Thoughts on This Year's Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Arlene Croce, dance critic for the New Yorker magazine, raised a ruckus the year she wrote a review of  a performance by the Bill T. Jones Dance Company she  didn’t attend.  I experienced few of the week’s events of the 2012 Cowboy Poetry Gathering, but I still have an opinion:  ho-hum.

The setting, Elko, Nevada at the end of January, was appropriately bleak, a cold landscape of old snow and mud, more mining town than ranching center; fewer pickups with stock racks than half-ton rigs bearing the logos of mining companies or their suppliers.  Most were covered with the grime of two-lane highways and dirt roads that lead to the mine, not the ranch.  Actually, I liked the rough, dirty look of the place, more Butte than Missoula. 

 As I browsed through the Cowboy Poetry Gathering program, looking to see who were this year’s presenters, I recognized the same old faces.  No, same faces, now old.  I do have my credentials.  I started coming to the Gathering, which is held in my home town, that first year, 1985.  I remember Waddie Mitchell when he was just a kid, twenty-five years ago, and I can lament with the best of them the passing of great cowboy poets like Buck Ramsey.

  I can imagine the conversations among strangers standing in line in front of the closed doors of the Gold Room or the Turquoise Room at the Elko Convention Center, where most of the daytime events are held.  “Yep, we’ve been comin’ since ’92 or ’89 or ’85.”  However, among some of my rancher friends and locals, it’s about when they quit coming because the Gathering had gotten too commercial, too liberal, and most of all, “too goddam yuppie.” 

For me, the keynote address indicated how far the Gathering has strayed from its  intention to preserve and reflect authentic rural life in the West.  Before the keynote speaker gave his address, Waddie Mitchell, a true buckaroo and one of the first and finest of the cowboy poets, received a Distinguished Nevadan award from the Nevada Arts Council.  After a brief thank you, Waddie recited a long anti-war poem and then left the stage. 

 The keynote speaker was a veteran Hollywood character actor.  He rambled on about his career in western movies, and two tv series, Lonesome Dove and Northern Exposure.  In the latter he played a retired astronaut.   He could tell a good anecdote and the audience seemed to enjoy him.  A bad sign.  I thought he was another full-of-himself bullshitter.  I guess that’s a cowboy of a certain type.

Here in Tuscarora, where I live part of the year, the ranching community is in dire straights:  government bureaucracies and antagonistic  attitudes make many of the ranchers feel like their lifestyle is both misunderstood and endangered by urban people.   Like Elko in January, real ranch life is too gritty for   phony nostalgia.