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Last Thursday, I was seated in an auditorium in Alpine, Texas. Onstage before me were six people. Five were wearing cowboy hats, and no two of the hats were alike. Three women, three men, three guitars. It was the first evening of the Lone Star Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
The first poet, Joel Nelson of Alpine Texas, began by saying, “Earth. Wind. Fire. Water. Metal. These are the five elements of the Chinese zodiac. This is the Year of the Fire Horse.” He went on to say, “Twenty oh two was also the year of the horse, and that was the year I decided to write this poem.”
Nelson is considered by many to be the current poet laureate of cowboy poetry (he was the recipient of a 2009 Heritage Fellowship). He has a stoic presence, and delivers his words slowly, deliberately.
What followed was ‘Equus Caballus,’ Nelson’s ode to the animal whose presence shapes ranch life as much as the weather does. Told mostly in rhyming couplets, the poem sweeps through history, across time and space, and positions the horse as simultaneously exalted and taken for granted. The voice of the horse is neither self-aggrandizing nor self-pitying; it simply is.
I have carried countless errant knights who never found the grail.
I have strained before the caissons. I have moved the nation’s mail.
[...]
I can be as tough as hardened steel – as fragile as a flower.
I know not my endurance and I know not my own power.
[...]
I have died with heart exploded ’neath the cheering in the stands –
Calmly stood beneath the hanging noose of vigilante bands.
I was rapt. I hadn’t expected cowboy poetry to land like a Zen koan.
The Lone Star Cowboy Poetry Gathering came out of the Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an annual event that has taken place in Alpine since 1987. Gatherings like this happen across the western United States, from the Upper Rockies to the Chihuahuan Desert. The definition of cowboy poetry appears to be quite simple and loose – poetry that is performed and, traditionally, passed down, orally. Unlike most poetry readings I’ve been to, there were more CDs for sale in the lobby than books – these poems are meant to be heard, rather than read. This genre is also rooted in, of course, cowboy culture, ranch life, and the American West. Some is recited, some is sung with musical accompaniment. Most of it rhymes, and the difference between a song and a poem seems not to matter much. Cowboy poetry is a tradition grown out of exactly the scene you’d expect: cowboys sitting around a campfire, telling stories. But as I came to see, it’s a form that is broad enough to contain multitudes.
Another performer, Andy Wilkinson, who performed with his daughter Emily (who, by the way, has recently been appointed as the new director of The Museum of the Big Bend), spoke about the chaotic, frightening nature of the modern world and asked, “How do we respond? What is our job?” The song he performed held an answer. Its refrain went:
Nothing is ordinary
Nothing needs my help
Nothing for me to worry
The story tells itself
Both the question and its response, I thought, would not be out of place in a meditation circle.
Thursday evening’s performance was rich with history (much of which, I admit, was new to me as a non-Texan). There were multiple mentions of Charlie Goodnight, the inventor of the chuck wagon. There was a song from the perspective of women on the Western frontier during the Civil War. Some poems and songs were original contemporary compositions, others were a century old. And there were so very many mentions of one particular phrase that it came to feel almost like an incantation itself: “this way of life.”
I attended a second session of the Gathering on Saturday afternoon – this one was titled ‘Cowboy Girl Spirit.’ All of the performers were women, and once again, everyone had their hat on. The emcee of this session, Kay Nowell, said “I’m glad we are calling it cowboy girl – I don’t like being called a cowgirl.” I felt slightly embarrassed that I had no idea what the difference was.
Sandy Seaton Sallee was the first cowboy girl performer, and rose to the podium wearing an embossed leather tie and blazer. Sallee grew up in Yellowstone National Park, and continues to live in the Yellowstone wilderness raising mountain horses and mules. Just like on Thursday night, the first poem of the show was about the noble horse.
Be still. Let the horse be a horse.
‘Cause sometimes a hoss must be wild and free
Unfettered, untouched, with complete liberty
To run if he wants to and buck and to flee
To be left alone - from you and from me.
There were quite a few horse poems beyond Sallee’s and Nelson’s. The horse was a metaphor for the self, a symbol of history, a connection to one’s own sense of rebellion and tradition at once.
I thought about how the Year of the Fire Horse fits into all this – in the Chinese zodiac, this year is characterized by rapid change, explosive energy, and dynamism. The last Year of the Fire Horse was in 1966, and I couldn’t help thinking about how much has changed in agricultural life since then. The onset of technology, the rapid adoption of imported rather than domestic beef, climate change, and more have meant that “this way of life” has waned in numbers and been culturally sidelined in favor of more cosmopolitan interests. Listening to these poems, though, it was undeniable that the art and spirit of ranch life is no less alive than it was in the last year of the horse.
In Saturday’s session, the cowboy girl archetype was described by the various performers as a woman who is: a walking contradiction, a tomboy, and someone who loves her horse more than her man. Trinity Seely, though, touched on the complexity that comes with being all those things at once. Before performing her song ‘Kitchen Window Cowboy,’ she told the audience that she hadn’t planned to play it, because it’s a song that still, years after being penned, brings up difficult emotions. Written when her children were young, it begins:
Here I am lookin’ out the window
Wishing I was them
Out there working side by side
With them other cowboy men
I’ve seen the seasons come
And I’ve watched the seasons pass
All the while with my nose pressed hard
Against this kitchen window glass
But I’m a kitchen window cowboy for now
I’ll make it through somehow
The best art is at once extremely specific and broadly universal. Seely’s song is a supreme example of this – what mother doesn’t mourn the loss of freedom on some level? What woman hasn’t wished to be one of those men out there? Despite feeling like I don’t have the cowboy girl spirit, feeling a little bit nervous around horses (they are so big), missing so many historical references, and not living the “way of life” that so many of the Gathering’s performers referenced, I saw myself reflected in so much of what I heard.
These songs and poems, ostensibly about a very particular and increasingly rare way of living, speak to a deeply human (and, deeply American) question – how do we wrestle with the idea of freedom in our daily lives? The horse gives us one example. Acceptance of nature and the world as it is gives us another. Family values, tradition, and an understanding of history offer a way through, giving shape to the formlessness of life. The message that stuck with me most from the Gathering, though, is that art and expression are what keeps freedom most present in the day-to-day. To write a poem or to sing a song, to be present in both the specific and the universal, is one way for all of us, whether we run cattle or not, to get a little bit more free in whatever “this way of life” may mean for each of us.
To learn more about the Lonestar Cowboy Poetry Gathering, their events, or the performers, you can visit their website.
