Interlude II: Poetry of the Cowboy Persuasion

I confess that I’m not a fan of poetry in general. I don’t understand most of it, and the intricacies of structure, form, meter, imagery, and other terms that I’m told are important pretty much escape me. I couldn’t distinguish between an iamb and a trochee if my life depended on it, and the only dactyl I’m could recognize begins with ptero-.

Now, lest you label me as an absolute philistine, there are snippets of poetry that stick with me. I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. ^[1] And, she walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies. ^[2] Also, there once was a lass from Killarney… (I forget the rest, possibly) ^[3].

But there’s an exception to every entry in my personal rulebook, and in this case it’s something called Cowboy Poetry.

Some of you know that my formative years were spent in far West Texas — west of the Pecos, in fact, if that means anything to you. It was, and still is, for the most part, ranch country…although the ranches are often measured in terms of scores or hundreds of square miles instead of acres, and more often than not their actual livelihoods now depend on oil and gas production rather than cattle. Still, the cowboy culture was (and is) a real thing, and while I don’t claim to be a caballero (I’ve never owned a horse, and I showed sheep instead of cattle as a 4-Her, and didn’t particularly enjoy it), I grew up with them and I like to think that I still abide by certain tenets of the culture. So there’s something in the cowboy poetry genre that resonates with me, whether it’s the often obscure equestrian terminology or the references to the western natural world or the foibles and adventures of the personalities that inhabit the stanzas.

But this is not a treatise on the genre; for that, I highly recommend this article, entitled The Myth of the Literary Cowboy, Part 5: Cowboy Poetry. Rather, I want to present you with a single — and singular — example of what I find attractive about cowboy poetry. It’s a bit lengthy, but stick with it; the payoff will be worth your time. Here’s Sunny Hancock reciting his poem, The Horse Trade:

There are rules to horse ridin’, but the horse won’t necessarily know them. [Texas Bix Bender]

Fabulous Footnotes (that’s an alliteration, and I’m told it’s referred to as a poetry sound device by people who are more refined than me)

[1] Joyce Kilmer wrote that poem, and was able to cleverly disguise the fact that he was a man, not a woman. I think that was intentional (his first name was Alfred, and I’d be interested to know whether there were any women named Alfred), and so, like much of poetry, his motivations escape me.

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[2] It’s confession time. I’ve often associated Lord Byron‘s rather famous poem — which I’m told was written in iambic tetrameter; I’m pretty sure that’s an ancient Greek dialect spoken by fewer than eight people today — with my lovely bride. If you’re unfamiliar with it, read the whole thing (I linked to it at the top), and understand that Byron, had he known my wife, would have been inspired by her to pen that poem, rather than by his cousin’s wife.

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[3] For all their bawdy reputation, limericks are “real” poetry, and while I was initially tempted to refer to them as rednek poems, they are governed by enough strict rules to qualify them for display in the … the… well, in something that requires very strict rules. They use anapestic rhythm (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one), and they have to be five lines in length. Extra points for silliness and/or crudeness. As an example, let’s ask Gemini AI to compose one about Lord Byron, who was quite the cad:

The scandalous Byron would flirt,
With hearts that he left in the dirt.
He loved many a lady,
In trysts that were shady,
And left half of Europe unskirt!

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