Well it's been a few days since my last post, but with good reason - I just got engaged! And then I was on Spring Break. So it's been a whirlwind two weeks of calling everyone I know and setting a date, which was oddly enough a very stressful and difficult challenge. But the date has been set -Saturday, March 12, 2005. Yay!

And now, back to poetry.

Let's talk about Cowboy Poetry, today, shall we? Yes, you heard me correctly. Cowboy poetry. The poems of cowboys. Cowboys do still exist, and while they don't have shoot-em-ups with Indians, pretty much all the rest of the stereotypes apply. I can say this with some certainty because I was born and raised in Oklahoma. Listen to a Garth Brooks CD, if you don't believe me. I know what "spurs and latigo" are. Anyway, I was quite surprised to find that there is an entire subculture of spoken word cowboy poetry, and that these wranglers of the wild west get together at little conferences to share their poems.

Go on and snicker if you want, but the truth is that I think it is wonderful. It's no more silly and superficial than a rapper singing about being a pimp who likes his hos in Louis Vutton bikinis. In fact, it's strangely enough in the same vein - dreaming and bragging and speaking out to a group of people who consider a good horse the best bling-bling money can buy. I mean, they have a "Lariat Laureate" - how CUTE is that?! This is what LaVonne Houlton, one of the current Laureates, had to say about Cowboy Poetry:

"Cowboy Poetry isn't about kings, tycoons or posh surroundings. It is about the extraordinary lives of ordinary people, be they set in the past or in the present. It covers an important time and aspect of American life that many people cherish, and children still dream of... I believe that poetry portrays the Cowboy and the West better even than prose can do."

In all seriousness, this quote, and others you can find at www.cowboypoetry.com, suggests a serious reconsideration of poetry as the primary method of storytelling and history-keeping for an entire culture. We are swept from the 20th century American West to BC Classical Greece, to the time when Homeric epics were woven and spun and retold from generation to generation. Cowboy poetry mirrors that exact desire to record great feats, to embody the dreams and fears of a people, to carry all those things from the past into the present through the oral sharing of poetry. What seems hokey and rusticated is, surprisingly, ultra-formal in both form and purpose.