I look to post on this blog at least once or twice a week until I either lose interest or I simply run out of things I want to share...which will run out first my interest or my enthusiasm....hmmm. we shall see.
So I want to write about cowboy poetry. What the hell is cowboy poetry? you may be asking yourself. Well, I don't know what the hell cowboy poetry is either. But I was recently amused to come across a copy of Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering by Hal Cannon at the Barnes & Noble in Stamford, CT.
Some years ago, I had previously stumbled across a copy of the small paperback at a Little Professor Bookstore in the Kroger Shopping Center on Tylersville Road in West Chester, Ohio. I did not know anything about poetry at the time or anything remotely literary other than the few required reading texts I had read or skimmed for school, your typical fare Fahrenheit 451, Lord of the Flies, Hamlet, Great Expectations, etc. I was looking for something real and exciting, possibly dangerous and I thought cowboy poetry would be it.
I thought the slim volume contained some sort of poetic mysticism. So I grasped at the book hoping it was something solid. I glanced at the cover and recall liking the image of a solitary cowboy reading by the fire, the head of a disembodied coyote floating above him. I held the book in my hands and flipped through its pages. But I don't recall reading a single page of cowboy poetry.
(Although a search of Google books brought up the book and I read these lines from "The Cowboy Soliloquy" by Alan McCanless, "I wash in a puddle, and wipe on a sack,/And carry my wardrobe all on my back./My ceiling the sky, my carpet the grass,/My music the lowing of herds as they pass" reads pretty good to me...)
I felt that knowing that such a thing as cowboy poetry existed, somehow made me worldly and sophisticated. I felt that I had discovered a great unknown and largely ignored literary genre and this was my ticket to acceptance into the intellectual world of the greater Ohio valley.
I pictured myself with a pipe in hand, wearing round reading glasses, and a tweed blazer with elbow patches walking across a college campus as fall leaves crunched under my feet. I imagined myself to be part Indiana Jones, part academic ass. I would seduce the female students with my knowledge of cowboy poetry and chastise the jocks for their ignorance of cowboys and their poetry. In my adolescent mind it was cowboy poetry + girls = seduction.
So one day a girl called me. It was a girl, I was trying to both impress and seem disinterested in. I mentioned that I read a lot of books and that I had been reading "a lot of cowboy poetry lately". The girl's voice suddenly came alive with interest. I was acting so casual and detached that I couldn't even recall what I had said. But the girl started grilling me about cowboy poetry. A wave of panic overwhelmed me as suddenly I had to talk about something I knew absolutely nothing about, "oh cowboy poetry, poetry written by actual cowboys. yeah, its rare stuff." I may have even called it profound and insightful.
I did this a lot as a kid. I would watch a movie, then read the novel adaptation of the movie and then feign ignorance that I was even aware that the book had ever been made into a film or the film made into a book, "Jaws, Really? I had no idea it was made into a film. Are you sure its the same story? Well, The book is really good." I look back now and I wonder...What the hell was wrong with me?
Luckily, a portable Beat Reader introduced me to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs. I picked up a Sylvia Plath novel and read some Walt Whitman. But when anyone asks where my love for good literature comes from, I puff on my imaginary pipe and say, "Well, my friend have you ever heard of cowboy poetry? no? Well, few people have it is a lost genre."
Cheers,
Chad
No comments:
Post a Comment