writing in the West, and perhaps in the entire country. I may be reaching for it, but I read Hannon as representative of the Catholic West and Torre of the Protestant landscape. Had I more copy space I could extrapolate on this idea; discuss thematic differences: the books are counterpoint to each other in content and poetic strategy. They are unalike in vision and voice, but alike in intellectual toughness and finish. Michael Hannon writes with a sardonic intensity: brief, compressed asides onJesus, God and the Void. The poet is our contemporary Pascal with, however, a Beckett-like sense of humour. The title of the collection is ironic—the author is no ordinary messenger. I might add, and I have a suspicion that this was intentional, that the first letters in each of the title words form the Tantric syllable om. (The late Kenneth Rexroth said, on the back cover of Hannon’s earlier book, Poems & Days, “A very good poet indeed, and certainly one of the few Tantric writers in any language who is both profound and witty.”) Ordinary Messengersis divided into six sections. Here are two poems, the first from “Stations,” called “Simon is Forced to Carry the Cross”: 278 Western American Literature This could be any one of us: culled from the botched multitude, dragged cursing in the wake of an ambitious god, and made to shoulder His perfection’s dead weight. Hating it, loving it, hating it. . . The second poem, “The Muse,” comes from the “Slender Means”section: I don’t go to her, she comes to me, red with unspeakable crimes and her hair is a black wind annihilating worlds to get at the door in my bed. It takes forever to get her clothes off, and I don’t have forever. If I have a quarrel with Hannon’s work, it is a small one—I would like to hear more news of the outside world and the society where he gets his living as a painting contractor. But this may be asking him to be another kind of poet than he is. Stephen Torre, on the other hand, in The Raven Wakes Me Up, embraces the world “out there” with gusto. His phenomenological purchase is that of men working together, or in isolation, and of their women, or lack of women. Torre brings us news from Montana, northern California and British Columbia. He has worked as a logger and in mills; has farmed and ranched. Most of the poems in the book are too long to quote in full for this...