Last weekend’s edition of the Houston Chronicle carried a long article on the subject of cowboy poetry. Somewhat defensively, the article began by insisting that cowboy poetry isn’t an oxymoron. Indeed, according poet Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, cowboy poetry, by making use of traditional poetic devices such as rhyme, meter and narrative, helps to rescue poetry from the highbrows and give it back to the popular culture.

There may be something to that argument, since the article went on to state that there are approximately 200 annual cowboy poetry readings in the U.S. every year.

Joel Nelson, a 61-year-old working cowboy quoted in the article, says he grew up listening to his mother read aloud from such well-loved poets as Rudyard Kipling, Robert Frost, Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen Vincent Benet. Today, Nelson is the host and unofficial laureate of the annual Texas Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas.

According to Nelson, cowboys are natural poets for two reasons. First, because they live and work alone much of the time, which gives them lots of room for reflection. Second, because the act of riding a horse is rhythmic in itself, and naturally leads the rider to spin verses.

Nelson’s 2002 poem, Equus Caballus, is a case in point, because it traces the history of the horse:

I have run on middle fingernail through Eolithic morning,
And I’ve thundered down the coach road with the Revolution’s warning.
I’ve carried countless errant knights who never found the grail.
I have strained before the caissons and moved the nation’s mail…
I am roguish –- I am flighty –- I am inbred –- I am lowly.
I’m a nightmare –- I am wild –- I am the horse.

The reference to “errant knights who never found the grail” poses an intriguing question. Does Nelson here refer to knights errant –- solitary knights who wandered the world in search of chivalrous adventures? Or does he mean that the knights were “errant” in the moral sense –- that they never found Holy Grail because they erred and strayed from the true path? Or does he mean that the lone cowboy is America’s version of the knight errant?

Owen Wister, who wrote the classic western novel, The Virginian, would probably have endorsed the last interpretation. In his introduction to the novel, he paid this tribute to the cowboy:

What is become of the horseman, the cowpuncher, the last romantic figure upon our soil? For he was romantic. Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he squandered were squandered hard,--half a year's pay sometimes gone in a night,--"blown in," as he expressed it, or "blowed in," to be perfectly accurate. Well, he will be here among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like. His wild kind has been among us always, since the beginning: a young man with his temptations, a hero without wings.

Wister was right. The cowboy will be among us always, singing his songs that celebrate the freedom of the open range. The rough rhymes of authentic cowboys like Joel Nelson, read aloud to appreciative audiences at 200 cowboy poetry gatherings a year, are ample proof of that.