December 2021

In this month’s edition of the advice column, Saddled-Up and Starstruck asks the sage cowboy poets a straight-shooting, no-nonsense question: "What are the cowboy poets really like?" To which we said, “do you really want to know?” Joking aside (mostly), we rounded up their (mostly) serious responses to this forthright, but rather philosophical, query.

Send in your own questions for the cowboy poets! Submissions can be made on our Facebook, Instagram, or by email to media@westernfolklife.org.

“
What are the cowboy poets really like?
— Saddled-Up and Starstruck

Dick Gibford:

Dear Starstruck,

First off, we are all different individuals, obviously. Yet we are bound in camaraderie within the endangered subspecies known as real cowboys. And I emphasize real, because nowadays under the widely accepted definition, which is pathetic, cowboys can be anyone from a truck driver who wears a cowboy hat and western boots, to a guitar-picking C&W singer, neither of whom have lived a cowboy life riding in big, wild country, gathering cattle on half-broke horses, and living on a meager wage month to month. Yet a real cowboy cowboys because he loves it. He or she loves the action of a sure-footed horse underneath and a big sky above in rugged country full of challenges too numerous to mention here. One cannot, of course, simply go out and purchase all the necessary accoutrements and become a cowboy. It takes years to develop within one’s psyche, spirit, and common sense all the skills needed to become a qualified cowboy that could hold a riding job on a big outfit. Someday I may write a book about it, but here I only want to clarify where cowboy poets come from. I have cowboyed for and with some of the best cowboys on the planet and they are the most interesting characters I have ever met, very aware and rugged individuals. So, when you ask what we are really like, I have to go to the source, and out there where it’s happening is where our poetry comes from.

Yvonne Hollenbeck:

Cowboy poets are really like anybody else. They like to write poems about what interests them and it just happens that their interests are in the Western lifestyle.

Bill Lowman:

There's many subcultures within our cowboy poet culture, from the "love it but don't live it" to many degrees of real, everyday cowboys from the West’s different regions. My family and I own and operate a 20,000-acre cow/calf spread in the deep, rough, and rugged western North Dakota badlands where I grew up. I write to record unusual and dramatic happenings of my day-to-day life. There's a huge difference between family-owned cowboy culture and buckaroo culture. A difference from long, cold northern winters to the high desert southwest. Dry humor has always been an everyday part of our lives, which I find some other areas are absent in. About the only similarity we bond over is the love of free enterprise and limited government control.

Waddie Mitchell:

They're ego driven narcissists in love with stolen thought
Bow legged master nothin's who complain of their whole lot

They'll swerve around all deep thought and avoid use of their brain
No know how or experience, the world's loss is their gain

They're just a waste of pencil lead, a bother to one's head
They'll never see fame in this life and even less when dead

And they lack good hygiene habits, don't iron shirt or pant
If asked "Can they do anything?" Them know them all say "Can't"

They will plagiarize, take credit for, fake sources and lie
They'll be on stage with someone good then claim glory or try

On cowboy poets I must say they're scoundrels and the like
You asked who they really are now it's planted in your psych