Word: cowboy
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Like the pickup truck and Interstate 40, Knox fails to fit Hollywood's western stereotype: he is a cowboy poet. Despite the apparent oxymoron, verse has its place on the range, and Knox and his fellow horseback balladeers capture well the cowboy's changing world...
After working some 30 jobs in nine Western states in the past 14 years, Knox understands the modern cowboy, and his poetry speaks the plains' truths. As he writes in a poem called The Dying Times: "Any man makin' a living by punchin' cows/ Will know what I mean when I say/ The good times that's been had are comin' to an end;/ Friends, we've about reached that day." His voice is not alone...
Research for a recent anthology, Cowboy Poetry: A Gathering, by Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center in Salt Lake City, turned up about 5,000 poems by contemporary cowboys (known in their slang as waddies) and ranchers. "If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em," says Knox. "I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry." The first poem Knox penned more than a decade ago describes a barroom brawl he lost, and he's been at it ever since...
Until about 18 months ago, Knox was a nomadic cowpuncher. His rambling philosophy: "There are only two good ranches--the one you've left and the one you're goin' to." Though he's settled with his wife Joni in a corner of Arizona, his cowboy blood still runs thick. With great pride, he pulls his battered steel spurs from the tack-room wall and brushes away the dirt. As he points out the silver-inlaid design and the gold initials R.L.K., he smiles at all the times he's worn them with a swagger. He hangs them...
...Most cowboy poems speak of real events and people, from bucking horses and cagey cows to old Stetson hats and long winter travels. Although they focus on the ordinary stuff of life, their truths, at least to cowboys, seem no less eternal than those penned by William Shakespeare. Some cowboy poems are bust-a-gut funny; a few are downright dirty. And some are just plain awful. But many carry an honest, primitive power, like these lines from Vern Mortensen's Range Cow in Winter...