Get Ready for Cowboy Poetry Week
Get Ready for Cowboy Poetry Week. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.This next week is Cowboy Poetry week. If you have never experienced a cowboy poetry event, you really need to. It's just about as down home and basic as you can get. Poet Waddie Mitchell talks about his writing process.
MITCHELL: If you are a writer what you've got in your head sometimes it comes so fast you can't even get it down. Other times it just gets blocked up there. Like Gary McMahan says, it's kinda like gas. And it just builds pressure and makes you miserable because you can't get relieved and you're just stuck.
Cowboy poets come from all walks of life but most are rooted on a farm or ranch like South Dakota cattle rancher and cowboy poet, Ken Cook. His inspiration came from his grandfather.
COOK: My grandpa was a cowboy and of all the men I admire, respect and look up to most, like I say in my book, he's the guy I most wanted to be like him. Not only as a cowboy or a rancher, but as a man he taught me more about cowboying and being a man than anybody else.
One of the most famous of the cowboy poets, Baxter Black, says he's grateful for how things turned out.
BLACK: Things have come along in my life, I can only be thankful that they did and they always seem to come at the right time. And I literally got let go and somehow this cowboy poetry deal, this entertainment deal took off. I don't have an explanation for it, there wasn't any reason, and I was a cowboy poet of all things.
That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.