How the West Is Fun
Baxter Black, the first full-time cowboy poet, gives away his formula for great poetry.
texasmonthly.com: I spoke with someone in your office, and they told me that you grew up for a short time in Lubbock.
Baxter Black: That was like when we were little.
texasmonthly.com: Like little itty-bitty?
BB: I went to the fifth and sixth grade in Lubbock, and then Mother said, "We've got to get out of here before these boys talk funny." So we moved to Las Cruces. I don't know if that helped any.
texasmonthly.com: Rumor on the circuit has it that you are the world's first full-time cowboy poet. Is that true?
BB: Well I could imagine that that is probably true, but a better way to put it is that I was probably the first one of this generation who made a living doing this. When I started writing poetry when I was in my mid-thirties—and I am 57 now—I didn't know exactly what I was doing because I had never learned a poem. I imagine I was exposed to some in English class, but anyway, I started writing poems because I told stories. I was a veterinarian and I was in the cattle business, so I went from ranch to ranch and feedlot to feedlot, and I would tell stories. Somebody would get bucked off, and I would get to the next place, and I would tell them. Then by the time I got it straight, it got to be a pretty good story. I thought I was a songwriter in my twenties and early thirties, so I wrote lots of songs, and I was used to writing in verse. So somewhere along the line, I turned one of those stories into a poem. I can remember that the effect it had on the cowboys I worked with was sort of impressive, because you tell a story and then the next guy tells it and the next guy tells it, and it keeps changing.
texasmonthly.com: Like a fish story?
BB: That's right. But the story changes, and jokes change. Everybody tells it their own way, but a poem is not like that. It's not a fluid thing. You weld the words in place, in my mind, and that's why the writing is so critical. It's all done with the idea that it is going to be performed or done out loud. I can't remember the seminal moment this happened, but when I first started writing poems and when I told the cowboys, they realized the difference between being the butt of a joke and being enshrined in a poem. That poem was not going to change. It was not just going to be a joke. They were immortalized.
It is an odd thing. People look at it differently, and they still do. So for someone like me—and this probably applies to a lot of cowboy poets—we do this for attention. We have something to say, and we want someone to listen. That's it. We want someone to listen, and in my case, I want 'em to laugh. And when they had that reaction, they did listen. It was like, "Gosh this is great. I'll just do this." So I started writing poetry. But I'll admit I didn't call it cowboy poetry because it didn't sound right.
texasmonthly.com: What do you mean?
BB: [higher voice] Cowboy poetry, oh really? When I first started, and as a matter of fact, I still have cowboy humorist on my business card, but when the cowboy poetry gathering came along, it was so outlandish that it made it okay. It took the sissy aspects out of poetry because it was so outlandish. It's like if Jesse Ventura wants to put on a dress and wear a wig, no one is going to bug him. That is maybe the same corollary: If a big, tough, blood-and-guts cowboy is going to say a poem, nobody's going to say anything. It's going to be okay.
I do agricultural banquets for a living, and of course, I do my poems, but I can imagine that wives are the ones who bring their husbands to shows like I do. The wife is saying, "We are going to hear some cowboy poetry," and he is saying, "Not on your life." But they drug them to my poetry, and as one guy put it—and he meant it as a compliment—he said, "Hell, I didn't even know it was a poem till you were halfway through it." If they are conversational, which mine are, then it's okay.
texasmonthly.com: If it's conversational, it's okay. That's a good rule to go by.
BB: Well, they can't all be that way, but there's a difference between telling it and reading it. Poetry is hard to just read when you pick up a book. If it is written well, then it is meant to be done aloud, and so you should at least move your lips when you are reading the poem. We go to a lot of trouble to pick just the right word, weld it into place, and search for perfect meter. We go to a lot of trouble so that when you read, it sounds the way we intended it to sound.
texasmonthly.com: So how do you go about writing your poetry?
BB: Inspiration is the first that has to come. You have to have an idea. I am not a person who gets up every day and writes something. I write a weekly column, but I don't get up every day and write a weekly column. I wait for something to inspire me, and the poems are part of that column. Every now and then, a line will lay itself out to you or someone will say something. I'll give an example. In the old days when I was a vet, I worked with a lot of cows. I'd be out working the cows in the fall, and one of the vet's job is to call a cow. You know to see if her teeth are bad or if she doesn't have a calf in her or she's got a bad foot, so you gotta squeeze her into trying to give her her annual physical. This old rancher was in the back pacing on horseback. He went clear up to the front, and I opened the gate, and I cut this old cow off to the left. Who knows why I cut her off. He looked at me and said, "What's the story on that good ol' cow." He had a personal relationship with her. I don't mean that as a joke. He knew that cow. What's the story on that good ol' cow. That's your first line. The bow-legged cowboy asked. Well she's sort of gimpy on her left hind leg and her breathing's kind of flat. So they come like that.
texasmonthly.com: You're amazing. You cover like three of my questions in one of your answers.
BB: Well I told you we don't quit talking.
texasmonthly.com: That does help.
BB: Yeah. Maybe I should just ask you the questions?
texasmonthly.com: All righty.
BB: I am going to make this observation, and then there are different things you can sort out of it.
texasmonthly.com: Okay.
BB: Poetry and songs are not the same. I also write songs, and I am not as successful a songwriter as I am a poet. That doesn't mean that you can't write songs like you write poetry, but rhyme seems to be a whole lot less important. And you can fudge bad meter with a tune, but when you are naked up there with your poem, you can't do that. There are no little dots that say that you can speed up or slow down. You are just reading. So you can slide bad writing into a song, but you can't slide bad writing into a poem.
There are three things I look for in my own poems when I am trying to write a poem well. The first one is perfect meter and perfect rhyme. You notice every now and then that songwriters will try and write poems, and they think things like "love" and "enough" rhyme. Well they don't, but you don't have a tune to cover it up. In poetry people expect it to rhyme, and when it doesn't, it is like somebody just goes "clank," and it stops everything. The second thing—and the most important—in evaluating a poem is original thought.
texasmonthly.com: Isn't that another thing that cowboy's are supposed to have lots of?
BB: They do.
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