Cowboy Poetry Gathering in St. Anthony

April 15- 21 is cowboy poetry week.  Friday and Saturday, April 20-21, there is a cowboy poetry gathering at the Roxy Theater in Saint Anthony.  Poets will be reciting their works all day with occasional performances by western bands.  The morning is open to the public, but the evening show requires purchased tickets.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, cowboy poetry is generally traditional forms of rhyming verse, frequently in ballad form.  Romantic imagery is often employed, though cowboy poetry usually sticks close to realism.  The vocabulary employed is the vernacular common to cowboys and not formal English.  It grew out of cowboys entertaining themselves around a campfire while on the trail though some early popular works were composed by people who merely lived in the west.  And, just like every literary genre, there are some that write well and many that don’t.

Generally free verse, poetry without meter and usually without rhyme, is avoided, though it is becoming more common.  There are still arguments within the community on whether poems that don’t use rhyme or meter count as poetry.  

Topics revolve around cowboys and their lifestyle.  That could include anything from ranch work to western landscapes to humorous anecdotes.  It has also been described as “any poem a cowboy likes.”

The first and most famous cowboy poetry gathering was started in Elko, Nevada, in 1985.  Poets still gather there every year to share their recent works.  Saint Anthony’s gathering has been an annual event since 1987.  The one I attended a few years ago was lively and full of good humor with a variety of poets reciting and western bands performing.

A good exploration of cowboy poetry is A Brief Introduction to Cowboy Poetry, or, Who’s the Guy in the Big Hat and What is He Talking About? by Rod Miller.  He concludes, “while sometimes denigrated as doggerel, dismissed as mere folk art, and decried for sins as varied as using rhyme and meter (or not) and vernacular vocabulary, if you listen closely cowboy poetry can be heard to say, ‘tell somebody who cares.’”