How the West Is Fun
Baxter Black, the first full-time cowboy poet, gives away his formula for great poetry.
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texasmonthly.com: Doesn't that go with the talking?
BB: I think so. Yeah. I have a couple of poems about a fire, and a friend of mine called up and said, "You know, I had a great idea to write a fire poem, but you already wrote it." And I said, "How can you ever say that. How many songs are there about love?" Oh, I had this great song, and I was going to write it about love, but you know it's already been written. No, you can always write. The one thing that I have noticed about original thought—and all poets, including myself, are guilty of it and it's not something that we should be proud of—is that we use old jokes. I used to tell jokes before I started writing poems, and I have seen many, many of them wind up in poems, and somehow the poem writer concludes well I must have written that. Well anyone else can take that same subject from that same joke and write a poem from it. The guy who wrote it first has no gripe because it wasn't an original thought. He took it right out and plagiarized an old joke and wrote a poem and somehow thinks it's his own. And all of us do it.
And the third one for me, because I do everything out loud—that's the way I write everything that I am going to perform—is a strong ending. Because when you come to the end of your poem and you're talking to a crowd, and then you stop, the crowd sort of is silent for a couple of seconds. They start looking at each other, and then they go, "Oh, okay, it must be over." You want a strong ending so they know the poem is over. I know some guys just take their hat off or step back or . . .
texasmonthly.com: Stare down at their feet?
BB: [laughs] That's what you do when you forget—as if your answers are down there. I will tell you this. Most of us take great pride in memorizing our poems and the poems of the—I call them the dead guys and I don't mean any disrespect. There was a whole swath of cowboy poets that lived almost a hundred years ago, and three or four of them, their work still lives on. People are doing them.
texasmonthly.com: It's amazing how these poems have lasted so long without being written down.
BB: That's because the meter and the rhyme are good. It's an oral thing. It's in your brain. And people keep telling it. We take great pride in being able to memorize our poem to the point of obstinacy. This speaks to the essence of cowboy pride. It's an introduction to one of my poems: "If it can't be done a horseback, I ain't interested. Many a cowboy's gone down the road after speaking those words to the boss. It is the essence of cowboy pride where survival, good sense, and regular meals all take a back seat. He'd rather go hungry." In other words, cowboy pride is a funny thing. I don't know how many of us were on Johnny Carson—a big deal for poets ten years ago. I was scared to death that I was going to forget my poem. I was pacing back beside the stage, and a lady— one of the people who worked there—came up said, "Are you all right?" And I said, "Gosh, I don't want to forget my poem." Of course, I had done it a thousand times, but you know how you get. She said, "Oh, we can put it on a TelePrompTer for crying out loud." And I just gave her this look of disdain. We would not consider putting it on a TelePrompTer, and I don't know a single person who did that. How stupid is that! "Where survival, good sense, and regular meals all take a back seat. He'd rather go hungry." I would rather stand out there and try and screw it up in front of twenty-five million people and know I did it the right way than to sit there and read it off a card. And I think that speaks for all of us. It's one of the magic things about going to a poetry gathering—to see people reel off these long stories and poems for hours on end. It's part of the cowboy pride of cowboy poetry.
texasmonthly.com: I was going to ask you about the aspect of performance and how important it is to the tradition and everything.
BB: Well, I make a living so I'm not sure how to answer that. I am not a traditional person in the sense that—I don't want to say I am not a fan of the Old West—I write about the non-romantic side. I'm not writing about a vanishing breed. You just can't see them from the road. In a whole poem that is the gist of it: You just can't see them from the road. You can drive from one end of the country to the other and never get off the freeway, pull into the same QuickStop and the same gas station, listen to the same canned radio from one end of the country to the other, and never roll down the windows or never smell air or touch dirt. So how would you know if there are any cowboys out there? You can't see them from where you are. They are just over the hump there . . .
texasmonthly.com: What do you think the purpose of cowboy poetry is?
BB: In my case it is to get people to laugh. There is nothing deep about what I do. I'm just here to make you laugh.
texasmonthly.com: And have a good time.
BB: And I do, and they have a good time. There are historians and folklore people who can . . .
texasmonthly.com: Debate about that?
BB: I hope they don't debate that I'm having a good time. But they can debate the influence that cowboy poetry has on representing the West.
texasmonthly.com: How do you think cowboy poetry distinguishes itself from other poetry? Does it?
BB: Of course it does. Here is the single most obvious distinction. It is popular and it sells. I have sold more than half a million books and an equal number of tapes. It's poetry. I mean I have stories in there too, but it's poetry. The only poetry that really sells that way is Robert Service, Banjo Patterson from Australia—just a handful of poetry sells like that. Now you can get Robert Frost and Edgar Allan Poe. But the kind of poetry that I call academic poetry—that's not meant as a derisive comment at all but that's the only way I can describe it—the books sell in much smaller quantities, and the audiences they speak to are small. That doesn't mean that the poetry isn't good, and it doesn't mean that it isn't good writing. It just means that it doesn't reach as broad an audience.
It's an observation about being on Johnny Carson again. I don't know how many stars of his caliber—talk-show people—could have had us on and made it work. I wasn't on there the first couple of times, so someone else was leading the charge. But we went out there. We were on there because of the term "cowboy poetry"—just like Jesse Ventura in a dress—that was why we were on there, because it was so odd. This was about six years after the Urban Cowboy craze. And then suddenly walking out onstage was the real thing, and we sat down. Johnny Carson did not ridicule us because we were not professional entertainers; we were regular people. We just happened to be cowboys. He gave us that respect, and he let us do our thing and present our stuff. Another thing that clinched it was that the poetry was clever, and it was completely like all of the humor that was on television, which was basically about sex and still is. But these were poems about getting bucked off, and so it was completely different and it was clean. I mean it was biologically correct. It had manure and blood in it, but it wasn't lewd. It was real, clever stuff to the point that the response was so good that every year they just kept having people back on. That was cowboy poetry. You couldn't have gone on there with any other kind of poetry and made it work—and you still can't.
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