Riding the silences in cowboy poetry
Great Basin
BY LINDA HUSSA
In this space this open-ness
where light feels its way along the hills
close
there is room for knowing
The landscape repeated
the silence living being just the same
as the place where the light turns
At any moment here
the most uncivilized among us
could unmire their bones
from the earth
from the sky
and begin again.
where light feels its way along the hills
close
there is room for knowing
The landscape repeated
the silence living being just the same
as the place where the light turns
At any moment here
the most uncivilized among us
could unmire their bones
from the earth
from the sky
and begin again.
Linda Hussa writes poems about silences, the silences between people and
in the open spaces of the Great Basin. She fills the silences with shining
shards of meaning.
When Hussa read poems from her new book, Ride the Silence, at the
Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko in January, an auditorium that moments before
had been filled with raucous laughter, fell silent. The air was knocked
out of the crowd of cowboy hats as each person alone heard her painfully
sharp portraits of women's lives emerging from the silences of ranches in
the West.
"People are touched because they haven't heard this side of the story before," Hussa says. "It's a different more honest look. You can document men's lives easily. They are visible. They're always ready to talk about their successes. Women's lives are the ones that backed them up. They are the support figures."
Some of Hussa's poems were inspired by oral histories of women in ranching. Others come from her own life on a cattle and sheep ranch in Surprise Valley in the far northeastern corner of California, where she lives with her husband John. Back of their home the Warner Mountains rise like a rock wall between Surprise Valley and the rest of California. Out front the Great Basin beckons. Nevada starts just across the valley.
Hussa grew up riding horses and writing. "I wrote poetry in school then completely stopped," she says. "I thought it had to have a lofty message and be at least as good as Emily Dickinson. Then I began reading cowboy poetry from the gathering. I began writing again. And I was lucky to have Wendell Berry put into my hands, along with other writers who write about the earth and life on earth." Hussa was invited to read at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in 1991 and has been a featured poet ever since.
"I'm not certain where cowboy poetry is going," Hussa says.
"It has to grow. It can't just stay the same. 'The Strawberry Roan,'
'Purt near Perkins,' Bruce Kiskaddon, Badger Clark.
I love that stuff. It's light hearted and beautiful. But it isn't all
of it. People need to hear all of it. There is a side of the gathering
that wants to maintain a traditional look at the cowboy and his life on
the land. Period. I see him too. But we can't forget there are other people,
like the small ranchers. He is trying to make it work and she is helping.
I see them."
Ride the Silence is published by Black Rock Press. The 90-page
paperback comes in a dust jacket that was printed by hand on a letterpress
printer and adorned with a color reproduction of a painting by Sophie
Sheppard, a Surprise Valley neighbor of the Hussas. Linda Hussa will read
from Ride the Silence, March 14 at 7:30 p.m. in the Clark Room
in Morrill Hall at the University of Nevada, Reno. Sophie Sheppard's original
art work for the book will also be on display. Copies of the book can
be purchased at the event or from the press by mail for $15 plus $2 shipping.
Black Rock Press, University Library/322, University of Nevada, Reno,
NV 89557 (702/784-1500). 