Poems for the week of January 11:
S. Omar Barker
(1895-1985)
brings a smile with the observation in his poem
Grand Canyon Cowboy:
I'd heard of the Canyon (the
old cowboy said)
And I figured I'd like to go see it.
So I rode till I sighted a rim out ahead,
And reckoned that this place might be it.
I anchored my horse to a juniper limb
And crawled to the edge for a peek.
One look was a plenty to make my head swim.
And all of my innards feel weak.
....
Read the rest of the poem and find a Grand
Canyon photo by Jeri Dobrowski here.
The poem was a favorite of the late
Colen Sweeten (more about him below) and
Rusty McCall sometime recites the poem.
Barker, one of the founders of the
Western Writers of America,
wrote thousands of poems and short stories, articles, novelettes, and a
novel. He was the first living author inducted into the Hall of Fame of
Great Westerners (now called the Hall of Great Westerners) by the
National Cowboy and Western
Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
Read more of his poetry and more about him in our feature here.
Posted 1/11
A contemporary poem from the archive...
Colen Sweeten,
a friend and a favorite to all who knew
him, was born on this day, January 11, in 1919. Colen had an
enormous repertoire of poems, stories, wisdom, and humor. He always
had a kind and cheerful word for all, and as he often said, so many
friends that he "wasn't even using them all."
He wrote a poem about the Western
Folklife Center's National Cowboy Poetry Cowboy Gathering, named
after the town where it is held, Elko:
They came to the mid-winter
gath'ring,
Leaving haystacks and dehorning chutes.
Dressed true to old west tradition,
Levis, Stetsons, and high heeled boots.
A few were in casts or on
crutches,
Some looked like I'd seen them before.
Each wore the hat no one touches
And had high polished boots on the floor.
....
Until his death in
August of 2007, Colen Sweeten participated in every
National Cowboy Poetry Gathering except one. He appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny
Carson. He was the recipient of the American West Heritage
Pioneer Skill Preservation award, presented to him by Michael
Martin Murphey at the Festival of the American West in 2004. He was
honored with the Esto Perpetua Award from the Idaho
Historical Society in 2005.
Read more poems and songs about the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
here.
Read more about Colen Sweeten and more of his poetry in our feature
here and find
tributes to Colen Sweeten, family photos, and more, posted
here.
The photo above is by
Jeri L. Dobrowski,
a special friend to Colen. It was taken in Kanab, Utah in 2005 at
the National Cowboy Poetry Rodeo. It was one
of Colen's favorite photos, and he liked many others that she took.
Jeri Dobrowski has a photo tribute to Colen at her web site,
here.
Posted 1/11
Popular poet and
Oklahoma rancher
Jay
Snider shares a recent poem,
Renegade Cow, another poem that will
leave you smiling:
She can hear your trailer rattle
From a way back up the trail
All you'll see is heel dust
And the nine throwed in her tail
She'll hit the timber runnin'
Then just vanish like a ghost
And leave you standin' slack-jawed
Like you's dallied to a post
....
About its inspiration, Jay
told us, "If you've been in the cattle business more than about sixty days,
you've probably had somebody's old renegade cow jump the fence and end up in
your pasture. Most times it's easier for her to get in than it is for you to
get her out. One old wild, renegade cow can turn your gentle herd into a
stampede-at-any-time bunch that are hard to handle. They'll test your cowboy
skills just trying to capture them. Sometimes drastic measures are a last
resort. That's kinda where the inspiration came from."
The current issue of
Western Horseman
magazine features Jay Snider in a multi-page article in its
Cowboy Culture
section. There is special presentation of images and audio on the
Western Horseman web site
here.
Jay i s
on his way to the Colorado
Cowboy Poetry Gathering (January 14-16, 2010) and is returning to the Western Folklife Center's
26th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
(January 23-30, 2010), his third invited appearance at the event.
Read more about him and his poetry
here at CowboyPoetry.com, and visit his web
site for his schedule and more:
www.jaysnider.net.
We featured one of Jay's poems from
our archive last week. Find that and more about him
below.
Posted 1/12
Thanks to Nevada poet and writer Hal
Swift, who tallies the number of poets and poems at
CowboyPoetry.com each year. Hal found 949 poets/songwriters and 4,994 poems/lyrics on December
31, 2009. He guesses those numbers may carry a "margin of error of 2 or 3
percent."
Posted 1/13
Bill Toti
shares his poem,
Fenceposts.
He told us about its inspiration,
"...Although I've done ranch work in the past, a career in the military and
then industry has been my real livelihood. When I could, I would get my
cowboy fix by volunteering to help out on a friend's ranch, mostly sorting,
weaning, spring and fall doctoring, branding, pushing the cattle to the new
season's pasture, and the like. After one of these particularly hard working
sessions, I commented on how much I loved it. I said I looked forward to the
day when I could afford to do this full time..." Read more along with his
poem.
Bill is a recently-retired submarine captain and a survivor of the September
11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon. His narrative from that experience, "Antoinette," was published in
the Random House book,
Operation Homecoming. Read more along with
his poem and find a link to his story.
Posted 1/14
Your support is essential to CowboyPoetry.com.
Be an important part of CowboyPoetry.com,
Cowboy Poetry Week, the
Rural Library Project, and all of
the activities of the Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry.
Receive the
Cowboy Poetry Week poster,
available exclusively to supporters,
and
other benefits.
Please consider a
contribution in support of CowboyPoetry.com and the
Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry.
Contributions from people like you make possible this site, Cowboy
Poetry Week, the Rural Library Project, and the Center's other
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join in
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Poems for the week of January 4:
Rarely recited today,
The Cowboy's Soliloquy,
written by Allen McCandless in 1885, is often referred to in
Western music references as one of the most well-known nineteenth
century cowboy poems:
All day over the prairies alone I ride,
Not even a dog to run by my side;
My fire I kindle with chips gathered round
And boil my coffee without being ground.
Bread lacking leaven, I bake in a pot,
And sleep on the ground for want of a cot.
I wash in a puddle and wipe on a sack,
And carry my wardrobe all on my back.
My ceiling the sky, my carpet the grass,
My music the lowing herds as they pass.
My books are the brooks, my sermon the stones,
My parson a wolf on a pulpit of bones.
....
In
Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry
(2000), David Stanley refers to the third stanza, and writes, "The
imagery is taken directly from Shakespeare's As You Like It, in
which Duke Senior, living in banishment in the Forest of Arden,
exclaims:
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything:
I would not change it. (II, i. 15-18)"
Little is recorded about McCandless. David Stanley
writes he was "a working cowboy on the Crooked L Ranch in the Texas
Panhandle."
The poem ran under McCandless' name in Trinidad,
Colorado's The Daily Advertiser on April 9, 1885. It's printed
in full in Trailing the Cowboy; His Life and Lore and Told by
Frontier Journalists, compiled and edited by Clifford P.
Westermeier (1955). It is included also in Songs of the American
West, edited by Richard E. Lingenfelter and Richard A. Dwyer
(1968). John Lomax' Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
(1910) includes two variations and music.
Glenn Ohrlin performs a version of the poem as "The Cowboy," a song on
a 2-CD set from the early 1990s,
Back in the Saddle Again (produced by Charlie
Seemann, now Executive Director of the
Western Folklife Center). Find more information about the
recording and sound clips
here. Listen to the entire song and find a transcription
here at the Western Folklife Center. Glenn Ohrlin's recording
was described in a 1990 New York Times'
review:
Mr. Ohrlin, a former rodeo rider
turned folk singer and scholar of cowboy song literature, exudes a
terse true grit in his performance of ''The Cowboy,'' a song adapted
from an 1885 poem, ''The Cowboy's Soliloquy,'' by Allen McCandless.
Far from glamorizing the cowboy life, the plaintive waltz lists the
physical hardships of the cowboy life (sleeping on the ground, bread
cooked in a pot) and pleads for understanding for a man whom polite
late-19th-century society views as half-savage.
The song is included on
Buck Ramsey; Hittin' the Trail,
and the liner notes state, "Glenn Ohrlin considers it to be perhaps
the finest of all cowboy songs."
The song is also included in Hal Cannon's
Old-Time Cowboy Songs, and he notes
that he learned it from a Carl T. Sprague recording. The poem is in
the anthology,
Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering, also edited by Hal Cannon.
Johnny Kendrick recorded the
song on his Western album, and comments that the song is also
known as "The Biblical Cowboy."
Read the original version of the poem
here.
D.J. O'Malley and
Curley Fetcher each have poems named
"The Cowboy's Soliloquy."
Posted 1/4
A contemporary poem from the archive...
Popular poet and
Oklahoma rancher
Jay
Snider's poem,
Of Horses and Men, enjoys frequently radio airplay and
is chosen for reciting by others:
It's been told of
good horses lost
In simple words that cowboys use
He dern sure was a good one
He's the kind you hate to lose
He's the kind you could depend on
In the river and the breaks
In rough country and wild cattle
He'd be the one you'd take
...
Jay told us about how
he came to write the poem:
The inspiration for this
poem came to me on December 7, 2002. I had to put down a little bay stud
that we owned for near a dozen years. Cancer had invaded one of his
kidneys and the vet gave him little hope. It truly was a sad day for us.
I remember telling my wife and sons, "Doc sure was a good one. He's the
kind you hate to lose."
That same day, I had been asked to do a poem at an old man's funeral
that lived north of where we live. He was as good a cowman as ever came
out of our country. After the service, his eldest son said to me, "Dad
sure was a good one. He's the kind you hate to lose."
I could not get those words out of my mind. I started this poem that
night; however, I could not finish it until March 19, 2003 when we
received word that Larry McWhorter had
passed away. Then it came to me what I had been trying to say all along.
(A CD collection of
poems by Larry McWhorter (1957-2003), some recited by top poets who
were his friends, is expected to be released later this month.)
The current issue of
Western Horseman
magazine features Jay Snider in a multi-page article in its
Cowboy Culture
section, which includes his poem, "Twister." On the
Western Horseman
web site, a special presentation of images and audio includes his
poem "Heroes," accompanied by the music of Craig Stuke. See the
presentation
here.
Among his award-winning recordings
is his most recent, Of Horses and Men,
which includes "Heroes" and the title poem. Jay Snider, a past
Lariat Laureate at CowboyPoetry.com, is featured on each volume of
The BAR-D Roundup. He has
contributed a number of interesting photos to
Picture the West. In 2008, Jay was named the 2008 Academy of
Western Artists' Top Male Poet.
Jay i s
returning to the Western Folklife Center's
26th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
(January 23-30, 2010), his third invited appearance at the event.
Read more about him and his poetry
here at CowboyPoetry.com, and visit his web
site for his schedule and more:
www.jaysnider.net.
Posted 1/4
Washington's
Del Gustafson shares his
poem, The Bad Bay:
I took me a job with the Cross Spur
brand,
A big cow spread up in the scab rock.
hired on as a bronc fighter, not a regular hand.
Taking the rough out of some of their stock.
....
He told us, "A few years ago I bought a black mare wearing a cross
spur brand. She was strong to standardbred breeding and was a
natural pacer. Word was she came up from Arizona and was by a
government stallion. Well she was just plain mean and her foals were
too. I finally got some well behaved foals out of her daughter."
Del's bio tells about
his early years, "spent on the family farm just south of the
Canadian border. Due to World War II, power lines were not strung
until late in 1946. Up until then lights were carbide, piped in from
a carbide well, kerosene lamps, Coleman lanterns and candles....My
brothers and I would ride anything we could and some things we
couldn’t. We improvised a bucking chute in the barn and someone
would swing the door open when we were set..."
Del is one of the recent
Lariat Laureate finalists. His poem,
"Cowboys," is included in the 2009 chapbook,
Eight Viewpoints, from
Western Poetry
Publications. Read more about the publication
here.
Posted 1/5
Welcome New
Mexico singer and songwriter
Richard Martin
and his song, April. Richard
told us that he co-wrote the song (and many others) with his
brother, Glenn Martin (more about him below).
Richard writes that he grew up
working on ranches in eastern New Mexico's Canadian River area. He
has been a competitive team roper for many years. He also "enjoys
hunting with his hawk (he is a licensed falconer) and playing solo
and duo gigs around this great country of ours."
Read more along with his song.
Posted 1/6
Welcome Colorado poet and
songwriter
Glenn Martin
and his poem Wet Saddle.
Glenn comments, "'Wet Saddle' is one of those experiences I cherish.
Spring and Fall roundup as well as everyday experiences on the large
ranches where I grew up have left me with a myriad of wonderful memories
that will inspire me forever."
Glenn writes, "I
h ave
always loved the rich tradition and lore of the cowboy way of life.
The many stories heard and life experiences lived while working the
ranches of Eastern New Mexico have inspired me to relate in my
poetry."
Glenn co-writes songs with his
brother, Richard Martin. Read more
about him along with his poem.
Posted 1/7
Your support is essential to CowboyPoetry.com.
Be an important part of CowboyPoetry.com,
Cowboy Poetry Week, the
Rural Library Project, and all of
the activities of the Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry.
Receive the
Cowboy Poetry Week poster,
available exclusively to supporters,
and
other benefits.
Please consider a
contribution in support of CowboyPoetry.com and the
Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry.
Contributions from people like you make possible this site, Cowboy
Poetry Week, the Rural Library Project, and the Center's other
programs.
Read some
of our supporters' comments
here,
visit the Wall of Support, and
join in
and be an important part of it all!
As the year ends, this week's poem selections are from our
archive, each with a New Year theme:
In his 1908 book Songs
of the Cowboys, pioneer cowboy music collector, poet, and songwriter
Jack Thorp
((N.
Howard Thorp, 1867-1940)
attributed
The Cowboys New Year's Dance—a
parody of Larry Chittenden's famous "The
Cowboy's Christmas Ball"—to
a "Mark Chisholm":
We were sitting 'round the
ranch house some twenty hands or more
Most of us Americans but a few from Arkansas
One Dutchman from the fatherland one Johnny Bull from Leeds
A Cornishman from Cornwall all men of different creeds.
....
...but evidence indicates the piece was Thorp's work. Mark L. Gardner, editor of the
outstanding 2005 book
and recording, Jack Thorp's Songs of the
Cowboys, comments
in his book:
"The Cowboys New
Year's Dance" was one of several songs that Jack Thorp sent to
music publisher Kenneth S. Clark in 1934 and claimed as his own. "The Cowboys New Years Dance" is mentioned at least twice in
correspondence between Thorp and Clark, now in the Thorp collection at
the Huntington Library. Here's a telling quote from a letter
from Clark to Thorp of June 22, 1934:
As to the verses in the book [1908 edition of Songs of the Cowboys]
which
were written by you, can you tell me if the following were written to
any
particular tune or if some tune has been set to them: "Chopo,"
"Pecos River
Queen," "The Cowboys' New Year's Dance" and
"Speckles." If so, I'd be glad
to reproduce them in the new book with credit to you as the author.
Thorp seems not to have had a tune or melody for "The Cowboys New
Year's Dance," and Clark, in a letter of July 7, 1934, wrote that
he tried to compose an original melody for the song but "came to
the conclusion that the best plan would be to publish it in the book
to the tune of 'Turkey in the Straw', which fits it perfectly and
which, indeed, is mentioned in the song."
Later that same year, Clark did publish "The Cowboys New Year's
Dance" to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw" in his The
Happy Cowboy and His Songs of Pioneer Days (New York: Paull-Pioneer
Music Corp., 1934), pp. 5-7. On page 5, under the title of the
song, it states "Words by N. Howard (Jack) Thorp."
Read the entire "The Cowboys New Year's Dance"
here.
See our feature about Jack Thorp and
his
Songs of the Cowboys
here,
and our feature about the 2005 Jack
Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys here.
Posted 12/29
Texas poet
Rod Nichols
(1942-2007), forever missed by all who knew him and his
work, wrote a lasting poem about the end of the year,
New Year's Eve:
I'll saddle the roan then
ride out alone
'neath a clear moon with frost on the ground,
to a high ridge I know
through the dark pines and snow
far away from the dim lights of town
....
A favorite
poem by Rod is Headin' In, a poem that was
excerpted by former Supreme Court Justice, the Honorable Sandra Day
O'Connor in her memoir,
Lazy
B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. Rod's most
popular and most recited poem may be Yep, which
was included on the first volume of
The BAR-D Roundup.
His poem, Talent, is on
The BAR-D Roundup: Volume Two.
Read more about Rod and his poetry here, and find a
page of tributes to him here.
Posted 12/29
S. Omar Barker
(1895-1985)
offers up a passel of resolutions in his poem,
Cowboy's New Year's Resolutions:
As one who's been a cowhand since the wildcats
learned to spit,
I've made some resolutions for the comin' year, to wit:
Resolved, to ride a shorter day and sleep a longer night;
To never come to breakfast till the sun is shinin' bright;
To draw a top-hands wages when they're due or quit the job
And hunt a wealthy widow or an easy bank to rob.
Resolved, to quit the wagon when the chuck ain't up to snuff,
To feed no more on bullet beans nor chaw on beef that's tough.
Resolved, to straddle nothin' in the line of saddle mount
That ain't plumb easy-gaited, gentle broke, and some account.
....
The poem is from S. Omar Barker's 1968 book,
Rawhide Rhymes.
The late Elmer Kelton
wrote that Barker "... once estimated his career output at about
1,500 short stories and novelettes, about 1,200 factual articles,
about 2,000 poems." Barker was one of the founders of the Western
Writers of America, served as president of that organization, and
twice was a recipient of WWA's Spur Award. His wife, Elsa, a respected
writer in her own right, also served as a WWA president. S. Omar
Barker was the first living author inducted into the Hall of Fame of
Great Westerners (now called the Hall of Great Westerners) by the
National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City."
As told in Cowboy Miner Productions' collection of S.
Omar Barker's poetry, Cowboy
Poetry: Classic Rhymes by S. Omar Barker, "Omar was born in the rugged
Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. S. Omar Barker was a
rancher, high school teacher, college professor, forest ranger, soldier,
outdoorsman, and legislator. He is best known, and rightly so, as one of
the West's best and most admired cowboy poets. He was named after his
father Squire L. Barker, but went by Omar. He often signed his books with
his initials and trademark brand, 'Lazy SOB.'"
Read more of his poetry and more about him in our feature here.
Posted 12/30
California writer, poet, and horsewoman
Janice Gilbertson
often writes an annual new year poem. In 2004, she wrote
the optimistic
Night Time's Promise:
Let's ride at night through a
blue-shadowed canyon under a night-light sky.
Let's choose a trail that is North star bound under a high moon's watchful
eye.
Ride your best horse and I'll
ride mine too, and we'll trust them to travel a surefooted trail.
Let's use fancy spurs we've been saving for someday and silver bridle that
hangs from a nail.
....
Janice Gilbertson presents
"Night Time's Promise" on
The BAR-D Roundup: Volume Two
(2007).
Her poem, "Sometimes in the Lucias," from
her book
of the same name, was a 2009 Western Writers of America
Spur Award finalist.
A
chapbook, Riding In, is forthcoming.
Janice Gilbertson is returning to the Western
Folklife Center's
26th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
(January 23-30, 2010), her third invited appearance at the event.
Read more about Janice Gilbertson and
some of her poetry in our feature here.
[2009 photo by Jeri
L. Dobrowski; see her gallery of western performers and others
here.]
Posted 12/30
Alberta poet (and Western
Music Association Female Poet of the Year)
Doris Daley's
poem, Goodnight to the Trail
is a perfect message for the end of the year:
Come with me to a place out
West
Where all who trod are Nature's guest
We'll ride to the top of a piney crest
And gaze at the valley below.
....
The poem was featured in a recent
BAR-D poetry column. It is included on
her latest CD,
Beneath a Western Sky, which was
named the top Cowboy Poetry CD this year by the Western Music
Association.
Doris Daley returns to the
Western Folklife Center's
26th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering
(January 23-30, 2010),
her
eighth invited appearance there.
Read more about Doris Daley and some of her poetry
in our feature here and at her web
site,
www.dorisdaley.com.
Posted 12/31
All were invited to submit cowboy toasts, and our
New Year feature
includes new 2009 toasts by Jane Morton,
Dale Page,
Pat Richardson,
Yvonne Hollenbeck,
and Debra Meyer
(and old favorites by S. Omar Barker,
Diane Tribitt,
Michael Henley,
Rod Miller,
Hal Swift,
Jane Morton,
and Pat Richardson).
The feature also includes classic
and contemporary New Year poems.
Find the New Year toasts and
poems here.
Here's
wishing all of you the best new year ever. Whether you are a
writer or a reader, thank you for being a part of the BAR-D.
Your support is essential to CowboyPoetry.com.
Be an important part of CowboyPoetry.com,
Cowboy Poetry Week, the
Rural Library Project, and all of
the activities of the Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry.
Receive the
Cowboy Poetry Week poster,
available exclusively to supporters,
and
other benefits.
Please consider a
contribution in support of CowboyPoetry.com and the
Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry.
Contributions from people like you make possible this site, Cowboy
Poetry Week, the Rural Library Project, and the Center's other
programs.
Read some
of our supporters' comments
here,
visit the Wall of Support, and
join in
and be an important part of it all!
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