Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering 2003
At the Crossroads

By Ray A. March

Poets were serious.

Poets were humorous.

At the 2003 Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering they were sometimes too serious and sometimes not humorous enough. But they read to their audiences and they read to their peers. Poets attended each other’s readings, sitting in the audience and applauding enthusiastically and supportively. Cowboy singers hung out at each other’s performances, just tapping out the time, or jumping on the G Three Bar Theater stage for an impromptu jam session at the mike.

Poets and singers were the heart and soul of the show. They all mingled; they talked with fans, signed CDs and books.

They shared their craft and continued a tradition. This is important, because without tradition we have no way of measuring our past against our future, and most importantly we won’t have a gauge on a given moment within our own time that works well and without much of a problem – at least until outside forces set in. Then the equation changes. Tradition gets tested and too frequently discarded.

So, the poets and performers talked among themselves and pondered over what went wrong with tradition, why was the show out of sync and how can it get fixed. Because they talked among themselves, they didn’t see their other profile, the side that’s arrogant, standoffish and obstinate. Hardheaded and conforming. And the conformity is left over from the good old days when ranching was king and you could buy a politician a drink without filling out some disclosure form. But conformity has turned into back-to-the-wall stubborness at the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering and change from the outside keeps coming anyway. And they can’t quite put their finger on what’s wrong – even as they read it in their poems, sing it in their songs and talk of it among themselves.

They say horribly stupid things like Don Hedgpeth did in his keynote address saluting the horse, as the Chinese are in celebrating the lunar “Year of the Horse,” when he said, “…the only substantive link he could think of between the Chinese and cowboys was the name by which buckaroos call them sawed-off leggin’s they wear.” And they printed this in the official program word-for-word. My God, the one thing refreshing about the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering is its absence of political correctness, but that does not justify flat out racism. Talk about arrogance. And, two years ago they bitched about Stewart Udall’s invitation to give the Humanities Lecture. Read the word: humanities.

Well, so what the hell.

How can we all, all of us, afford to be so self-righteous? The Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering and what it represents is not a private club. If the poets and performers in a proprietary frame of mind think so, they will go down screaming to themselves.

That’s the top layer, the fall leaves drifting with the still stream, but like all quiet water there is a greater depth to the Elko Gathering. Call it a depressing undercurrent. It manifests itself over coffee at Cowboy Joe Downtown, at dinner at Pastries and the Star or upstairs in the pressroom over the main stage at the Elko Convention Center. They talk among themselves, sometimes joking but almost always coming to the same point: something was amiss. Noted, there was a pall hanging over the news of poet and musician Larry McWhorter’s absence and his fight with cancer. But it went beyond that. What was amiss came from two quarters. On the inside they can’t separate their personal lives from their art. On the outside they can’t separate their emotions from fact.

In their individual ways they talked about the evolution that’s been sweeping insensitively over the land and the people who live and work on it for two decades or more. Call it an environmental movement, if you will. Others think of it as a personal attack on their way of life, an attack that makes the men and women of the land the victims in the name of passively protecting nature.

They’re tired now. They’ve run out of answers because none have worked that they can tell. They stand idling at the fence, ready to move into action if they could just find direction. Bewildered, they are searching for a safe route into the future. Direction. That’s the key. If there is no direction, there is no future. The future will belong to someone else and the fear is the land will be abandoned, empty, void of people as if it can take care of itself, and that is the myths of all myths, they say. And when the land is orphaned who does it turn to? Mother Nature?

Yes, Elko was out of sync in 2003. Maybe it was the bad news of McWhorter’s facing cancer. Maybe the performers, the poets and musicians were too serious, too “somber,” as a man with his young daughter in the elevator of the High Desert Inn said one night. When something is out of sync, it’s difficult to get to the cause at first. It takes an examination of all the parts.

Fortunately, not all falls on deaf ears at Elko. The panel “Towards a West that Works,” one of many but not enough in recent years, can be the catharsis for what ails the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering. This panel and others are a response to what poets have been talking about, to what singers have been singing about. The message heard is: A memorial for the so-called disappearing cowboy has been in the making. To remedy the ailing patient before he is buried alive, the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering has inserted a hotbed of workshops in its program directly or indirectly dealing with land use. Granted, these workshops give the impression that it is a foregone conclusion that change has arrived – even if “environmental land uses” remain polarized. And there also is an atmosphere akin to the speech given in the 1957 movie “The Bridge On The River Kwai. “You are my prisoners but if you behave I will treat you well.” Or, people of the land are the prisoners and the higher educated and better organized (or least those who think they are higher educated) are the keepers. Still, while a bitter pill for some to swallow, panels like this can give direction to the future of the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering.

Everyone needs to vent. When I was a kid we called it an “emotional release.” They all need it: the poets, the performers, the fans and the attendees at the workshops. They need to stand at the window and yell, “I’m mad as hell” until they can’t breathe, until they cry if they need to. And when their echoes have faded to nothing, only then can they rebuild. Only then will everybody find that common ground and recognize that we are all victims. We’re all victims.

So, poets must continue to support one another. Some poets and performers are passing on the traditions of a yesteryear and that’s okay, but others are moving forward and the words of these modern poets will be the folklore of the future. These modern poets can be the leaders once they have direction. Why is any of this important? Because in 2004 Elko will mark its twentieth year. I only hope that while it’s finding its direction, it not only celebrates the last twenty years, but it will also look ahead and ask what do the next twenty years hold?

It’s not surprising there was a lack of direction at the 2003 Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering. To overwork a cliché, they are beating a dead horse to death. As the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering concludes its ninetieth year, direction is what it needs to lead this genuine heartland culture through the trials of the future and carry its message to an entire country. This gathering is, after all, the National Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering.