Genre Exploration: Cowboy Poetry

Yesterday in my American Folklore class we talked about cowboy poetry. My professor showed us some clips from the cowboy poetry gathering in Elko, Nevada. It was actually some great stuff, and definitely worth looking into.

As a beginning, general thing, here is a great cowboy poetry site with a big collection of poems.

I wanted to highlight a couple of my favorite poems, and put them here for easy access, but to keep safe from any copyright issues, I'll just have to link to them. Here are my two favorite:

The Pearl of Them All by Will Ogilvie

Anthem by Buck Ramsey

(On each of those pages there are several poems, so you may have to search for those specific ones).

Much of their poetry is put to music, so here is a link to The Riders in the Sky website, a very fun band who I think sang Woody's Roundup in the second Toy Story movie.

Other poet recommendations are Badger Clark, Baxter Black, Joel Nelson and Gwen Peterson. See if you can find something you like.

So why cowboy poetry? Well, its rhyming and often sentimental, which usually aren't good things in my opinion, but much of this poetry shows how sentimentality can be done well, and that is a good thing. I believe its good to read in tons of genres to round out your own writing. Plus cowboy poetry is just fun. I really enjoyed, and was moved by it, and that's the point of art, right?

Anyway, let me know what you think of this. I hope it will brighten your day as much as it did mine.

Sarah Allen