The staff of the Accounting Office at the Library of Congress has never seen an invoice like the one Paul Zarzyski submitted for his services at the end of Cowboy Poetry Day.
The invoice cited "one half-hour of spurring the jump-'n'- kick verses, for making the ring and ricochet of cowboy lingo resound lovingly off the stirrup bone of the Mumford Room's middle ear."
Despite the unusual description of the "deliverable," as they say in government circles, Mr. Zarzyski should have no trouble getting paid. For the invoice describes exactly what he did on the evening of April 7, along with two other poetry "hands," Sunny Hancock and Linda Hussa. And while the verses jumped and kicked, three other Western writers sought to throw a rope over the poetry and brand it with an interpretation or two during an afternoon seminar that preceded the reading.
Hal Cannon, founding director of the Cowboy Poetry Gathering held each year in Elko, Nev., opened the seminar with an overview of the history and current state of cowboy poetry.
"A true renaissance of cowboy arts in under way," said Mr. Cannon. "It is largely powered by the pressure the modern world exerts on a way of life that is foreign to it. ... Beyond being just a cry from the wilderness or providing us with a mere nostalgic look at a vanishing past, cowboy poetry, story and song possess a strength and knowledge that are worthy of everyone's attention."
Mr. Cannon gave a brief history of cowboy verse from the 1880s, when the first books began to appear, to its current revival in more than 150 poetry gatherings in small Western towns. Although separated by more than 100 years, Mr. Cannon attributed the surge in popularity during the two time periods to the same root causes: nostalgia for a vanishing way of life and anxiety about the future.
In his introduction to New Cowboy Poetry: A Contemporary Gathering, Mr. Cannon writes, "As the century turned, the cowboy way of life changed. The West was no longer an unpeopled, unfenced land; the long cattle drives ended, and the ability [to achieve] independence on the frontier was diminished."
During this time the myth of the cowboy began, fueled by books, music and movies, until it became a symbolic emblem of who we are as Americans. To escape this onslaught of popularization, the true lore of the cowboy went underground. Poems from the early days were kept in scrapbooks or recited from memory, but seldom published. Now, according to Mr. Cannon, "Open-land grazing, one hallmark of the West, is being challenged by grasping urban centers, by recreationalists and by environmentalists."
This has caused men like Sunny Hancock to step forward, as he did after Mr. Cannon's presentation. Mr. Hancock is a large barrel-chested man with a dry wit who delivers folksy, conversational verse directly from his prodigious memory. He and his wife live on a ranch in Lakeview, Ore., although, according to Mr. Hancock, "You really couldn't call it a ranch because we never ran over 150 cows, but that was enough so that we both had to go to work to pay the mortgage and keep those old cows eating."
In case anyone happened to be wondering about his position on environmentalism, Mr. Hancock made that clear from the beginning. What he could never understand, he said as he stepped up to the microphone, was why two teenagers needed no more space than the back of a VW to breed, but a spotted owl needed hundreds of acres of forest.
Mr. Hancock's contrary nature was a source of motivation after someone once told him never to attempt a poem about roping a bear. This is a popular subject for cowboy poetry. The many poems that already addressed this improbable theme probably couldn't be improved upon. "But I decided to do it anyway," he said, launching into his own version.
The poem begins with a bear digging ants out of a log. It ends with the same bear fixing to rope Mr. Hancock from atop his own horse. In between, the audience was treated to a hilarious parable on the folly of man's attempts to bend nature to his will.
Writer and editor Teresa Jordan confessed that initially she was very wary of the entire notion of cowboy poetry. As a writer about ranch culture, she thought cowboy poetry would "kitschify" the experience. But after one visit to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, she was hooked.
She was puzzled, however, as to why the women's poetry did not seem as strong as the men's. She decided it was because of a kind of self-censorship that women imposed upon themselves. They were trying to tell their stories in a male way, not from their own experience. Drawing upon her memories of growing up on a ranch, she said, "When I was with boys, we rode horses. When I had girls to play with, we actually became horses."
Her negative assessment was short-lived, however, because within a few years there was an "explosion" of writing by women in general. Women on ranches found their own voice. It's definitely a softer voice, one more concerned with subtlety and community and less with braggadocio and tall tale. Ms. Jordan recited some classic examples. Then Linda Hussa shared her poem "The Widow Olson."
As she rides past a ranch, the poet asks an old ranch hand who owns the place. He replies, "The Widow Olson lives there./At least she used to." She asks for how long, and he replies "30 or 40 years." She is shocked: "A woman ran a ranch out here/for 30 or 40 years/ALONE/and you still call her/the WIDOW Olson?/What was her first name, Jimmy?"
The hand thinks about it for "two jackrabbits and a half dozen chuckholes" and says, "I d'know. We just called her the Widow Olson."
Of such small moments is great literature made, according to Kim Stafford, director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College. If the other commentators were there to prove that cowboy poetry was written by real cowboys, Professor Stafford was there to prove it also was written by real poets. And he was prepared to prove it with some medieval examples.
By way of a demonstration, Mr. Stafford faced off against poet Paul Zarzyski. Mr. Stafford drew first, throwing out a bit of Beowulf he had committed to memory. Mr. Zarzyski countered with "The Legend of Boastful Bill." When the smoke cleared, they both had scored direct hits. Mr. Stafford had proved the epic tradition is alive and well in cowboy poetry.
During the evening reading, Sunny Hancock showed that other traditions are alive and well too. A capacity audience, many sporting cowboy hats, heard him recite a virtual anthology of cowboy poetry from memory. Bruce Kiskaddon's "Red Flannins" told of a fight to the death over borrowed long johns. The accuser later discovers he was wearing them all along, deep below a layer of accumulated grime. Other poems dealt with the character of an old roundup cook, the unexpected turnabouts in horse-trading, the vexations of pack rats and the comforts of hell, among other themes.
Linda Hussa followed with readings from her own poetry. Ms. Hussa brings a delicate sensibility to the rigors of ranch life, a life in which, along with her husband, she is a very active participant in Northern California.
"Homesteaders, Poor and Dry" tells of the tests of character a drought can bring. A young girl sees her father broken and weeping over having to kill a cow he professed to hate. When the well goes dry, she must go down the rope on a stick, a terrifying experience into the "Belly of a monster/a monster that would take me in one swallow."
But she went down, into the underworld, and returned redeemed. Now, "Nothing can ever scare me again./No man./No beast./No God./I saw His face that day/and He promised me/no fear."
Perhaps no poem exemplified more of the women's sensibility of which Teresa Jordan spoke than "Under the Hunter Moon." Here Ms. Hussa translates the grim necessity of shooting a coyote into an aesthetic experience. She describes what she sees as she steps out into "the silence of dawn" and stations herself in a rose patch, awaiting the arrival of a predator that has been taking a lamb a day for two weeks. But she finds she must shoot as she watches the coyote "Snatch mice out of the grass/flip them up like popcorn,/down the hatch."
The poem ends with a reckoning, but not with the decisive violence one might expect ranch life to demand. With her "finger soft on the cold steel trigger" Ms. Hussa ends the poem with the coyote looking directly at her: "Her eyes hold me accountable." We never know if the score is settled.
One would never find Paul Zarzyski staring at a coyote for long. He would sooner throw on a saddle and try to ride it. Paul rode bareback broncs for more than a decade and was a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. His poetry brays with a rollicking exuberance that makes one marvel at how long he can hold on. Whatever the subject, from escorting his grandmother to a potluck supper of "Rocky Mountain oysters" to describing an old celebrated bronc rider, Mr. Zarzyski's poetry is a constant reminder that this poetry was founded on an oral tradition. There is a love of language and cadence that was meant to be recited.
The best example in this regard is "The Heavyweight Champion Pie-Eatin' Cowboy of the West," a sort of panegyric to pies made possible only with a good stock of Bromo Seltzer in the chuck wagon:
"I just ate 50 pies -- started off with coconut/macaroon, wedged my way through bar angel/chocolate, Marlborough, black walnut and sour cream/raisin to confetti-crusted crab apple-- /still got room for dessert," Mr. Zarzyki boasted, "and they can stick their J-E-L-L-O/where the cowpie don't shine, 'cause, Sugar Plum,/I don't eat nothing made from horses' hooves!"
